The fall guys
The streets of Edinburgh are a national embarrassment - and it's because the SNP government left councils to tackle austerity on their own
MY word, if the SNP government could shift rubbish half as well as they shift the blame in Scotland, then the streets of Edinburgh would be clean enough to eat your dinner off.
Our capital is an embarrassment. Walking out of Waverley station, as I did on Monday, is to be confronted immediately by a tide of coffee cups, cans, paper bags and sweet wrappers layered carefully around the city’s already full public bins.
Fittingly for a town in full festival swing, it’s almost at the level of street art.
It seems like the kind of domestic crisis which a devolved government, led by a strong First Minister, might want to grip to show they have their finger on the pulse.
Given the fact that thousands of tourists are taking home a dreadful impression of Scotland, the national government might have seen the need to protect the country’s reputation.
Yet, as tourists step around the filth on our capital’s boulevards, we find our SNP political masters– normally so keen to show they stand up for Scotland – desperately pointing at others and playing a form of politics almost as dirty as the streets of the old town.
Pride of place in the blame-shifting stakes goes to Angus Robertson, the SNP’s “Cabinet Secretary for the Constitution”, and local Edinburgh MSP, who took time out of his busy schedule yesterday to set out his position on this national humiliation.
In May, Edinburgh City Council was taken over by a minority Labour administration, supported by the votes of Conservative and LibDem councillors.
The local SNP, including Mr Robertson, were highly peeved.
Mr Robertson had taken a careful and dispassionate look at the situation on his streets, weighing it up in the round.
And to the astonishment of nobody, he pronounced in his local newspaper column that it was the new Labour leadership and “their Tory and LibDem friends” who were entirely responsible for failing to stop the strike.
By last night, refuse workers in a further 14 councils – including SNP run Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen - announced they would begin strike action too. Mr Robertson has yet to set out whether Edinburgh’s Labour leadership and their Tory and LibDem friends are also to blame for that.,
That wasn’t the point of Mr Robertson’s nonsensical comment of course. The point was to throw a smokescreen over the core reason for this strike: the decisions taken around the cabinet table in Edinburgh where he sits, to erode local government in Scotland to its current weakened state.
The unedifying spectacle of local and national politicians shouting at each other as the rubbish mounts up will doubtless go on this week.
But take a step back and I think the strike sets out a wider lesson about the crisis within Scottish democracy as a whole.
For years now, Local Government in Scotland has been the whipping boy of the current SNP administration.
As elsewhere in the UK, the NHS has sucked up whatever spending is going, as Ministers try to keep the health service going.
In addition, with new Scottish welfare powers having recently come on tap, the SNP has also spent heavily, and entirely unsustainably, on new Scottish-branded benefits.
Someone had to suffer. The fall guy has been local councils. Take away the extra Covid money that the Scottish Government passed on to councils from the UK Treasury, and figures show Scotland’s 32 councils have seen their funding cut in real terms by 4.2% over the last decade.
Much of that depleted pot is also ring-fenced for the SNP government’s priorities. Councils have therefore had to cut back on “discretionary” spending. Since 2017, the money going towards environmental services has fallen by 8%.
Over the last few weeks, faced with a crisis of their own making, the Scottish Government re-emerged to play the role of saviour, finding an extra £140m to give to COSLA.
It is a consistent wonder that – despite the endless complaints of Westminster’s dreadful treatment of Scotland – such money is always found.
But paying for a bandage to stem the bleeding from a wound you have created is not a sign of a caring or benevolent government.
It is just another attempt to fix the careless and short-termist decisions taken over the last decade which are now coming home to roost.
I have no gripe with council workers seeking to get a fair deal in the face of sky-rocketing inflation. It is estimated that more than half of Scotland’s 250,000 council workers earn less than £25,000 a year. Is a 5% increase on top of that going to protect families from 20% inflation by January?
But what I would like to see coming from this strike is a fresh look at those deeper issues that lie behind the long term degradation of local government which led to this week’s embarrassment.
At root, it is about the imbalance of power in our country between central and local government which surely now requires correcting.
COSLA’S original 2% offer to workers – the lowest anywhere in the UK - was the direct result of the deep cutbacks issued by the Scottish Government.
The improved 5% offer it was then able to provide was only made possible when the Scottish Government found extra cash at the last minute. The story this tells is clear.
The SNP government takes when it wants. It gives when it wants. Scotland is now run and controlled entirely from Edinburgh’s centralising elite. It holds all the power. For all that ministers step in at the last minute, it inevitably means that the needs of local government are pushed down the pecking order. The Scottish Government’s own agenda takes precedence.
As one of Scotland’s foremost political thinkers, Professor James Mitchell of Edinburgh University put it recently, councils are now suffering from “disempowerment”. “For all the talk of being more European, or abandoning the Westminster model of government, today’s Scottish polity looks as insularly British with a Holyrood cherry on top of that which existed pre-devolution,” he declared.
The answer must be to tilt the political balance back in favour of Scotland’s proud local democratic tradition.
I find it impossible to imagine the scenes in Edinburgh being replicated in Manchester, or Birmingham, or Liverpool. That is because those cities have directly elected mayors who know full well they are going to be held accountable for the physical state of their cities.
None of them would have accepted the stand-off we now see in Edinburgh. None would have allowed the mess to accumulate. Whether paying private contractors to clean up the rubbish, or finding another immediate resolution, they would have acted.
Much more than that, none of them would have allowed the likes of Angus Robertson and his fellow Ministers to shift the blame. They would have made sure the slow erosion of our local democracy became front page news. They would have made a far better job of standing up for our towns and cities than the weak and anonymous leaders who currently preside over them. They would have held our over-mighty and arrogant government accountable.
The rubbish piling up in Edinburgh this week is only a sign of a wider crisis in Scotland – the crisis in our democracy. To clean up our streets, we need a few new brooms.
ENDS
This article first appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail, 24th August 2022