Dunoon SNP Councillor Michael Breslin has been known for some time to be facing an official complaint against him to the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland.
The complaint has been lodged by the Council’s top executive officers acting in concert: CEO, Sally Loudon; Executive Director for Customer Services, Douglas Hendry; Executive Director for Community Services, Cleland Sneddon; and Executive Director for Development and Infrastructure Services, Pippa Milne.
This last post used to be responsible for ‘Economic Development’ – and was advertised as such after the departure of previous incumbent, Sandy Mactaggart – but has been reduced to the vague generality of ‘development’ because the appointee had no economic development experience or expertise.
The reason given for the making of the complaint is the content of emails from Councillor Breslin and his alleged circulation of emails to him in relation to three matters where there remains legitimate public concern over the proper conduct of council officers:
- the non-disposal of the neglected Castle Toward Estate to the South Cowal Community Development Company – a decision which, by the end of this month, June 2014, will have eaten £133,500 from Argyll and Bute Council’s reserves;
- Rothesay Harbour – a matter of ongoing dispute on which we are fully informed, in which it is hard to see any legitimate defence for the council’s conduct but on which we have not published for reasons of confidentiality, which we respect;
- the pay and conditions of care-at-home workers – a growing and exploited sector in Argyll’s ageing population.
The letter to Councillor Breslin from CEO Sally Loudon, informing him of the complaint, says: ‘We are particularly concerned about the sustained, repeated and public criticism of council officers which has the potential to have a severe impact on the ability of officers to deliver objective, appropriate and frank advice to council members.’
Where is redress?
It is undeniable that every one of the issues noted above in which Councillor Breslin’s specific engagement is under challenge is of genuine and serious interest to the electorate of Argyll and Bute.
It is equally undeniable that the conduct of the council common to and underlying each of these issues is indefensible.
The big question is whether and when an elected member is not only entitled but, given their elected responsibilities, required to act outside the norms of accepted conduct?
If they may never do so, that effectively licenses continuing and serious misbehaviour by unduly protected council officers.
There is the national audit commission, Audit Scotland, of course. Experience of the – arguably deliberate – impotence of its interventions in a range of matters relating to Argyll and Bute Council had made Audit Scotland no more than a ritual player. It has certainly not been seen to be an effective one; or one whose values in investigation have lived up to public expectations of a commitment to reinforcing the fundamental difference between between right and wrong.
That has been most recently evident in the local audit team’s very demonstrably less than adequately engaged review of the Council’s processes in the award and immediate implementation of a contract to provide community based addiction recovery services.
With recourse to Audit Scotland an accepted waste of time as unlikely to lead to clearly necessary reform, what is a capable and engaged councillor to do in situations of obvious wrong, where no redress has been forthcoming through the direct intervention of the principals concerned?
Michael Breslin has a substantial record of leadership in managing the only successful attempt to establish Argyll College in so physically decentralised a geography as that of Argyll and the Isles; and then of leading it to an embedded position in the area – and to growth.
Having come from Highlands and Islands Enterprise [HIE] to the Argyll College job, he is also someone competent and confident in financial management, a rare bird in the chamber of Argyll and Bute Council where the whites of many eyes show brightly when anything expressed in figures and not words is under discussion.
He has a structured intelligence that can be very fruitful in producing clear seeing solutions – with this capacity well in evidence in the papers he has been writing of late in his personal blog, analysing what practical solutions night be implemented to make Argyll and Bute work better. These papers, which reward reading, demonstrate the ability to identify the core nature of problems; and to see constructive addresses to them which bear no trace of respect for the sacred cows of custom.
Councillor Breslin is used to authority, not subservience. He is also naturally not given to tolerance of incompetence or mincing his words.
Over his time as an elected member, since 2012, For Argyll has come by a variety of communications from Councillor Breslin to various recipients. As many of these have made their way to us via those who oppose him as via those who may support him. This indicates the extent to which the councilor’s communications often boomerang – and are patently written with no thought to or fear of such a result.
