Peter Jones: Democracy requires proper debate

The civil service has a duty not just to serve the government of the day, but also the electorate

WHEN does civil service impartiality become partiality? In the row over whether Sir Peter Housden, head of the Scottish civil service, has stepped over the line into political partisanship, it seems to me that the opposition has aimed and missed at one target, but completely ignored another problem which has rather more serious and disturbing political implications.

The opposition complaints about Sir Peter were that his advice to civil servants to work enthusiastically to implement the Scottish Government’s constitutional reform agenda stepped over the political line and that he had become a cheerleader for the SNP.

No, he hasn’t. The rejection by Sir Gus O’Donnell, head of the UK civil service, of that charge was predictable given that the prime job of any civil servant is to do their best to ensure that the policies of the elected government are implemented. They are certainly not there to divert or prevent a government putting its manifesto into effect unless, of course, those policies breach fundamental human rights.

The SNP, moreover, has a majority in the parliament, so there is no doubt at all about its mandate, which is, as set out in its manifesto, to get as much power as possible transferred from Westminster to Holyrood up to and including independence.

Thus it is absolutely right, and not wrong, that Sir Peter should write in an internal memo to his staff that “this will be a remarkable period in Scotland’s history as we embark on a journey towards constitutional reform”. Neither was he wrong to point staff towards an article in The Scotsman by Professor James Mitchell of Strathclyde University.

Stylised by some, again wrongly, as a pro-nationalist piece, it simply offered the entirely accurate analysis that the SNP appear to have broken through a glass ceiling and have much less difficulty than they used to in selling the idea of independence.

Civil servants, while they have to keep themselves out of politics, also have to know what political environment they are working in, and Prof Mitchell’s analysis set that out for them and anyone else with admirable clarity. Opposition parties might not like his view that they have got themselves stuck in a fundamentalist corner that is unattractive to voters, but to me, Prof Mitchell was stating the blindingly obvious.

Sir Peter did get a little over-exhuberant in advising his staff to go and see the National Theatre of Scotland’s excellent production of Dunsinane as some sort of depiction of the modern Scottish condition.

The play imagines events after an English army topples Macbeth, a tyrant hated by many Scots. Only in the wilder recesses of nationalist mythology could Scotland possibly be imagined to be under English occupation. They may have missed me in their searches, but I don’t think English troops are busy pursuing and putting to death seditious Scots across the land.

I am nonetheless concerned about what Sir Peter’s civil service machine is putting out concerning that journey towards constitutional change. It used to be the case that when government planned a major change, constitutional or otherwise, it would put out a discussion paper outlining what it planned to do, what the effects would be, what the problems were and how these might be overcome.

Not any more. Civil servants are putting out one-sided advocacy papers which list all the benefits of doing something and none of the disbenefits. Problems which are known to exist are ignored. Difficulties which might arise are glossed over. But the paper is nonetheless treated by Alex Salmond’s automaton-like cheerleaders on the benches behind him as irrefutable proof that something can be done.

A case in point is the recent paper on devolving excise duties. It is not even entirely clear what the government wants to do here. It seems to be that under devolution, the SNP would like any excise duty raised in Scotland to stay here and for the Scottish budget to be reduced by an equivalent amount. The Scottish Government, it appears, would not be able to vary the rate of duty charged – that power would stay with Westminster.

The argument here is that this would align the costs of dealing with alcohol abuse with the revenues raised from its sale. But to with what result? The net effect on the Scottish budget would be nil. There would be no extra money to direct towards alcohol abuse policies. In any case, regardless of whether the proposal is just to collect or to be able to vary excise duties, calculating exactly how much is raised from Scottish sales of alcohol is next to impossible without imposing a huge burden on alcohol producers. Excise duty is levied on whisky the moment it departs a whisky bond. Once on a truck, there is no way of knowing whether that bottle is going to be sold in Scotland or England.

The only way of finding that out is to make any alcohol producer – brewers and distillers – have separate distribution networks – one for Scotland and one for the rest of the UK, the returns from which could be used to calculate which bit of the UK gets what share of excise duties. Oh, what bureaucratic joy.

Civil servants are not stupid people. They will know this and what is apparently being proposed in this paper is impractical. To make this point is not even being political; it is just to suggest that there are practical problems which make the proposal, at best, extremely difficult to achieve. The same can be said, ten times over, about the papers on devolving corporation tax.

My objection to this is that in conniving with putting out these partial, one-sided proposals, civil servants are complicit in cheating us of a proper debate. Democracy does not just require the casting of a vote every few years, it also requires proper debate at all times, and for that, we need to have full information, on both sides of the argument.

But Sir Peter is not giving us that. He seems quite happy for us to receive, with all the authoritative imprimatur of the civil service, papers which could just as well be issued by the SNP press office. He needs to be reminded that while his prime duty of the day is to serve the elected government, and there can be no complaint about that, he also has a duty to serve the electorate. And on that, there is a valid complaint.