TRANSPARENCY, clarity, openness, accountability; all words we have frequently used to describe how our democracy and its legislatures should function.
Sometimes, as in the handling of our Holyrood parliamentarians of the way they account for expenses, we think we are heading in the right direction, and then along comes an issue like the way a grant for the T in the Park music festival changing venues was dealt with.
We were not in principle critical of the £150,000 grant to the event organisers. If someone we had not heard of had represented DF Concerts in applying aid to assist the move from Balado to Strathallan Castle no-one would, perhaps, have batted an eyelid.
As the Scottish Tourist Alliance argued on these pages recently: “If I asked you to invest £150,000 in a project and guaranteed that you would receive somewhere in the region of £15 million back for your support, what would you do? If I guaranteed you that you would receive another £15m-plus the next year, and another £15m-plus the year after, what would you do? If I told you that the project needed urgent funding to ensure its survival for this year and viability for future years, what would you do?”
It is a profit-making venture but its benefits to the Perthshire and wider Scottish economy seem beyond question, before even taking into account the importance of the nation hosting major cultural events of this kind. But the fingerprints of Jennifer Dempsie should not have have been near this deal. As a former special adviser to First Minister Alex Salmond, she should have known better than to beinvolved in this as one of her first acts as a private lobbyist.
Alarm bells should have rung on the ministerial floor at St Andrew’s House when her name came up as part of the approach for a grant. Both sides should have known better. Why undermine a valid transaction by having a tainted broker and cause the Culture Secretary to be grilled by MSPs?
Right across government in parliaments of Britain a cosy merry-go-round between senior special advisers and mandarins and the private sector has been allowed to run out of control. In Whitehall there has been a stream of departures from government to the private sector across the health, education, defence, social security and finance sectors, and it works in reverse too as prominent firms second their staff to departments and as donations in kind to MPs’ offices.
Soon the contracts flow and the stench of cronyism is detectable. Holyrood was not meant to be like this but early on a senior Labour aide left to join Atos just as it was winning lucrative Government contracts. The rules for civil servants leaving to join the private sector should be strictly enforced to avoid the whiff of cronyism and the same strict code should apply to departing special advisers. But spads are by definition political creatures and, as such, they should know better. As always, the question is: how will this look when, not if, it comes out? At that point they should recuse themselves.
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