I have a secret vice. I can’t help filling in answers to questionnaires. Anything beginning “on a scale of one to ten, do you think . . .” gets me going. Will Jeremy Corbyn still be Labour leader by the end of the year? Does sugar make you fat? Has the Volkswagen scandal undermined your confidence in big business? Do you believe the Scottish government’s budget figures?
Hang on, I think it may be a virtue, not a vice. All the questions bar the last come from recent surveys carried out by YouGov, the international market research company, which has become a big player in influencing public opinion. I don’t think it has yet posted a survey on the SNP’s fiscal policy, or how Scotland is going to be run over the next five years. But I hope it does. We need some independent thinking, and by that I do not mean thinking on independence.
From Friday morning — barring last-minute upsets — Scotland will be governed by a party which will wield more power than any we have known since the war. There is a plus side to that. It could mean an administration that is finally confident enough to venture some radical proposals — to reverse, for instance, our education decline, refinance the NHS, or rethink the best way to empower local government. On the negative side, it means that there will be little encouragement for points of view that challenge SNP thinking.
Governments with big majorities are not in the habit of welcoming opposition. Mrs Thatcher famously posed the question, “Is he one of us?” when contemplating a new promotion in her civil service. Tony Blair’s Downing Street became a model of intolerance as it compiled its case for the Iraq invasion. The SNP — and its online supporters — is not exactly sympathetic to anyone who questions its credentials.
The outcome is that Scotland lacks platforms that encourage lively, objective, and above all well-informed debates testing out the projections on which national policy is decided — and feeding into those decisions. There is no lack of think tanks in Scotland, but they are desperately under-resourced compared with their UK equivalents. Most rely on volunteers or part-time workers and spend much of their time trying to raise money. In London, by contrast, there is a wide range of fully-funded institutions. All have full-time staff. The smallest have budgets of about £1 million, the largest £5 million to £8 million.
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There are a few bodies, like the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which mount independent inquiries, and universities, which can and do provide original research; but even these may be subject to pressure if they question government policy. Notoriously, the former principal of St Andrews University, Louise Richardson, was personally harangued by Alex Salmond when she asked whether independence might threaten the grants that Scottish universities get from Research Councils UK.
“Merely to question SNP policy is to suggest either a lack of patriotism, or a failure to engage with the prevailing mood
Another potential source of independent scrutiny has been closed off. The much-vaunted committee system of the Scottish parliament, intended as a means of holding ministers to account, has been taken over and effectively neutralised by the SNP. In 2013, Professor Paul Cairney of the University of Stirling addressed the following questions: does the committee system scrutinise government legislation sufficiently? Does it have a sufficiently large, professionally trained staff dedicated to their activities? Has its independent scrutiny been undermined by the party whip? Have opposition parties succeeded in engaging properly with the system?
To all of these, though couched in suitably academic language, the answer was: no. The committee system has little that can compare to the ruthless interrogations that characterise its equivalent in the House of Commons.
Overriding all of this is an attitude that can be traced back to the divisions opened up by the independence referendum of 2014: if you are not for us you are against us; merely to question SNP policy is to suggest either a lack of patriotism, or a failure to engage with the prevailing mood. And yet, on every level, there are hard and legitimate questions to be asked, and the principal one is this: given that Scotland is about to be handed greater powers to raise or lower taxes than it has had for more than 300 years, how best should those powers be used? Every party, of whatever persuasion, wants the same thing: to use the tax system to improve the life of the nation, to bolster the economy and to improve the health and education of its people; at the same time they know there are limits to what can, and cannot, be afforded.
This is not something on which the SNP has a monopoly of wisdom, nor should it object if others have views, information or research that may challenge or even improve its decisions. We need a diversity of opinion, and we need the tolerance that will encourage it.
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Not long ago, I asked a group of SNP activists how they thought Scotland should tackle the problems of an economy where oil prices were going through the floor, the budget had a potential deficit of £9 billion, and public sector commitments were growing ever faster. They looked at me pityingly. “Only someone from The Times could ask a question like that,” said one of them.
Well, I am asking it again, and, on a scale of one to ten, I want to know what chances I have of getting an answer.