The Sunday Herald

March 25, 2001

Spin-and-tell government costs £206m

BYLINE: By Douglas Fraser Political Editor

SECTION: Pg. 2

LENGTH: 509 words

Scotland's government media machine is nearly six times bigger than 30 years ago, and growing faster since devolution than ever before.

The finding, from a detailed study of the media and government through the transition from Scottish Office to Executive, follows the disclosure yesterday that the cost of government administration in Scotland has soared by 38% since Labour came to power.

The bill is up by £57 million per year to £206m, with much of that to pay for an increase in civil service numbers, the cost of running the parliament and the bill for publishing official documents.

The academic research into the information service, published exclusively today in the Sunday Herald, finds that, despite the rapidly expanding media machine, Scottish government has not become more open, as had been hoped before devolution.

Politicians, civil servants, lobbyists and journalists have all contributed to sticking with the secretive practices of Whitehall government, according to the Stirling University media studies team.

They found that in 1970 Scotland's central government machine had 15 people working on PR. In the months before the first Scottish parliamentary election two years ago, there were 59 people working in that area for government in Scotland. By June last year, the number of information officers and spin doctors had grown to 81.

That does not include the swelled ranks of political special advisers, with First Minister Henry McLeish now having five people to deal with the media. However, he has failed so far to follow through on promises to his backbenchers to set up a Labour-funded political unit in the Executive to improve links with them.

He is also still to make good on a promise to Jack McConnell, whom he narrowly beat in the leadership race last October, that the schools, children and foreign affairs minister would be allowed to break with the convention set down by the late Donald Dewar and have his own special adviser.

David McLetchie, the Scottish Tory leader, commented: "Labour has been surrounding itself with spin doctors and media manipulators who are paid lavish salaries at the taxpayers' expense and are pouring more and more public money into the cost of government."

The Stirling research, by Professor Philip Schlesinger, David Miller and William Dinan, is to be published as a book, Open Scotland?, next week. In it civil servants face strong criticism for failing to reform themselves and their secrecy as part of the home-rule process.

There is a call for lobbyists to face statutory regulation. Journalists are attacked for jointly working to limit access to information and allowing politicians to assume they can speak without attribution. All of them are criticised for cronyism which stems from the political media community being so close knit.

"The proximity of politicians, lobbyists and many of the journalists the public rely upon to hold these actors to account is potentially unhealthy for Scottish democracy," say the academics.