Is there a Scottish model of policy-making?

Scottish government will celebrate 25 years of renewed existence on 12 May this year. Originally conceived (by a Labour government) with a proportional representation voting system aș a rebuke to the much-maligned bipolar Westminster system, it started with a Lab-Lib Coalition but became, first in 2007, a Scottish Nationalist minority government which went on to win, in 2011, a majority of the parliamentary seats. In 2015 it reduced the Labour party to a single seat although the last Scottish elections (in 2021) produced a 63/31/24 split for SNP/Cons/Labour

After 25 years, it’s reasonable to ask what impact the new system has made – whether on the Scottish public as a whole or on the “chattering classes”. It wasn’t as easy to get data on this as I had imagined but the survey conducted in 2021/22 suggested that two thirds of citizens thought that the Assembly gave the ordinary person more say in how Sotland was governed (as distinct from 5% who thought “less”).

The chattering class is a derogatory term applied to journalists, academics, public intellectuals and politicians who try to engage us in discussion of ideas. And it is here that Scotland seems remarkably weak.

• The powerful weekly Scottish Review stopped publishing 4 months ago.

• The last edition,of the Scottish Review of Books was more than 4 years ago.

• Although Scottish Left Review is still going strong

• Sceptical Scot momentarily stopped appearing but has now resumed welcome service

• With the recent death of Tom Nairn, the country has but a single public intellectual – the inestimable Gerry Hassan who used to write in Scottish Review but whose writing is now difficult to find – apart from on his blog.

• The other worthwhile blog is Bella Caledonia

Thank god therefore for Paul Cairney who, for the past decade and more, has been Professor of Public Policy at the University of Stirling – but also a prolific blogger and author. 

Not surprisingly, he has been an adviser to both the Scottish government and parliament with a recent paper posing the question What is Effective Government? as part of a wider process of inquiry being undertaken by the Parliament – which has produced this report. And he has just presented this 140 page evidence to the Scottish end of the UK official inquiry into Covid

The Scottish approach to politics is too often romanticised as not just democratic but social democratic whereas the statistics for its civil society activity and polling simply don’t bear that out. The country is rather petit bourgeois – I’m having difficulty with my internet speed at the moment and therefore can’t give a link for that assertion. Ditto the other links I would have wanted to insert. So, for the moment, let me rest on this statement about the “the scottish model” and this article of Paul Cairney’s “Public Administration in an age of austerity” from 2012

Further Reading

The Case for Scottish Independence – a history of nationalist political thought in modern scotland Ben Jackson 2020