Fears Scots politician complaints process 'weaponised' amid huge increase

A city councilman saw an opportunity and decided to convene public hearings. And so Jeremy Jamm, orthodontist and rabble-rouser, tried to find a way to throw dirt at Meagle’s boss, the irrepressible public servant Leslie Knope.

“This will be blown way out of proportion,” Jamm declares. “You have my word on it!” And then referring to two of the endlessly and fruitlessly investigated controversies around Bill and Hillary Clinton, he says the dodgy tweet scandal will make “Benghazi look like Whitewater.” The point of the hearings? To get to the bottom of how to tweet was sent - and spark a media circus.

READ MORE: Alex Salmond case leads to huge rise in complaints about MSPs

Jeremy Jamm’s investigation of Lesley Knope was supposed to spoof a divided America, even before the rise and fall of Donald Trump.

But the scenes, for some in Scotland, look more like an instruction manual than satire.

Here, investigations of alleged misconduct by local and national politicians is supposed to be carried out behind closed doors, in secret.

There is an independent watchdog which looks in to complaints. The Ethical Standards Commissioner, currently Ian Bruce, then reports his findings either to the Scottish Parliament, or an another independent body, the Standards Commission, to councillors and public appointees.

Mr Bruce, and his office, has been busy.

There has been huge rise in the level of complaints made about councillors and MSPs in recent years.

As The Herald reported last week, the commissioner’s office 763 official complaints about Holyrood members in the last financial, compared with only 109 in 2019-20 and 23 in 2018-19.

Of these, some 730 are thought to have been made about politicians who investigated the Scottish Government’s botched handling of sexual misconduct allegations against Alex Salmond.

Officials - and sources - are not prejudging the outcomes of these investigations, which are still under way. Mr Bruce on Thursday declined to confirm what they were about.

Speaking to the Holyrood committee responsible for MSPs standards, he said: "There is the very large complaint, super complaint we call it in the office, and I can’t talk about it, but the numbers are there. That is still under investigation and it is very complex and there are an awful lot of moving parts.”

“But if we set that aside, and we have had quite a few MSP complaints in this financial year, additional ones, so again the trend there does look to be that those are on the rise.”

There are fewer cases than complaints for Holyrood members, But the workload for councillors remains high. There were 301 in 2020-2021, compared with 319 a year before and 197 in 2018-2019.

However, Mr Bruce in his last annual report suggested the online world was generating of the concerns. At an earlier parliamentary committee meeting, he warned of a pandemic effect.

Speaking in 2021, he said: “I think that, for the past year and a half, people have had a lot of time on their hands and there is an exponential rise in the way in which members engage with the public via social media.

Politicians, speaking on condition of anonymity, fear that the complaints process is being weaponised.

Real concerns, they say, may be getting buried in a wave of vexatious complaints, including those drummed up on social media.

Councillors and MSPs are reluctant to speak out about complaints made against them - because they are told the process is secret. But there are serious mumblings about Scotland’s political culture. Some politicians believe their opponents - rather like the fictional Jamm - are behind complaints. More blame a tribal online culture where their character is fair game.

Mr Bruce has acknowledged that members of the public do not necessarily understand what would amount to a grounds of complaint. Does being rude, stupid or abrupt on Twitter or Facebook amount to misconduct? Not necessarily. But that does stop complainers. In 2019-2020, for example, there were more than 60 formal complaints about a single tweet. That was more than half the total complaints in the 12-month period.

A former MP, Tory and Herald columnist Adam Tomkins was last year cleared of misconduct after he called the deputy first minister, John Swinney, a “devious unscrupulous manipulative little man” on social media. In this newspaper he admitted what he said was “horrible”. And added: “It’s not a tweet I’m proud of.”

The remark had been made when blood was up and emotions high over the Salmond inquiry. Mr Swinney was under pressure to release information about the case. In total it took nine months before a committee of his peers finally decided Tomkins was not guilty. He had left politics by this point.

Local government sources describe similar concerns. There is particular anger about leaks about complaints generating local news stories or social media frenzies about investigations, even ones that are, at face value, not of merit.

The deputy leader of Glasgow council is an SNP politician called David McDonald. He and his boss, Susan Aitken, were accused of “footballing bias” in 2018 over their local council’s rejection of a fane zone for Rangers. The allegations were made public. Opponents of the SNP got involved, including Tomkins, who wrote the council asking about the fan zone and calling for them to ensure “the outcome was neither partisan nor one-sided”.

There followed a period of what Mr McDonald called “vitriolic” abuse, for him and his family, some of whom support Rangers. He received death threats. McDonald, like Aitken, was cleared. He is leaving politics at the next elections in May.

Some complaints appear to be generated out of hot button wedge issues of the kind that thrive in an online political eco-system, such as football rows and the Salmond affair.

The Herald understands, for example, that concerns have been raised about the conduct of both opposition and government members on the committee investigating the Salmond case.

Complaints are, insiders stress, not without context. Members of the committee have also been subject to online abuse and conspiracism. Investigators still have their work to do. Nobody knows what conclusions they will come to, including about more than 500 complaints about breach of confidentiality.

How will Scottish politics respond to the outcome of these probes - or any others. Will partisans continue to point fingers? Will they keep seeing the failings of individuals as the fault of entire parties? And what will happen with this growing culture of complaining if Scotland has another independence referendum? Politicians affected by complaints are not optimistic, at least those asked for this article.

When Councilman Jeremy Jamm was after Leslie Knope in Parks and Recreation, he left no stone unturned. When his target complained that he was taking cheap shots, he had a simple response.

“How dare you demean the value of the political points I’m scoring?”