Let's take key issues out of the hands of politicians

There is a large part of all of us that wishes politicians in their workplace would behave a little more like us normal people behave in ours. But there is a little part of all of us which is secretly delighted they don’t. A little part which is gripped by the psychodrama; which wakes up and wonders who’s had to resign today. It’s fascinating.

Let me tell you what isn’t fascinating to most people. Policy. Policy is everything that politics is not. Policy is dull. It’s a slog, a grind. It requires research, and thought. It demands pragmatism and an understanding of unintended consequences.

However, policy is much more important than politics. It is what makes a difference, positive or negative, to the lives of everyday people. Politics is like the shell of a sports car; policy is its engine.

In Scotland, we spend almost all of our time polishing the shell of the car, and no time getting it serviced. So when we try to drive it, it often doesn’t start. The normal reaction to that would be to service the car, wouldn’t it? However, our politicians don’t want to service the car, because if they do so, someone would ask them why it needs serviced. A politician would have to take the blame for the car not starting, and thereby run the risk of the voters trading them in for a working model.

Primarily because of our interminable independence debate, this has already gone on much too long and, irritatingly, there is no real prospect of any of our leading politicians opening the bonnet. There are actual General Election votes to be won, and theoretical independence referendum voters to be kept and gained, and as a result the incentive to open that bonnet is absent.

So we, the people with a vested interest in fixing those parts of Scottish public policy which are not delivering well enough, need to be able to shed light on our problems and openly, honestly discuss how to solve them. Those with the expertise and the will to discuss and change need a safe space to so do.

This should not be especially challenging, not least because most of the undiscussed deficiencies in Scottish public policy do not obviously sit in the remit of one political ideology or another, or in the sweet spot of one constitutional camp or the other.

Take immigration, for instance. Scotland is both acutely and chronically short of workers. Acutely, because right now there are unfilled posts all over the economy, not least in crucial frontline public services, and it is further holding back our already sclerotic growth and weakening our already poor public services. Chronically, because we have a rapidly increasing non-working age population funded by the taxes of a proportionately decreasing working age population. It is the dictionary definition of fitting a square peg into a round hole. We need more people with much greater urgency than our neighbours in England.

There is a clear, non-ideological step towards solving this problem, which is to devolve immigration powers from Westminster to Holyrood. And, yet, politics gets in the way. The Conservative Party will not countenance this because, emotionally, it believes that devolution equals defeat, no matter the subject. Labour is little better; Sir Keir Starmer cannot afford to be perceived to be "weak" on immigration, lest the voters in the Brexit-leaning north of England, whom he needs to win back, think he is going soft on the EU.

We need to take this out of the hands of politicians, so that we might create a sensible policy on attracting people to Scotland, ready-baked for as soon as the politicians are finished talking about the constitution and in a position to implement it.

Our inability to attract enough people through our front door is exacerbated by relatively new but troubling evidence that we are losing young people out of the back door. Young, privately-educated Scottish students are beginning to experience difficulty getting a place on blue riband courses at blue riband universities. Our universities are being squeezed from both sides; they are obliged to widen access by taking more state school-educated students, whilst also needing to take fee-paying students from outside Scotland in order to balance the books.

In other words, in addition to limiting the number of state school students universities can afford to take, Scotland’s "free" tuition fees policy is having the unintended consequence of forcing privately-educated Scottish kids out of Scotland. Will they ever return? Or will we lose them for good, never to live, love or contribute to Scotland’s future again. It’s not a bet I’d like to take.

And yet, again, politics gets in the way. "Free" tuition has become such a totem for the Scottish Government that it feels like there would be more chance of persuading them to abolish tartan.

Again, we need to take this out of politicians’ hands and figure out how we can adapt the policy to make it work in practice rather than in theory.

These are not isolated examples, and I could have chosen others. Our shortage of housing is an economic, social and moral problem, yet we are barely paying lip service to it, let alone creating policy to fix it. We have crumbling infrastructure, more generally, yet neither our Scottish Parliament nor our local authorities have the borrowing powers they need to make the seismic capital investments required to bring us up to scratch.

Our health service will never be truly fixed by money, because the service’s archaic structure makes it unfixable. It is a near-open secret that our schools are increasingly producing mediocrity at the expense of excellence. But what possible political reason would any party have to rock the boat when doing so may spill out the passengers they need, if and when another Scottish independence referendum graces us?

All of this is a wonderful argument for our politicians coming together to create a negotiated constitutional settlement.

In the absence of that, though, a safe space for the rest of us will do.

• Andy Maciver is Founding Director of Message Matters and Zero Matters

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