No place for him in Scotland’s new McCop megaforce
Here is an intro to get all Scottish Nationalists fuming about London media bias: Alex Salmond is abolishing John Rebus. Well, all right — this recalcitrant Scots detective never actually existed in the first place. And even in fiction, he’s been drawing his generous public-sector pension for some time now.
But if Scotland’s First Minister reads crime novels, he will know that many of the successful ones depend as much on place as on character and plot — Conan Doyle’s clattering Victorian London, Morse’s Oxford, and a Rebus Edinburgh that keeps tourist board officials awake at night.
In Mr Salmond’s new model Scotland, Rebus would never have been born. His employer, Lothian and Borders Police, constantly mentioned in the novels, is about to be closed down. In a Bill now going through the Scottish Parliament, he and all his colleagues are being merged into a new, single, pan-Scottish megaforce. Inspector Rebus, being a bolshy sort of character, will probably find himself posted to Dingwall in a job swap with Hamish Macbeth. And Edinburgh — Edinburgh, home of Miss Jean Brodie, Alexander McCall Smith and Sir Malcolm Rifkind — Edinburgh could find itself being policed by Taggart.
The exquisite and growing paradox of Scottish devolution, at least as practised by the SNP, is that it is making Scotland more centralised than before, and taking local public services further away from democratic control than they have ever been in the past. Under the Thatcher jackboot, elected regional councils ran the police and a wide range of other services. Even now, each of Scotland’s eight forces is accountable to police boards composed entirely of elected councillors — 146 of them, many from parties other than the SNP. Their budgets are set locally, and 49 per cent of the money is raised locally, through the council tax.
Next year, all that will end. As England moves towards elected police commissioners in each local area, the Single Salmond Constabulary will be controlled by a new national police authority — not elected, but appointed by the Scottish government. Scottish ministers will have a ‘power of direction’ over the new quango. The McCops’ senior officers will, we’re assured, be ‘operationally independent’ — though they will effectively be appointed by the government, can effectively be dismissed by it and will certainly depend on it for all their funding.
The potential for abuse is clear. Last month Jim Gallagher, former head of the Scottish Justice Department, warned that the new arrangements would hand ministers ‘much more control over policing’. Other critics, including a former head of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, have called them ‘undemocratic’, ‘sketchy’, even — from a former leader of Strathclyde regional council — a blueprint for a ‘personal army’.
The potential for public dissatisfaction is even greater. Policing the Hebrides is, in every sense, a long way from policing the Gorbals. From Stornoway, Holyrood looks almost as remote as Westminster. I first suspected that Scottish national unity was questionable when I worked, in the 1980s, for a Glasgow Labour MP who boasted that he had only visited Edinburgh (46 minutes away on the train) twice in ten years. It is hard to imagine that officers will not be moved from the quieter parts to the more voter-populated central belt, and very notable that the greatest opposition to the change has come from the forces on the edges of Scotland.
With their freedom of manoeuvre, some Scottish forces have done pioneering work, such as Strathclyde’s gang-intervention programme. But if small is beautiful, the new force might be a bureaucratic monster. The problems of integrating all its different computer systems alone could keep Scotland’s investigative journalists in work for years.
All eight fire and rescue brigades are being merged under SNP control, too. ‘If that means centralisation of mountain rescue, then I am in no doubt people could die on our mountains as a direct result. Loss of local control could result in loss of life,’ says John Grieve, of the Glencoe Mountain Rescue Service. His team’s taskings in the Highland brigade area are managed locally — they can get on the mountain within 15 minutes, he says — but their Strathclyde work already has to go through a control room in that land of lochs, soaring peaks and wide open spaces, Glasgow.
Scotland’s local authorities, kept by Edinburgh on a fiscal chokehold that Thatcher would have envied, are getting cross. They have all been forced, on pain of massive cuts in their government grants, to freeze their council tax for the next four years, while spending money on various SNP giveaways — such as free personal care for the ever-growing number of old people, regardless of income — which neither councils nor nation can afford. As well as losing their blue light services, there is talk of taking social care and some educational functions away too. Localism is not a buzzword in Scotland.
Holyrood’s proportional electoral system was, of course, supposed to prevent anyone ever gaining an overall majority and monopolising power. But largely due to the skill of Mr Salmond, and the total ineptitude of his pygmy opponents, he won a majority anyway. The fact is that most of the best Scots in the unionist parties still gravitate to Westminster. Only the SNP keeps its top talent north of Hadrian’s Wall. The freebies are popular, and the Nats are still on a roll. In May’s local elections, they could even win Glasgow — a monumental blow to Labour.
Mr Salmond’s 2014 independence vote might put the brakes on a bit. The other paradox of Scottish politics — the reason he will probably lose the referendum — is that Scotland almost certainly has more power inside a devolved UK than as a fully independent nation. Independence wouldn’t really give Scots any more control over their domestic public services than they already have — but it would reduce their control over economic and fiscal decisions made in London which would still affect them.
The other reason to vote ‘No’ is that it might be the only way to stop Scotland’s gradual transition into a kind of East Germany with elections.
Andrew Gilligan writes for the Telegraph.