It is fair to say that those we have come to see are characterised by a certain imperiousness; a fondness for delivering deadlines – often with threats of action in the event of non-compliance; and an unmoderated bluntness.
Some of this is born of the councillor’s professional background in authority; and some is temperamental. In Councillor Breslin’s distinct favour is the unusual phenomenon that he can take it as well as dish it out – which rather validates his habit of doing just that.
The role of local councillors
Local councillors are effectively members of the Board of a company.
The Council Leader is the Chair of the Board and does have serious executive authority, superceding that of the CEO. The CEO is the only member of staff whom councillors can sack. Below CEO level, all errant officers may only be sacked by the CEO.
Councillors with specific areas of little more than apparent responsibility – like chairing Area Boards and leading on policy development in specific areas – are Executive Directors. The rest are the Non-executive directors, free even from apparent responsibility.
As with a business, the permanent management staff have the real authority and carry the responsibility. Unlike business managers, council officers have no real accountability to focus concentration on their grave responsibilities.
Elected members, outside the Council Leader, have no responsibility worth the name but are wholly accountable to a sometimes noisy but generally intimidated electorate.
The electorate are – properly – the shareholders, able only to hold to account the members of the Board, at five year intervals; and never the company management.
When advice to councillors is anything but ‘objective, appropriate or frank’?
The letter to Councillor Breslin from CEO Sally Loudon quoted above, in notifying him of the complaint she and her fellow executive officers had made about him, refers to the councillor’s email habits as having a potentially ‘severe impact on the ability of officers to deliver objective, appropriate and frank advice to council members.’
This is all fine and dandy in theory; but what of the many documented cases where senior officers can be shown to have given council members anything but objective, appropriate or frank advice?
Are councillors to be expected to be silent witnesses to what can be and have been highly improper derelictions of professional duties to councillors and primarily to the residents of Argyll and Bute?
When, in 2012, the SNP were elected to the position of leading an administration at Argyll and Bute Council – they came to that office from the background of the disastrous school closure proposals which saw:
- universally non-complaint closure proposals put forward and retained against all informed protest – in respect initially of a massive swathe of 26 rural primary schools across this mainland and island territory;
- a genuine error of understanding made by the Head of Finance of the Grant Aided Expenditure [GAE] mechanism by which the Scottish Government annually calculates each council’s block revenue grant. He therefore did not accurately calculate the financial losses and gains from each of the proposed school closures. This failure unintentionally misled councillors in the early stages of this wide-ranging set of closure proposals into – wrongly – believing them to be financially secure;
- assurances repeatedly given to the chamber by the responsible Education Director and Executive Director for Community Services, that the proposals were soundly evidenced, where, often at the most basic level, they demonstrably were not;
- assurances repeatedly given to the chamber by the responsible Executive Director for Customer Services that the proposals were legally compliant with the 2010 Act – which again they demonstrably were not;
- the deliberate – documented – exclusion by non-notification of the responsible Education Spokesperson from meetings on the school closure proposals between the Council Leader, external consultants. senior officers and education officers;
- the abandonment in disarray of the first proposal to close the 26 schools;
- the production of a new suite of proposals – no better evidenced and no more legally compliant than the first suite – but relatively less ambitious – proposing ‘only’ to close 12;
- repeated ‘consultations’ with the parents of pupils at the final 12 threatened schools, with most of them having already just defended themselves against the previous set of unsound closure proposals. This was a fully unprincipled and sadistic pursuit and left communities and parents exhausted and weakened, even though they triumphed in the end;
- sustained and stubborn retention of fundamentally flawed proposals which cost the council a very substantial sum of money which has never been disclosed and which has probably never been tabulated; and cost it serious reputational damage in what became a Scotland-wide serial comedy;
- clear failure by the then new CEO to monitor, supervise and regulate the actions of her senior executives; and her apparent complicity in efforts to defeat the wishes of elected members to have reliable objective guidance from officers.
