Alastair Darling, frontman for the supposedly pro-union campaign that is, in every way, better described as the ‘No’ campaign, has been vociferous in recent days on the subject of the funding of the opposing campaigns.
He has focused on the role of private donors and on the Scottish Government’s use of public money in the ‘Yes’ campaign, pointing to the cost of producing and distributing the White Paper tome on Scotland’s future.
He has also questioned the deployment of Scottish civil servants to the ‘Yes’ campaign; and the involvement of SNP party officials in the drawing up of that White Paper.
Private donors
One may legitimately query the nuances of Scotland being effectively bought for the SNP by a series of extremely generous donations from a gigantic win on Euromillions.
However, one ought also to query the nuances of attempts to buy UK government for the Conservative party by, for example, Stuart Wheeler, multimillionaire owner of a spread betting empire and a multi-million donor to the Conservatives.
And one ought to query the long standing bank-rolling of the Labour Party by the Trades Unions, to buy the government of the UK for a party they can largely control and direct.
At heart, party politics is already an anachronism, expensive and dangerously obstructive to a country in arriving at and implementing a stable economic development strategy that includes due care for social justice.
But the way political parties are funded itself prolongs their existence on financial life-support machines, long beyond the survival time that would result from the manifest lack of serious public interest in any of them.
So let us set aside the issue of donor funding of parties – because all parties are at it. They are just users, exploiting the naive vulnerability of the wealthy at all levels to the cosmetic presentation of being part of an in-crowd.
Use of civil servants
The Scottish Government has been using untold but very substantial amounts of public money to support its pro-independence campaign. This goes well beyond paying for the production and distribution of the White Paper, into the even greater cost of the volumes of civil servants redirected to work up the detail of post-independence situations across the spectrum; and to produce options for action.
Whatever the outcome of the referendum, the overall cost of the exercise to the taxpayer will be huge – but will never be known.
A year ago, under Freedom of Information, For Argyll asked for the detail of the staff numbers and grades of staff allocated to each of these tasked workgroups of civil servants; for the percentage of their time allocated for such work; and for the salary spectrum for each grade. We were told simply that no answer could be given because of the complexity of the operations.
This indicates an ad hoc and centrally unmanaged deployment of whatever human resources are necessary, whenever they are wanted – rather than any strategically planned work programme.
However, before anyone follows Alastair Darling too quickly into a position of piety on the misuse of public money, it has to be remembered that Scottish independence is the formal policy of the elected majority government. The overall majority enjoyed at Hollyrood by the SNP administration has seen independence a declared governmental aim, not just an SNP party aim.
Independence was also an SNP manifesto commitment. This means that whatever other reasons individual voters may have had for voting SNP in May 2011, the party is entitled to claim that its manifesto was supported by the public in that election to the point of awarding it the overall majority in the Scottish Parliament that the system had been designed to prevent.
Any government has to be entitled to spend as much public money as it deems appropriate in pursuit of a declared government policy, endorsed first by the electorate and then by the parliament.
A sophisticated government would be judicious in this spending but there is no requirement on any government to be sensitive to the percentage of those entitled to vote who did not support it. That is one of the problems with our outdated adversarial party political system – and with the way this referendum will be decided. The winner – 50% +1 of those who vote – takes it all. We will all have to deal with the impact of this from 18th September onwards. Whoever has won and however narrowly, we are in for a difficult time.
Involvement in government by party officials
Now let’s consider the issue of the procedural integrity of SNP party officials’ involvement in the creation of the content of the White Paper on Scotland’s future.
Of course they were and of course this is improper – because they are not government officials but party officials.
But this is the UK, with no constitution [and embarrassingly proud of the lack]. We like to muddle along because muddling along gives endless licence to the powerful to do what they like and to justify it on the hoof.
There is plenty of precedent, in all quarters, for improper access to government work by party officials.
The most high profile example of this took place on the evening of Black Wednesday, 16th September 1992, when, under John Major’s Conservative government, with Norman Lamont as Chancellor, the UK had to pull the pound sterling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.
No government member would speak to the television news channels that night. Instead the government sent out, as its spokesperson, the Chair of the Conservative Party, Sir Norman Fowler. This was improper and inappropriate – but not one single media outlet made a comment on it. This is the unhelpful failure to separate roles that results from having no constitution.
People may not like what the SNP administration of Scotland is doing in its unbuttoned application of public funds and staffing resources to the independence referendum; and they may not like unelected party officials dabbling, for party political advantage, in the work of government. But, as thing stand, there is no procedural reason, in entitlement and in precedent, why the SNP Scottish Government should not operate on both these fronts as it has been doing.
In government and in constitution we get what we do not resist.
Is spending the issue?
In the end the referendum will not be won by the relative spending but on the relative vitality of the campaigns.
The Yes campaign is shamefully dishonest and focused on the lowest common denominator – but it is consistent and coherent, if you’re not bothered to scrutinise it, which few are.
The pro-union campaign remains shambolic – unfocused, dysfunctional, ill led and ill represented, lack-lustre and lackadaisical. The main political parties of which it is composed are focused largely on the UK General Election next year - for a parliament in another place, trying to gain advantage over each other in a very different theatre of political conflict.
Quite simply, they are selling the pass. If they lose an election, they can come back. If they throw Scotland away, she’s gone for good. They are listening to their own orchestra playing on the deck of the Titanic.
