‘I will lead by example in adhering to this Code and knowing it is an incredible privilege to serve the people of Scotland. I know that Ministers will do likewise,’ is how First Minister, Humza Yousaf, ends the foreword to the latest edition of the Scottish Ministerial Code, published in July.
Just a couple of months later and Yousaf appears to have potentially broken the Code, which stipulates ministers must ‘give accurate and truthful information to the Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity’.
As revealed in an investigation by These Islands, Yousaf made a false statement in relation to Scotland’s renewables energy capacity back in June. At First Minister’s Questions (FMQs) on June 22, in response to a question from Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, Yousaf said that Scotland had ‘the majority of the renewables and natural resources’ in the UK. The correct figure for 2022 was 26 per cent, according to UK government figures.
Instead of quickly rectifying the error with the true figure as soon as it became known, as he is required to do, Yousaf’s office instead appears to have engaged in a bizarre effort to engineer a correction aimed at avoiding embarrassment for the first minister.
At the end of that FMQs, Conservative MSP Liam Kerr raised a point of order on the matter. Several weeks later, on August 29th, the first minister wrote to Kerr, as well as Sarwar and the presiding officer, to inform them of his correction.
‘To be clear, in a UK context we do have the majority of renewables per capita and natural resources, here in Scotland. I had intended to say “per capita”, and I hope that clarifies the matter you raised at FMQs on 22nd June 2023,’ he wrote.
There are two problems with this. One is that it is nonsensical because it is not possible to have a majority of a per capita number. You can have a higher per capita or lower per capita figure compared to another per capita number, but ‘a majority’ in this context is meaningless. In trying to maintain the line that Scotland has more resources, Yousaf has spun the wording of his statement to the point of gibberish. And remember, this is official wording presented to his colleagues in the Scottish parliament.
The second and more serious issue is how the Scottish government, with the help of supposedly politically neutral civil servants, spent several weeks conspiring to come up with the ‘per capita’ line before Yousaf issued his correction. A freedom of information (FOI) response has revealed lengthy discussions and planning amongst civil servants that aimed to come up with a ‘line to take’, as the internal emails are headed.
The first email came on June 22, just after FMQs, when one government official emailed a number of colleagues (most names are redacted) to state that they had worked out Scotland’s share of UK renewable capacity and that it is 26 per cent. A quick correction at this point would have ended the matter with little public notice.
Instead, there followed many days of further discussion and research as the officials tried to come up with a number that suited the narrative Yousaf was trying to spin.
However, the FOI shows that it was not until July 3 that the ‘per capita’ figure began to appear in the internal correspondence. How, then, could the first minister have ‘intended to say “per capita”‘ in parliament two weeks beforehand? Did he intend to use these words but keep this to himself as his team of civil servants got to work producing an accurate correction – which then just happened to be the wording he had intended to use all along? This stretches credulity.
It seems like the correction was reverse engineered by civil servants to maintain the first minister’s preferred spin on the situation. There are now calls on Yousaf to refer himself to the independent adviser on the Scottish ministerial code. In theory, it is a resignation matter. ‘Ministers who knowingly mislead the Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the First Minister,’ says the ministerial code.
If the first minister respects Scottish democracy then he should refer himself to the independent adjudicator. As for those who helped put together the spin effort, the evidence is mounting that the impartiality of at least part of Scotland’s civil service has been compromised. At some point there will have to be a reckoning.
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