Alf Young: Open season on political change

If government talk of transparency is true, then new policy proposals should be independently scrutinised, writes Alf Young

IT WILL be standing room only in the Palace of Westminster on Tuesday when the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks face MPs on the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.

Even if the Commons authorities were to put the shoot-out on in historic Central Hall, such is the preoccupation with this extraordinary drama they would probably fill that cavernous space several times over.

Mrs Brooks has belatedly done the decent thing and resigned. She will now concentrate, she tells us, "on correcting the distortions and rebutting the allegations about my record". The man who until yesterday insisted his main mission was to protect her from her detractors, Rupert Murdoch, now tells his own Wall Street Journal he wants to counter the "total lies" told by UK politicians about his media empire and its methods and reclaim "our integrity".

Murdoch will scrap to defend his family dynasty. Many more vats of ink will be spilt on this saga yet. However, as politicians go off into summer recess with the sweet scent of revenge in their nostrils; rival newspaper groups scramble for abandoned News of the World readers; a shamefaced Metropolitan Police pursue their inquiries and Lord Justice Leveson embarks on his daunting twin-track inquiry, another concern keeps nagging away at me.

Some are already describing these cathartic events as the dawn of a new era in relations between politicians and the media. Others are concerned that over-zealous reform could throttle our free press. Only time - quite a lot of time in the case of the Leveson Inquiry - will tell on both counts. My anxiety is how, in the atmosphere this scandal has created, we deal with other matters of great significance, happening in the here and now. And how politicians and journalists can address these issues in a much more transparent, accountable way.

On Thursday the Scottish Government abandoned attempts to prevent disclosure of advice it received from officials in 2009 on the cost of replacing council tax by a local income tax. Twice ministers went to the Court of Session to appeal against a decision by the Scottish Information Commissioner to grant a freedom of information request on the matter. Now they've conceded because the numbers, having been leaked, are already in the public domain. The overall cost to the public purse of that abortive legal challenge is put at 100,000.

Ministers claim they need some "private space" in which to develop, with their advisers, new policies. But this was a policy abandoned in February 2009, just a month after that cost analysis was completed. The legal challenge was pursued right up until March 2011, just before the most recent Scottish parliamentary elections. That's not about creating private space to develop new policies. It's all about preventing inconvenient facts about a policy that affects every taxpayer in Scotland gaining wider currency lest it turn voters off.

I would go further. If politicians really mean it when they say they are committed to the principles of openness and transparent government, they should submit all major policy changes to independent scrutiny before they are finally adopted. On an issue like introducing a local income tax, which could pop up again in Scotland post-2015, that wouldn't just mean proper scrutiny of the costs.

No government of whatever stripe, I would contend, should even promote such a change unless it has carried out and published a thorough, independently-vetted analysis of which taxpayers would benefit from it and which would be hardest hit.

The next few years in Scottish politics will increasingly be dominated by arguments for and against independence. Indeed the exchanges have already started. On Wednesday the Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Moore went to the Scottish Affairs select committee at Westminster with a Treasury forecast of the consequences for Scotland of gaining control of corporation tax revenues and cutting the rate here to the Irish level of 12.5 per cent. The analysis shows that, if the change were introduced this year, the accumulated cost to Scotland's budget by 2015/16 would be between 10bn and 12bn.

But this is actually the cost to the UK Exchequer if the tax change were made within the current devolved settlement, not to an independent Scottish Exchequer. It puts, for instance, the boost to such tax revenues from businesses relocating to Scotland from the rest of the world at no more than 1.26bn over the same five-year period. The costing model used has been approved by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, but only for UK-wide changes. Were the change only to happen in Scotland or Northern Ireland, say, fresh OBR approval would be required.

But if, as Michael Moore has indicated, this is to be the first of many Treasury interventions in the run-up to any referendum vote, perhaps what Scotland needs is a mechanism to allow all of the really big claims and counter-claims that emerge about the benefits and risks of Scottish independence to be subjected to independent, open, expert scrutiny.

Let me throw in another example. Earlier this week in this slot, Joan McAlpine, who is now both a journalist and a politician, was praising what she described as a "demolition" job on a unionist "myth" - that, had Scotland been an independent state when its two main banks collapsed in 2008, the country would have faced financial ruin. She based her claim, in part, on contributions by two academics to a BBC radio programme last Saturday.

I've since listened to that programme on iPlayer. The two experts, both lawyers, made clear from the start that there are "no formal rules", there is "no body of international law" that decrees which jurisdictions should shoulder the costs of bail-outs when banks with businesses in more than one jurisdiction fail. There isn't even a convention. Governments make it up as they go along. And as both Iceland and Ireland can testify, the costs to a small economy with a disproportionately large financial sector can be crippling.

In this case, the argument is essentially hypothetical. Scotland wasn't independent when RBS and HBOS crashed. In this strange, potentially post-Murdoch era on these islands, we in Scotland will get much more of this contradictory clamour as the referendum debate heats up. If there is to be a new open, transparent era in relations between politicians and the media, why don't we all look for a new independent mechanism to adjudicate?

I don't think Alex Salmond's Council of Economic Advisers has met since last September. Might it be up for the job?