A toxic culture that values the dark arts of spin over telling us the naked truth
IMAGINE you live in a country where the state hikes your taxes and then uses some of the cash to fund a propaganda department.
A lot of the time, its sole function is putting a positive gloss on government blunders, and there are more than enough to go around.
Its many apparatchiks help to spread wilful distortions, half-truths, or outright fallacies, whether in press releases or in public debate.
There are promises of maximum transparency but a legal guarantee of ‘freedom of information’ is routinely ignored, with no effective sanction.
Meanwhile the contingent of reporters on the payroll of the state broadcaster is outnumbered by the propagandists, or public relations officers.
And a senior TV journalist has left her job, complaining of a campaign of abuse from fanatical supporters of the government, outraged at her perceived bias against the regime.
Nightmarish, isn’t it? But it might sound familiar, as it’s a portrait of Scotland in 2022, where an army of Scottish Government press officers and special advisers costs nearly £9million a year.
The number of public relations staff has soared by more than 50 per cent since 2018, so that there are now 175 in the communications department — compared to 115 four years ago — at an estimated annual cost of £7.4million.
Another £1.3million was spent on the First Minister’s team of 13 special advisers, or SPADs.
SPADs were criticised during the Salmondgate affair in an official (and heavily redacted) report published nearly a year ago which called for them to be held to account under the ministerial code (that hasn’t happened yet).
It was the government press office which issued a release on behalf of John Swinney back in 2016 after the Supreme Court ruled his Named Person scheme to be largely unlawful — the SNP is now trying to revive it, albeit supposedly in modified form.
The release was ambitiously headlined: ‘Swinney commits to roll out service as legal bid to scrap Named Person scheme fails’, a falsehood that remains on the Scottish Government website.
It’s an egregious waste of money, and all the less palatable given that the British Medical Association warns we don’t have enough actual doctors to look after the sick.
Spin doctors are in rude health, and proliferating — but it’s easy to see why their services are needed when so much of our bile-filled politics have been tainted, perhaps irrevocably, by government-promoted disinformation.
That’s the only fitting description of the ‘debate’ that has raged in recent days, sparked by the SNP’s Commons leader Ian Blackford who suggested that the UK Government would pick up the bill for Scottish state pensions after independence.
The First Minister was drawn into this charade at Holyrood, but not before her own Finance Secretary, Kate Forbes, had backed Mr Blackford as a pensions ‘expert’.
It’s worth pausing to reflect just how troubling her intervention was, given that soon afterwards she unveiled (somewhat shambolic) plans to ease the cost of living.
How can the economic judgment of a minister who believed Mr Blackford’s disingenuous rubbish be trusted again?
Over several days, I contacted the government’s spin team to ask if Miss Forbes stood by her comments, but there was no reply.
Naturally, I intend to renew the enquiry until a response emerges, but it is likely to be a long wait, and you might think it’s hardly surprising that she would want to duck behind the parapet after realising the extent of her faux pas.
But was it really a mistake — did she mis-speak, or is that her real view? We don’t know, because she’s protected by that phalanx of spinners whose primary duty is only nominally to the taxpayer.
You’d think one of these well-paid communications gurus might have been able to craft a quick reply, maybe suggesting that the minister was too busy — this was the excuse of former SNP MSP Andrew Wilson, the party’s economics mastermind, who either wisely or cynically refused to step in to the pensions debacle.
Governments have always been, to varying extents, paranoid about how they are seen and reported upon, believing that they’re treated unfairly, and maybe sometimes they are.
But the vast apparatus of the press operation that is now engaged in feeding us a diet of untruths can hardly claim that it is the underdog in this public relations battle, when it has more staff on its payroll than many news organisations.
That doesn’t stop the SNP claiming that it is misrepresented, of course, though it is relatively rare that BBC Scotland picks up on particularly damaging stories in its main television bulletins.
The launch of the BBC’s digital TV channel at a cost of £32million was driven partly by a desire to shore up the corporation’s defences in the event that independence was achieved and the SNP targeted the BBC in a bout of score-settling — or at least that’s the view of some of those close to its genesis.
It allowed a pre-emptive argument to be made that money was being piled into a distinctively Scottish project that would fit the Nationalists’ world-view — whether that worked out as planned isn’t clear, as barely anyone watches it.
Certainly, if you’re struggling to remember the last time a BBC TV interviewer in Scotland really took a government minister to task in prime time, you’re not alone.
The next big task awaiting the SNP spin crew will be the independence referendum Bill, destined for a costly courtroom battle.
Doubtless many grand promises will be made about it by the same people who told us, wrongly, that Mr Swinney had triumphed in court over Named Person campaigners.
They will also publicise the revamped plan for separatism, though who knows whether the bit about state pensions will need some revision, or redaction, before that documents sees the light of day?
The SNP came to power in 2007 partly because of its Blairite proficiency in spin and getting its message across, and in those days it liked to argue that once it had shown it was capable of governing effectively, independence would surely follow — best-laid plans…
But after 15 years in office, ‘message discipline’ and instant rebuttal have morphed into a far more toxic culture which values political self-preservation over telling voters the truth.
- This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on Tuesday, February 22, 2022.
- *Follow me on Twitter: @GrahamGGrant
