When I was training as a journalist with DC Thomson we were given a training exercise. We were given the facts of a incident and asked to explain whether it was a story or not and what the story was. Basically a woman was picking up her kid from school and the child was knocked down an killed, plus extraneous detail added to distract.
The point of the exercise was to get you to stop reporting what you think you’re reporting and to find the real core of the story. We all over-thought it, focussed on pointless detail and none of us got it. The trainer explained ‘how many people see their child killed?’. That was the emotional core of the story; this woman watched as her child was killed. I’ve never forgot that lesson. It has been invaluable throughout my life.
I was thinking about it when I read the Herald interview with Lorna Slater this morning and it left me with substantial conclusions about why politics is in such a mess. Because there seems to me to be a very big and very serious story right in the heart of this interview and as best I can tell the journalist and her editor seem to have missed it.
Let me offer some quick caveats here; both the journalist and her editor are women and since the story makes the same-old claims that men-criticising-women is evidence of misogyny and I wouldn’t like that now, would I?, I shall just say that I’ve been reading Hannah Brown for a while and she seems like a very capable young journalist, and I’ve been impressed with what Catherine Salmond has done with the Herald.
Also this was clearly a set piece interview, a puff piece set up to give Lorna Slater some free advertising in the struggle to get reelected as co-leader of the Scottish Greens (or, frankly, reelected to anything whatsoever). Traditionally you don’t screw someone over in a puff piece…
…until they give you a big and significant story. I think that happened here. Put really straightforwardly, Lorna Slater admitted that she’d stood up in the Scottish Parliament and promoted legislation with which she knew there were problems. I mean stop the bus right there – you should under no circumstances be pushing through legislation which you know is seriously flawed (Ministerial Code and all that).
The Scottish Government has made so many mistakes and paid so little a price for them that everyone just seems to shrug these days
But (and this is the crux of the matter), you really, really shouldn’t be admitting it in public when you’re being sued for £170 million by a waste management company for losses that were incurred as a result of passing seriously flawed legislation. I mean, the lawyers for the company concerned must have been dancing round the meeting room this morning. “Did she… just admit that… she has a habit of deliberately passing legislation that she knows isn’t fit for purpose?”
Meanwhile the Scottish Government lawyers must be in tears. The whole case will revolve around whether there was knowing imposition of flawed laws that induced costs on third parties. We know the costs bit is clearly there, we know the flawed law was present and correct, the whole case will presumably revolve around knowing or not knowing.
Well, it would have…
Since this is all subject to legal action I’ll leave it at that just now, but not before offering everyone out there who is not Lorna Slater a general piece of advice – if you’re being sued for screwing up, don’t admit that you knew you were screwing up in advance and, if you absolutely have to confess, find a priest, not a journalist.
For a nothing article there are a surprising number of issues raised. First, how did this story get missed? I think there are a few factors. For a start, I think there is a remarkably normalised attitude to failure in Scottish politics. The Scottish Government has made so many mistakes and paid so little a price for them that everyone just seems to shrug these days.
That’s a worry. It’s not just that failures of this scale didn’t use to be things that we shrugged off, it’s that a competent civil service wouldn’t have let it happen in the first place. In my opinion (man!), Lorna Slater is one of the least accomplished politicians in recent parliamentary history (she lacks basic political self awareness in her engagement with anyone outside her bubble) and is certainly responsible for major failures as a minister.
But it is too easy just to blame politicians; civil servants used to exist to pick up and prevent these kinds of errors. Now? They seem to be there to blow smoke up political arses while working up their connections in the private sector for future employment.
So ‘oh, she’s just cost the public purse £9m’ is just gossip in Scotland ‘and now she seems to have admitted culpability in potentially costing the public purse another £300m‘ doesn’t really merit mentioning at all. Failure is seldom the result of just one thing or one person not performing adequately. It is systems that fail more than individuals.
And why is it so easy to miss this stuff nowadays other than the normalisation of failure? Boilerplate identity politics news. This admission came in the middle of another long peroration about how everything would be fine if it wasn’t for ‘men!’.
Slater thought politics was nicer when it was Sturgeon and Davidson and Dugdale. Not my recollection, but perhaps it has something to do with Slater not being in parliament at the time and not being leader of the Scottish Greens. Certainly she wasn’t a minister, had no power and wasn’t expected to answer in parliament for legislation she was making a pigs’ ear of. I imagine it would feel more ‘respectful’ not being asked questions because you’re not a politician. I suppose.
Was she really waiting to get caught, didn’t get caught and so said ‘fine, fire through this non-legally-compliant crap’?
She complains that the opposition didn’t notice the big flaws in her legislation because they were grandstanding, looking for a ‘gotcha’ moment. Except until recently Slater’s argument was that her and her big team of civil servants didn’t notice the big flaws either. Was she really waiting to get caught, didn’t get caught and so said ‘fine, fire through this non-legally-compliant crap’?
It is very difficult for people in opposition to scrutinise legislation to the degree that would enable that kind of engagement. They simply don’t have time or resource and the Scottish Government introduces pointless legislation like confetti. Even a small team of people can’t track it all, and I really don’t remember any forensic skewering of bad legislation by Slater when she was on the back benches.
It is almost as if any female politician can escape any serious scrutiny by dusting down the ‘men!’ speech. They certainly won’t get asked to substantiate their wild claims. There has been endless big talk about Holyrood’s feral men running amok through our democracy, but a marked lack of evidence of anything.
It’s not that there aren’t bad attitudes or bad behaviour, it’s that if you’re going to claim it, you need to evidence it. I’m really sick of this crap – if you’re trans or Jewish, just say you’re scared, or if you’re a woman say ‘abuse’ and then suddenly all scrutiny and every difficult question just melt away.
Men can be arseholes. Literally no-one is denying that, and it is good that we collectively don’t accept it like we use to. But women can be arseholes too, and the era when shouting ‘patriarchy’ was the end of all debate really should be drawing to a close now.
God knows I’m not trying to generate a new culture war here. Actually, I’m arguing against one. This is a story about three women and I think two of them are talented and good at their jobs. I just think they missed an important issue and I think it was in part because of the shallow culture-wars conditioning we’ve all been through in recent years (on one side or the other).
This story had nothing to do with gender and everything to do with a second tier politician without the savvy to be aware she appeared to be confessing to knowingly passing bad legislation that is currently the subject of a substantial law suit.
That’s news. If it isn’t treated as such, something’s up.