Going Dutch

A WEEK mostly spent touring the Netherlands, interviewing sundry species of conservationists for a Radio Scotland programme, Postcards, which it would be quite improper to mention here. Likeable place: liberal, prosperous, relaxed, and jolly, with an air of contented tolerance that stops just short of sanctimony and a deep-rooted devotion to inclusive decision-making that runs through every level of their politics.

Could this be a role model for the new Scotland? You might well ask. The last time I wrote in this column about consensus I suggested that it was an excellent objective provided it was never achieved. One correspondent wrote back accusing me of confusing consensus with the lowest common denominator, negotiation with inertia, patience with lassitude. Or words to that effect.

The Netherlands is a good place to test this out, since it holds consensual policy-making to be an imperative, as many here wish the Scottish Parliament to do. It has also, incidentally, just re-elected a centre-left government under the amiable and placatory Wim Kok, reinforcing the belief that it has finally kicked a long-time addiction to voting Conservative. Some of this may sound vaguely familiar.

There are a lot more Dutch than Scots - 16 million, in a country roughly half the area of Scotland. Industry and agriculture both tend towards the intensive. You can imagine that their nature reserves, around which I was contractually obliged to plod, are rarely huge. One was no more than an abandoned hayfield. Still, their conservationists, who seemed slightly less anorakish than ours, were justly proud of what had

been wrestled back from the jaws of commerce.

Anyway, let me tell you about the Ijberg Project, which isn't really about conservation - not in the first instance, at least - but about dealing with Amsterdam's housing shortage. Unwilling to build up, constrained from building out, Amsterdam has decided to build in - in, to be precise, a very big lake.

Six artificial islands, linked by bridges, are being formed in the Ijmeer, an area of former sea diked off in the 30s and turned into

sweet water. On these islands,

tens of thousands of new homes will be built, a careful mix of private and social housing as

Dutch law rather splendidly requires. New infrastructural links will connect these new aquatic suburbs to old Amsterdam.

It is by any standards a massive undertaking, but civil engineering on a heroic scale is something that Dutch geography requires Dutch politics to accommodate. This is a land of prodigious dikes, of endless canals, of paved cycleways beside every road, of causeways that vanish into the blue horizon. They're currently thinking of building a new international airport out at sea.

Ijberg has also been massively controversial. Not only is the site a very popular recreational area, full of yachts and speedboats and adjoined by pricily quaint little settlements, but it also stands right in the path of a connected system of nature zones, ordained by a national plan as recently as 1990. It has, therefore, a lot of enemies.

HOW, then, does a determinedly consensual polity deal with that? First and foremost, by talking. The project has been in gestation for something like 20 years. Working parties with every conceivable interest group have chewed over every detail, public meetings have been exhaustively conducted, plans endlessly amended. Alternative amenities will be provided nearby, ecological features incorporated in the design, and so forth.

As one of the senior officials in charge of implementing the project put it to me, the Dutch way is to talk and talk and talk until everyone is fed up - and then to do. He is, incidentally, a sociologist, a breed highly valued in Dutch public life for their ability to marry policy to public concerns. Here, one suspects, he would be

an accountant.

Last March, the plans finally came to a referendum, and this is where it gets really interesting. Opponents of the project won, but not by enough of a margin to cross the required threshold. Therefore the plan goes ahead. Now, were such a thing to happen here - hell, when such a thing did happen here - the instinct of the objectors would be to claim moral victory, and redouble their opposition.

Not so in the Netherlands. The outcome, so I was everywhere assured, has brought a general acceptance among more or less all concerned that the matter is now settled in favour of the project. What the ambiguity of the vote does is to give the objectors an acknowledged entitlement to lobby for further concessions and addenda. The work goes on. So does the talking.

Now, to be absolutely frank, I harbour a nagging scepticism about this apparently universal attitude of patient pragmatism. I'm not quite ready to believe the official who insisted to me that there were no public misgivings (''We're not a sentimental people'') about the absorption of the guilder into the euro. On the other hand, try as I did, I couldn't really puncture it. And I've seen it elsewhere. A Swedish politician once told me to think of a small country as an ocean liner: it takes a very long time to change course but, when it does, everyone aboard is going the same way.

Whether the new Scotland - presumably coalition-run, intuitively collectivist, aspiringly consensual - can dump enough of its historical baggage to find a similar way remains to be seen. Probably not quickly, one would have to guess. But the Dutch example is an encouraging one. It does show that a consensual approach to decision-making can achieve a highest, rather than a lowest, common denominator; that it can get great things done, and can make them better.

Not quickly, though.