Help us lob a molotov cocktail at failure

The scale of failure in Scotland now has gone well beyond concerning into really alarming territory. We can’t go on like this, but to create a manifesto of change we’ll need help…

On Wednesday Common Weal was in Galashiels at the Heriot Watt University Borders campus. We were organisers (though our energy group) of a major symposium on district heating. It was a really valuable event and should lead to real follow-through.

My contribution was to look at the big picture. I based my short talk on a simple question. Do you think Scotland could have build a universal sewer system 150 years ago? Do you think we could have built a universal sewer system 60 years ago? And do you think we could build one now?

From the nodding in the room I think most people agreed with my own assessment – yes, yes, not a chance in hell. I mean seriously, can Scotland successfully build anything? We can't do a basic tram system on budget and in time. Then again, we can't hold a public inquiry into a tram-building fiasco without that being massively over budget and miles over time.

We are currently in a situation where putting together a basic ferry to get us across a short journey on not particularly perilous seas seems to be beyond us. A basic legally-compliant deposit return scheme for bottles? Nope. National Care Service? Nope. Energy company? Nope. I mean we can't reform land ownership or change the economy, but those are because we're not trying.

The other stuff? We're trying, but we still can't. We can't get legislation right and we can't implement it without screwing up. But there are more fundamental and more dispiriting questions. There are things we could do ten years ago that we can't do now. Ten years ago we could run a university without bankrupting it or turning it mainly into a property development company.

Ten years ago we could educate a child in a school without the child apparently feeling the need to batter the teacher. Ten years ago we could run a system of GP surgeries with the novel idea that you would be able to see a doctor. This isn't nostalgia. I'm not looking back to some wistful idealised past – ten years ago is after the referendum.

As regular readers will know, I spend a lot of time trying to analyse all of this and why it is happening. I know the shape of the problem, but it still surprises me. We now outsource all our policy-making to private consultancies which are not there to serve the public good. Why on earth has the decision on whether to give publicly-funded ferry routes to a publicly-funded ferry company been outsourced to Ernst and Young?

I go on and on about this; if you let con artists inveigle their way into every corner of your operation, extracting wealth and undermining things that don't help them extract wealth, then your system will obviously stop working.

If you want to diversify the ways of screwing up public service you could then also make sure that no-one who knows how anything is done is allowed to run anything, ever, and instead create a god-awful management class which is largely drawn from the same circles of thinking that produced the con men.

Of course, you could then make it much worse again by hunting down the people who actually do know what they're doing and make sure they can't do the thing they're supposed to be doing because instead you have them through the back writing a 40 page risk assessment just in case something goes wrong and you need to prove it was their fault and not yours so they get fired and you get promoted.

Then you could centralise everything to make it worse, and wherever you see signs of autonomous action not being run by your vanishingly small group of central office halfwits, you would make that stop. Social workers and local authorities treating care services as if they are services and not ways to get Scotland's failed people parked out the way? Centralise it in a National Care Service where you can hand out contracts to the private sector who won't waste time on the 'caring' part and will instead focus on the 'parking' bit.

Fine, you've probably read me running over these arguments. I do try and keep an eye open just to see if anyone else has a coherent suggestion of the alternative reason this is happening and, well, they don't. All they ever say is 'more money!' or 'privatise it!'. Neither of which answer the question.

Because the work to build a replacement for Barlinnie basically is privatised. It is being run by the privatisation agency (they're technically known as the Scottish Futures Trust but they seem to work for the construction corporations) and delivered by 'we built a leisure centre so bad it couldn't open and then burned down the Glasgow School of Art' favourites Keir Construction.

“a Molotov Cocktail we could direct straight into the heart of Scotland’s failure would be great”

I mean, what could go wrong with letting the privatisers cost a prison and then give it to the burn-down-heritage guys? That's the efficient private sector, isn't it? Which means there is no way that it has increased in price by an utterly inconceivable 1,000 per cent? That would be nuts. Yet that's what happened.

I am writing this again because I am growing more and more frustrated with the fact that, fundamentally, we know the answer to why Scotland can't build anything, can't do anything. How do I know the above things? Because I ask people. The academics all know exactly how and why their universities are being mismanaged. The doctors will tell you why their surgeries are collapsing under the strain.

The social workers will tell you why they can't deliver social care. Speak to an engineer who knows what a bolt is for and they'll explain to you why our procurement and construction track record is so bad. Ask a teacher about rising violence in the class.

We seem now to have a simple class divide. There is a getting-things-done class who know exactly what is wrong and have no power, and there is a senior-manager-and-quango-member class who either haven't got a clue what is going on or don't care. Either way, the former are trapped and the latter will not have their cold, dead fingers prised from the levers of power no matter what.

I have been thinking about this a lot. There are bits of this I have clear answers to. I can quickly deal with quangos (abolish and replace with elected bodies), with consultancy culture (just stop doing it and hire proper civil servants), with centralisation (just decentralise) and with a lot of the paperwork problem (just don't do it), as well as with New Public Management (to the incinerator), internal markets (sell!, don't buy) and the desperate lack of transparency (powerful democracy reform).

I am increasingly feeling though that this needs to be put together into a plan, something that could be enacted. That would need more detail than I can go into in commentary. We've been chatting about this as the Common Weal team and we have some thoughts about consolidating this work into a 'manifesto to save the public realm'.

But we could do with your help. I don't care how senior you are or how junior, if you work in or for the public sector or are directly affected and have specific thoughts, I want to hear them. Please email me your experience and what would make a difference. Are you a trained professional who knows what risk looks like and could cover it without a 20-page risk assessment. How did you use to do it?

If you are a GP and have specific ideas about what is preventing you getting more done, tell me the barriers and what you'd do with them. If you are in a local authority and trying to do something and being told you need to put it out to tender when you know this will fail, what would strengthen your hand?

I lay awake last night thinking about this. Could we create national guidance to change behaviour? Could we specify in writing that 'Do No Harm' means you and your colleagues discuss a project and how to manage the risk sensibly, which may not mean 'fill in a form'.

(I sat in a meeting where a group of people were working on a risk assessment for high school kids handing out leaflets. It was multiple pages of A4 which basically said 'keep them off the road, tell them to behave, keep an eye on them'. I couldn't see why we were writing any of it down.)

This is getting rather crisis-like now. If something is getting better then I can't see it. If there is a giant source of new money which would let us continue to run this batshit-crazy system without reform then (a) I can't see where it is and (b) why on earth would we waste the money doing the wrong stuff anyway?

We need an agenda to make public service work again. I mean a proper one, not one of the dozens which are produced by the people who broke public services exonerating themselves and blaming Covid or the Russians. We could do with a 21stcentury communist manifesto as well, but for the meantime a Molotov Cocktail we could direct straight into the heart of Scotland's failure would be great.

If you're pissed off, think about what you'd do and tell us. If we can, we'll prepare the Molotov Cocktail for you.