Free ministerial car to watch his football team for free. SNP must understand what’s wrong with this
SNP Health Secretary Neil Gray may be a fine, upstanding person who is working hard to save the NHS. He may be just the person for the job. As someone with a number of age-related ailments, I sincerely hope he is.
However, the row over his use of a chauffeur-driven ministerial car to attend three football games (to which he had been given free tickets, naturally) could become the issue that defines his image in the public eye.
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Hide AdOpposition parties are doing their best to ensure this happens. Scottish Conservative deputy leader Rachael Hamilton claimed the row was starting to look like “another Michael Matheson affair” – the football-related scandal that brought down Gray’s predecessor – given the “shoddy excuses” offered by the SNP.
Certainly, Net Zero Secretary Gillian Martin’s attempt to defend Gray – saying “it’s my understanding that Neil Gray was doing his job as the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport” – did not stand up well to scrutiny.
Firstly, all three games involved Aberdeen, the team he supports (as do I, although only half-heartedly). It would have helped, image-wise, if he had thrown in an occasional tie at Stenhousemuir or Morton.
Secondly, his job title on the Scottish Government website is actually “Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care”, although sport is a responsibility of one of his supporting ministers, so appears to be part of his remit. Thirdly, two of the games took place when he was Well-being Economy, Fair Work and Energy Secretary.
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Freebiegate crosses party lines
The problem for the parties seeking to make hay with this particular issue is that ‘freebies’ seem to be popular across the political spectrum. In September, the Guardian counted up MPs’ declarations of “gifts, benefits and hospitality” since 2010 and discovered this added up to a total of more than £6 million. The figure last year was £1.3m, up from a ‘mere’ £483,500 in 2021.
The highest-profile recent example of Westminster’s appetite for free stuff was, of course, provided by none other than our Prime Minister. After a row broke out over his acceptance of gifts – including free tickets to watch football – it emerged he had received gifts and freebies valued at £100,000-plus since 2019, more than any other MP.
This prompted SNP MP Kirsty Blackman to declare Starmer to be “the king of freebies”, a title he would struggle to contest. The reluctantly chastened Starmer eventually decided to pay for more than £6,000 worth of gifts and hospitality he had received for free since becoming Prime Minister.
Gold wallpaper
The most common defence I’ve heard of his actions is to suggest the Tories are, overall, worse than Labour on this sort of stuff and provide a reminder of the infamous ‘gold’ wallpaper that was used to decorate the Prime Minister’s Downing Street flat as part of a £112,000 refurbishment during Boris Johnson’s term of office.
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Hide AdThe resulting furore over who paid for it led to the Conservative party being fined £17,800 for not properly declaring donations, while the wallpaper, alleged to have actually been yellow, was eventually painted over – at a cost to the taxpayer of £7,000.
Standing among the politicians as they engage in regular bouts of mud-slinging over who’s worse than whom are the public – SNP supporters forced to defend Gray, Labour voters sticking up for Starmer, Conservatives insisting Johnson was all right really... Thankfully, the latter are still in a minority, but there are those on the party’s populist wing who would gladly see him return.
Defending the indefensible
At a time when the rise of populists the world over poses a serious threat to democracy – we wait to see just how ‘authoritarian’ Donald Trump will try to be in the US – it is more important than ever that our elected representatives demonstrate an understanding that maintaining high standards in public life really does matter.
Pushing politically active members of the public into defending what is basically indefensible represents a powerful and corrosive societal force that will make some of them give up in despair, while others adopt an increasingly tribal approach that is resistant to inconvenient facts.
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Hide AdIf we end up in a world where ideology trumps reality (pun intended), then we really are lost. In the Soviet Union, if scientists discovered anything that contradicted some aspect of Communist philosophy, they learned to keep quiet about it. Trump’s return to the White House raises fears that his administration will adopt a similar attitude to science, particularly about climate change.
If democracy is to survive its current troubles, we desperately need leaders to be proud of. It’s not about holding people to unachievably high standards. We all make mistakes and it is easy to go along with the crowd when ‘everybody else is doing it’. This attitude was obvious among MPs during the expenses scandal.
Soulless robots
But, from the outside looking in on the political world, I get a sense of growing dismay at freebie culture. Neil Gray’s trips to three football games might seem like a small thing to some, but the lame excuses are making things worse. Why couldn’t he have apologised for an error of judgment, made a donation to charity, and promised there would be no repeat? It would have been embarrassing, but the public would have moved on, with less reputational damage done to him as an individual, the SNP and democracy as a whole.
Some supposed experts in ‘image management’ seem to believe politicians must stay relentlessly on message, never apologise and never admit a mistake. The result turns elected representatives into soulless robots who are almost impossible to empathise with. And this means the very human flaws exposed in ‘Freebiegate’ are more difficult to forgive.
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Hide AdIf there’s one lesson that democrats need to learn from populists, it is that gaffes and mistakes make politicians seem more human. However, in order to avoid becoming populists themselves, they need to react more honourably when challenged about them.
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