The best of pals 1 Kenneth Roy How the Scottish…

Richard Simpson MSP

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What is needed is a fresh ideological assault on the orthodoxies of centre-left politics, revealing the dishonest sub-text that lies beneath the surface of soothing rhetoric.

     SR has exposed the high level of rewards received by members of health boards, as well as the cosy and self-serving bonus system enjoyed by hospital consultants. Again, the excellent ‘Health Watch Scotland’ bulletins produced by John Bannon and John Womersley have shown that many of the claims made by hospital managers are little more than public relations flannel, designed to give the illusion that patient concerns are being treated seriously.
     In education, the teacher unions employ a discourse that invokes high standards and quality of provision, but when it comes to the crunch salaries and conditions of service are more significant drivers of policy: fortunately many of their members have a different order of priority, putting the children first.
     Bodies such as the General Teaching Council for Scotland are powerful agents of conservatism, protecting existing vested interests, even while claiming that they are advancing a ‘progressive’ agenda. At university level, principals make statements about their commitment to access and opportunity while ensuring that they (and the ever-increasing army of senior managers who support them) are paid at levels that seem difficult to justify. And, as university places are squeezed, it is safe to predict that the offspring of the middle classes will suffer fewer consequences than those ‘non-traditional’ students everyone claims to be concerned about.
     In local government, there is now a growing recognition that the financial packages enjoyed in recent years by chief executives and service directors are excessive. Is it too cynical to suspect a degree of collusion between officials and elected members in allowing a situation to develop in which both do quite nicely by adopting a policy of selective blindness to each other’s privileges?      Meanwhile, in large sections of the country electors are treated as voting fodder, expected to retain their traditional tribal loyalties and keep returning the ‘radical’ politicians who constantly promise – and constantly fail – to make their lives better. It is hard to see a way out of this impasse since the tribal lines are firmly drawn: a few more genuinely independent councillors would help, but would not be sufficient to challenge the poverty of thinking highlighted by Gerry Hassan. What is needed is a fresh ideological assault on the orthodoxies of centre-left politics, revealing the dishonest sub-text that lies beneath the surface of soothing rhetoric.
     There are other challenges that need to be made. The fashion for ‘networking’, an instrument through which those already given a voice are enabled to be heard more loudly in the arenas that matter – and so marginalise the disadvantaged still further – is ripe for attack. A few years ago I wrote an article entitled ‘Workers and networkers’, in which I argued that many of those who devoted a large amount of time to networking often did little real work: indeed they were parasites on those colleagues who got on with the job and tried to make a difference to the people whom they were supposed to serve.      Later I learned that copies of my article had been posted on staffroom notice boards in several schools in Lanarkshire – until members of senior management decided they should be removed. Maybe that decision had been taken at a bar in Hamilton.

Prior to his retirement Walter Humes held professorships at the universities of Aberdeen, Strathclyde and West of Scotland. He is now a visiting professor of education at the University of Stirling