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Delancy Johansson: at least we know her name
‘Now the real work begins’. If you cannot find words to that effect in this morning’s newspapers, I owe you a fiver. The real work, however, started some time ago, and is fairly advanced. By the eve of referendum, Scotland will be in a high state of preparedness for a brisk march to separation. Only the pesky electorate stands in the way of the project.
The real work is being done by a group of people of whom we know next to nothing. It is easy to overlook them amidst the fabricated excitements of the moment – and could the Scottish press come up with nothing more original this morning than ‘Date with Destiny’? How many more such dates must we endure?
They are called civil servants, these people, and their role in the project should not be under-estimated. The nameless ones are already gainfully employed putting an independent Scotland together, and their dedication to the task is deeply impressive.
You may not be aware, for example, that there is someone who is constructing a social security system for the new Scotland. She – I understand it’s a woman, but if I’m wrong it will likely be a chap – has this enormously challenging brief yet no one outside a tiny circle has the faintest idea who she (or he) is or what she (or he) has in mind.
There is someone else who has been charged with organising a Scottish security service. The pesky electorate only has to give Eck the nod and we will have our very own network of McSpooks, all sounding suspiciously like Eck’s pal Sean.
Naturally we will require to open embassies and consulates throughout the civilised world. As soon as the epoch-making result is confirmed, a long queue of the usual suspects will be clamouring to be the first ambassadors of an independent Scotland. In a room somewhere in the bowels of St Andrews House, they do little else but pore over maps of the globe. Rush now while diplomatic posts last.
The simple point I’m making here is perhaps not as widely appreciated as it ought to be. It is time to lay to rest any residual notion that the civil servants will be set to work on the practicalities of independence sometime in the late autumn of 2014, assuming the vote goes Mr Salmond’s way, and that only questions of strategy will be determined before then.
The reality is that the intricate machinery of a nation state will have been painstakingly built and laboratory-tested before the referendum, ready to be slipped into production. The process already consumes the working lives of many rather bright people in the civil service for whom this is the assignment of their dreams. After yesterday’s date with destiny, that process will accelerate.
It would be wrong to suppose that there is an air of Olympian detachment about the detailed pre-planning. In the over-active imaginations of those involved, it is no theoretical exercise. The degree of buoyancy about the project among civil servants at the sharp end of ‘constitutional reform’ (the official euphemism) – and more generally in the senior bureaucracy – is remarkable. Despite all those depressing polls, there is an implicit assumption that Scotland will be out of the traps faster than a Shawfield favourite. It’s just a shame that the common people are so slow to grasp the inevitability of it all.
Is any of this worrying? Perhaps just a little.
At this point, it is necessary to draw a tedious distinction between career civil servants and that curious breed known as spads (special advisers) who are formally bound by the principles of the civil service but whose allegiance is to the party in power rather than to the public good. The great chieftain of the spadding race, Kevin Pringle, recently quit to practise his dark arts at SNP headquarters, but he has been succeeded by several freshly minted spads, of whom there is never a shortage of potential recruits, among them Delancy Johansson, an Edinburgh University graduate with an interest in international affairs and a name to conjure with.
The spads are fiercely ambitious – one sees Delancy as Scotland’s foreign secretary in the year 2024, if not before – but it is hard to visualise any of them cosying up in bed on these mellow autumn evenings with a cup of cocoa and a copy of the civil service code.
The press has got all hot and bothered about the cost of the spads. It’s petty cash. Who would begrudge Delancy her £40,000 a year fully three years after leaving university? What ought to concern us far more is the influence the spads will exercise as we approach the business end of the referendum.
You should not be surprised to hear that they interpret the service’s core values of ‘honesty, integrity, objectivity and impartiality’ in a more relaxed way than the majority of civil servants. The spads are as desperate for a result as any football manager, and will be worth watching for rough tackling on the edge of the penalty area. I detect, however, that their enthusiasm is catching. In St Andrew’s House these days, there are few volunteers for the subs’ bench.
Up to a point there is nothing improper about any of this. The chief responsibility of civil servants is to help the elected government to deliver its priorities; and the over-riding priority of the present Scottish Government is to deliver a Yes vote. Cast aside any troubling thoughts about the ethics of civil servants facilitating a campaign to break up the union. It’s much too late for such niceties.
Still, minefields there are a few. One of them, the most obvious, is the obsessive quality of the devotion to the project. How does anything else get done? How is the dull, plodding work of government to continue when everyone in the building has gone native about the project? Are we looking at two years of paralysis? At the end of them, the poor will be no better off, the children no more literate, the sausage-makers of Broxburn no more employed, and we will still be complaining about the wretched state of the pavements.
Just as perplexing, but much less obvious, is the question of how the impartiality of the civil service – the proper civil service, not the expedient one of the spads – is to be protected in the face of intense pressure to deliver ‘facts’ favourable to the narrative. The required position of political neutrality is fine in theory, but it has never before been exposed to so severe a temperature. Will it crack in the heat? Could it be cracking already?
An independent Scotland achieved with the eager compliance of a fatally compromised civil service would be an independent Scotland perilously short of rational thinkers in Regent Road, Edinburgh. But there is a risk that it will be the one we find ourselves living in before the century is very much older.
Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review
