The Scottish parliament has voted in favour of allowing government ministers to mislead it. That is the effect of a vote at Holyrood yesterday afternoon.
The Scottish parliament is a failed institution that lurches between national irrelevance and terrible law-making
The background is this: the SNP-run Scottish government is doing everything in its power to avoid holding a Scotland-wide inquiry into child grooming gangs, both by pivoting to the pre-existing but scope-limited Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry and by running a strategic review group to coordinate a re-examination by several institutions (Police Scotland, the NHS, etc) of their handling of past allegations.
Keen to force the Scottish government’s hand, in September the Scottish Conservatives’ Liam Kerr moved an amendment to the Victims Bill, which creates a victims commissioner for Scotland, requiring the commissioner to carry out an investigation into grooming gangs north of the border.
SNP justice minister Angela Constance opposed the amendment and cited in support of her opposition Professor Alexis Jay, who chaired a grooming gangs investigation for England and Wales and now sits on Scotland’s strategic group. Constance told MSPs that Professor Jay:
‘[S]hares my view and has put on the record and stated to the media that she does not support further inquiries into child sexual abuse and exploitation, given the significant time and resource already spent in the review that she led, the Casey audit and other reviews. She says that it is now time that “people should just get on with it”.’
Following this, Kerr’s amendment failed to pass and there has still been no national grooming gangs inquiry in Scotland. Only, Professor Jay did not share Constance’s view and wrote to the minister telling her the words she quoted ‘had nothing to do with Mr Kerr’s amendment, or the position in Scotland, as could be interpreted from your statement’. Moreover, she urged the Scottish government to ‘urgently take steps to establish reliable data about the nature and extent of child sexual exploitation by organised networks’, before concluding: ‘I would appreciate my position being clarified.’
Constance did not correct the parliamentary record or apologise. The Scottish ministerial code says it is ‘of paramount importance’ that ministers ‘give accurate and truthful information to the parliament’. Inadvertent errors should be corrected ‘at the earliest opportunity’; those who ‘knowingly mislead’ parliament are expected to tender their resignation.
Scottish First Minister and SNP leader John Swinney backed Constance, reasoning that since a correction had been made to the minutes of the most recent meeting of the strategic review group, and since minutes of those meetings are publicly available, his minister’s duty to correct errors had been satisfied.
While it is unethical for ministers to mislead at all, the ministerial code specifically refers to the parliament and underscores the point by making it a resigning matter. So while Constance may have corrected her error in the little-read minutes of a group most Scots have never heard of, she did not correct her statement to the parliament. Her misleading remarks about Professor Jay remain on the Official Report, the Scottish parliament’s equivalent of Hansard, and by allowing this situation to continue without making a correction she is knowingly allowing the parliament to remain misled.
With Constance seemingly refusing to do her duty under the ministerial code and Swinney refusing to report her to the independent advisers who consider potential breaches, the Tories reached for the only option left to them: a motion of no-confidence. It was a quixotic effort, for the SNP and their allies the Greens were never going to allow a senior minister to be forced out on this issue. When the vote was taken, Labour and the Lib Dems backed the Tory motion but the Greens ensured Constance’s survival.
None of this matters a jot to the public. The only cut-through with them will be for the substantive issue of grooming gangs, and many will wonder why the Scottish government is so reluctant to set up a full and public inquiry and would rather have the institutions of the state investigate themselves in-house, an approach victims of the gangs have said they have no confidence in. My best guess, and a guess is all it is, is that ministers fear a public inquiry will throw up harrowing evidence of routine, Rotherham/Rochdale-style abuse and exploitation by gangs of predominantly Pakistani-heritage men and perhaps indications that the state had some awareness but looked the other way for fear of being accused of racism. Again, this is a guess but I am otherwise at a loss to explain the Scottish government’s failure to hold the kind of inquiry victims are demanding.
Parliamentary and ministerial rules might not matter to the public but they ought to matter to the parliament and to ministers. In voting to rubber stamp Angela Constance’s misleading statement, MSPs might think they have voted to save one of their own. Not very noble, but politics is often a grubby business. They underestimate the seriousness of what they have done. Not only have they confirmed that the parliament is content with being misled provided it is a minister of their political persuasion who does the misleading, they have established a precedent that will undoubtedly be relied upon in future. Another SNP minister who misleads Holyrood will expect the same indulgence that Constance got and the first minister of the day will either have to grant it or risk a personal rift at the top of government. It seems unlikely many will opt for the latter course of action.
The Scottish parliament is a failed institution that lurches between national irrelevance and terrible law-making, fringe agendas and compulsive secrecy. In more than a quarter-century of its existence it has only occasionally contributed to meaningful improvements in Scottish life and is for the most part a job-creation scheme for overly ambitious councillors, third-sector pension-seekers, oddball activists, and sundry cranks and inadequates of what passes for public life in Scotland. Whenever I point this out, it seems to displease those who inhabit this world, whether that’s MSPs, advisers, civil servants, establishment academics, or on-message journalists. They are aghast that I would disrespect the parliament. Look at this week’s vote. The parliament doesn’t respect itself.
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