Bunker Politics prevents good policies from working

We’ve written a lot about the need for maximum transparency in Government. Democracies simply cannot function if we, the citizens, cannot see how Government works, what they are doing, who they are talking to and how they are coming to their decisions. There’s no real surprise that Governments hate this concept and do everything they can to preserve their shielded bunker from view. A “Glass Wall Government” is one where we can look in and see everything they are doing and they can’t stop us.

Glass Walls work both ways though as does a bunker mentality where the Government stops us looking in. Doing this also makes it difficult for them to look out.

Which is why the news that Health Secretary Neil Gray has bunkered himself against scrutiny of the Glasgow drug consumption facility policy is so concerning.

This policy is fundamentally a good thing (see our discussion with the late Peter Krykant who spearheaded the campaign to get it up and running). Treating drug addiction as a health rather than a criminal issue saves and safeguards lives. It has long lasting, rippling effects right through our community. It helps people who, until now, have been demonised and abandoned.

But the policy must bring the community along with it. One of the fundamental problems of the current policy is that there is only one safe consumption facility and therefore people who wish to use it must travel to it. Local residents have been complaining about negative impacts of crime, anti-social behaviour and illegal drug use – impacts that would likely have still happened elsewhere but are being drawn in and concentrated around the facility.

To stress – this is not a problem being caused BY the consumption facility. It’s a problem caused by the fact that this is the ONLY such facility.

The logic of several government policies – from local care provision, to 15 minute neighbourhoods – leads to the conclusion that every community should be able to provide the services provided by The Thistle. More and better services will not just help more people who need the services, but will both help and cause less harm to everyone else too.

This will not happen if Gray continues to stay inside his bunker and not engage with the community to lessen or reverse the harms they feel now. What will happen is that public sentiment will turn against a health policy that has been shown to work, opportunistic politicians will pick up that sentiment and parley it into power and then the policy will be reversed – taking us back to demonising and abandoning the victims of illegal drugs, probably causing more harm to the communities who were themselves only acting to try to reduce their own harms.

Glass Walls work both ways. Government must allow us to see how they operate but they also must come into communities to see how their policies actually affect people in the real world and must observe these impacts in a much closer way than can be seen via a choreographed Ministerial visit. Scotland is a small enough country that our Ministers aren’t inaccessible talking heads only seen on TV or from behind a wall of security goons as is the case with UK or other larger nations. Our Government can be in and among the people it serves. Communities aren’t just there to complain about problems but often themselves hold the solutions that no Government Minister could even conceive of.

Policies like The Thistle are too important to let fail through inattention or avoidance. Government should be willing to build up from communities, not just impose things on them. We need not just a Glass Wall between us, but a means of reaching past it too.