Lessons are never learned as Sturgeon surges towards another disaster - Brian Monteith

Lessons will be learned. How often have you heard that phrase, or words to that effect, said by Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish Government Ministers or their spokespeople?

“Lessons will be learned” is not so much a cliche of the Sturgeon administration as its motto. I can imagine the ancient Greek form “pathei mathos” – learning comes through suffering – being trilled out repetitively at the start of every Cabinet meeting before the Dominie gives her instructions.

So common has the phrase become, so little sincerity does it now carry, that when uttered at Holyrood it has less value than a Zimbabwe dollar. The real problem is, lessons never seem to be learned; indeed, if any are ever identified they are studiously ignored.

There were lessons to be learned from the ferry fiasco other than “don’t paint in false windows” – but still the contract trundles on with little sign of when the first ship will put to sea. Another lesson might be to build the new quaysides required for the ships to dock at their island destinations at the same time as their construction. A prime lesson for the First Minister should be not to rush procurement contracts so a conference speech might give her a “Gotcha” announcement or a front press headline might be gained to help garner votes in a forthcoming election.

“Lessons will be learned” is not so much a cliche of the Sturgeon administration as its motto writes Brian Monteith

Nor should seminal public announcements about establishing a state-owned energy company be made, again at a conference in need of a punchline, without the ability or real intent of delivering an energy company. How impolite of President Vladimir Putin to start a war that drove up energy costs that would expose the failure to deliver on promises so cheaply made.

Sadly, however, I have to admit the Scottish public has not been very good at learning the lesson of trusting Nicola Sturgeon’s one broken promise after another. Remember how she promised education would be her top priority, then went on to run down support for teachers, schools and parents without any political cost? Yet there is hope the public is now learning its own lesson.

With many warnings provided over many years of what could happen if men with records of sexual abuse were given the right to self-define themselves as women so they could gain entry to single sex spaces of women and children, the First Minister, her Ministers such as Shona Robison and the unquestioning majority of her MSPs chose not to listen or learn from past mistakes.

And while that sordid scandal continues to play out – with new examples appearing in the headlines about abusers seeking refuge in the knowledge that transitioning to their opposite sex might both protect them and give them fresh opportunities to offend – the next catastrophe is coming up fast.

So accident prone has Nicola Sturgeon’s government become we can now predict with the accuracy of an algorithm which policies are next going to fail and when – and next is going to be the Deposit Return Scheme

Nothing but respect can be given to SNP MSP Fergus Ewing for pushing the First Minister openly in public to pause her fatally flawed “disaster of a scheme before it becomes a catastrophe”. Yet still she forges on, not listening, not learning.

Businesses explain how the additional costs will cause them to cease trading and how many jobs will be lost – but lessons have not been learned about listening to real concerns and warnings.

When the BBC asked the Greens’ Lorna Slater, the Minister responsible for implementing the scheme, to appear on a politics show to discuss the problems she was unavailable; neither was anyone from her party available to take up the free hit to publicise their environmental credentials; nor were any Scottish Government officials; nor was anyone available from Circularity Scotland who administer the scheme; and nor could Zero Waste Scotland (who designed the project) provide someone to talk about it.

Lessons about addressing concerns and giving critics the respect of a hearing clearly have not been learned. Instead debate is cancelled, opposition is closed down, opponents are left with nowhere to go except resorting to heartfelt public appeals about their fears.

When asked recently by Liam Kerr MSP in a Holyrood committee what happens to the fines for not complying with the scheme, Lorna Slater said the honest but incredulous words, “I don’t know”. Really? This is a Minister who is clearly out of her depth and turns to officials to answer the most obvious of questions. Has anything been learned?

The short but full answer is No. The glib responses we repeatedly hear that lessons will be learned is little more than a formula for skipping past the embarrassment of wilfully delivering egregious but wholly avoidable failures in our public services.

So, why do they keep repeating these mistakes, why do they not learn from them? The answer is two-fold – power and the imperative of “independence” – but as Eric Morecambe might have said, “not necessarily in that order”.

The Holy Grail of “independence” comes before education, before ferries that put to sea, before state-owned energy companies – before anything except, of course, power. Retaining power, so that one day while gathering their generous pensions they are in the right place at the right time when the planets align and there is a possibility of the public thinking, let’s give this “independence” a whirl, the advocates of that mirage without an oasis are still in power to try and deliver it.

Thank goodness they will fail. For in never learning the lessons from their repeated failures they are destined to never deliver “independence” – unless their opponents gift it to them.

Unfortunately, if there is a lesson to be learned, it’s that complacency might just allow that to happen.

Brian Monteith is a former member of the Scottish and European Parliaments and Editor of ThinkScotland.org

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