Iain Gray: Question time requires a clever game plan

POLITICIANS playing the jobs’ creation card at Holyrood take a calculated chance, as the First Minister has illustrated recently, writes Iain Gray.

As Labour leader you are often asked, “why do you ask that stupid first question at First Minister’s Questions?” The offending question is “to ask the First Minister what engagements he has planned for the rest of the day”.

There is an explanation. Firstly it hides the topic of the question from the First Minister, so he has to guess what it might be and prepare several topics accordingly.

That is part of the game, and Alex Salmond is quite good at guessing, but there is another reason. Questions are submitted a week in advance, and follow-ups must relate to the initial question. So if the real question went down, and then a major crisis or scandal broke the day before First Minister’s Questions (FMQs), the leader of the opposition would not be able to ask about that, she would have to stick to last week’s subject. Topicality is the real purpose of the dummy question.

Sometimes Alex Salmond gives a dummy answer, and the real business of the day can then begin. More often than not though, he uses, or abuses, the opportunity to make a statement about some government achievement, especially if he can find a jobs announcement. This is designed to create an uncomfortable dilemma for the opposition leader. They can welcome the jobs, or they can ignore the announcement.

Either way the First Minister will chortle with glee, accepting the grudging endorsement from his opponent, or lambasting her for churlishness in failing to welcome his good news. It is a simple ploy but the SNP backbenches never tire of it, because it does work.

Of course, these regular announcements are also designed to create a sense of momentum, economic growth and investment in jobs, signifying the success of the SNP government.

However, last month showed that it can be a trap for the First Minister too. It emerged that a renewables investment by Korean company Doosan, promising 700 jobs, which had featured regularly at FMQs, had in fact been cancelled. Worse still, it had been cancelled four months previously, and the Scottish Government had been told, yet ministers had continued to use it as an example of success. The First Minister’s defence, that he does not make company announcements brought the house down with laughter. Only four weeks later he was at it again. That was the day he should have said that his engagement for the rest of the day was a long lunch over a nice bottle of wine with his parliamentary aide Joan McAlpine, MSP.

What he actually revealed was a company announcement – a planned investment by BASF in the Western Isles which could create 90 jobs. But the real news that week in the Western Isles was the loss of 90 existing jobs in UDC, a construction firm of 35 years standing. The good news of jobs tomorrow must have rung very hollow for the workforce facing the redundancies of today.

Most of these announcements turn out not to be all they seem. A favourite is the promised renewables investment by GAMESA at Leith. But when this first surfaced at FMQs, it was promised to Dundee. Now it appears that there is a £100 million funding gap in Leith plans too. When Barclays announced this month plans to transfer 100 jobs from Glasgow to India, who remembered Mr Salmond in 2010 announcing government grants for 600 new Barclays jobs in Glasgow. None of the grant has been paid because none of the jobs happened.

In contrast, Amazon jobs promised at FMQs have appeared in Fife. But they turn out to be low paid, non-union, and often fixed term. We also find that Amazon has no intention of paying any taxes in this country.

SNP politicians have been hitching themselves to Scottish industrial success since Winnie Ewing arrived in Westminster in 1967 in a Hillman Imp from Linwood. But all parties do it, and they all get caught out.

In 1994, I organised a visit by Neil Kinnock to the NEC plant in Livingston. He presented a certificate to the 1,000th employee. We revelled in the company’s commitment to the workforce, the community and to Scotland. In 2002, I was back as Enterprise Minister trying, unsuccessfully, to save the last 200 jobs left there.

I did succeed, though, in clawing back government grant which had been given to Taiwanese company Chunghwa to create 3,000 jobs in Lanarkshire. They never employed more than 1,000 and sacked them when they closed in 2002. Not only had Donald Dewar been delighted to turn up at the opening of that plant only five years before, the ceremony was carried out by the Queen herself.

Labour ministers loved opening these factories, but it was the Tories who, in the 1980s and 1990s entrusted their reputations and Scotland’s economic future to attracting investments in electronics which proved to be short lived.

The difference now is that some investment announcements seem to spin so rapidly through their life cycle that they go from idea to announcement to grant award to collapse and cancellation without ever actually employing anyone or making anything in between, like a dot.com company. Silicon Glen came and went, but it did actually exist for a few years.

Nothing will stop ministers of every party jumping on job announcements to get the credit. But recent history should be a warning not to overreach. If you clothe yourself in a narrative of success, woven entirely from new factories in a constantly restructuring industry like electronics or exploratory stage company announcements in an emerging new sector like renewables, then the slightest of economic winds can leave you in the chamber without clothes, as happened to Mr Salmond with Doosan.

Sometimes he would be wise just to tell us what his engagements are for the rest of the day.