In each of these cases, rather than inform elected members properly, as they are duty-bound to do, the executive officers concerned were shown to have given them both false and consciously manilulated information, relying – correctly – on the likely automatic acceptance of their proposals by a dependent and trusting chamber.
These proposals were shown to be unsustainable only through the persistent efforts of the officers of the independent Scottish Rural Schools Network [SRSN]. It was the powerful support by the Argyll electorate at large for the committed voluntary work of the SRSN that helped to drive the final victory.
A second betrayal of the electorate
In May 2012, elected to lead an administration, the SNP group of councillors came to that position with recent fully documented evidence of serious incompetence, failure, conspiracy to deceive elected members and the wholly unnecessary incurring of very substantial financial loss – with not one single school ultimately closed.
The SNP had promised in the election ‘to clear out Kilmory’. They were elected to do just that by an electorate starving for decent honest local government.
This SNP-led administration had all the evidence necessary to support an instruction to the CEO to sack the two Executive Directors named above; and then to sack the CEO herself.
In the first of what was to be a momentous series of their own betrayals of the electorate, the SNP group chose not to do this. The achievable moment for real change was gone and is not retrievable.
The pantomimic saga of what has followed after that will form the basis of final year undergraduate theses in politics into the future. It is on the record and will not be rehearsed here. It is, though, solely the SNP’s direct responsibility.
For Argyll’s decision not to publish earlier on the pursuit of Councillor Breslin
For Argyll has chosen not to publish earlier on this matter because we see it as entangled in a complex wider issue – which relates to the connection between it and the record of the SNP ‘in office’ [of sorts] at the Council from 2012 to early 2014.
In its complete disregard for responsbility to Argyll and to those who had elected their councillors, the SNP – to protect the vote for independence in the September 2014 referendum – plotted, bullied and brutalised their own councillors, as well as Argyll, in a desperate urge to get untried rookies out of power before they might offend anyone by actually making competent, objective and principled decisions in the interests of Argyll as a whole.
Pork-barrell politics has always delivered the votes, hence its popularity. The last of what became a sequence of three short-lived SNP administrations, each felled by their own, was finally destroyed by the SNP NEC and the local constituency branch by force majeure.
Some gravy-hunters jumped ship to the strangest of alliances. Some were excommunicated – others were not. Some resigned. Elected SNP councillors were – are – to be found in all parts of the chamber but relatively few in the ineffective rump of the formal SNP group – officially ‘the opposition’ – with no influence and of no account.
Over the last few months there has been a concerted effort by the SNP to refurbish and reinstate the party at Argyll and Bute Council. This is planned in order to grow the vote for the SNP in Argyll in the Scottish Election in 2016; and in the local authority elections in 2017.
It is being done by mounting a series of noisy campaigns to undermine senior officers and the current administration, under the renewed leadership of the Council Leader deposed in favour of the SNP in 2012.
Undermining senior council executives and the current administration is a turkey shoot. It’s no more than a case of which case do you use to prove the point. There are so many. Officers – all deservedly- have been targeted. Issues – all legitimately – have been pressed into service in an orchestrated campaign using virtually in-house media services and evangelised journalists.
Whether or not Councillor Breslin’s well-above-the-parapet challenges to the council are consciously part of this campaign or not – they would certainly contribute to the cause.
For Argyll has worked to report and assist the legitimate individual campaigns while not being perceived as an apparent member of the conducted choir or an acolyte of a cause we do not believe has legitimacy.
What the SNP did in and did to Argyll was unprecedented, disgraceful and unforgiveable.
In justice, there is a price to be paid for that. The price is the penance of serious hard work for no reward to build a trustworthy reputation the right way.
It ought not to be a case of just bulling their way back into a power they flunked and then abused when they were given in in 2012..
This was a party that put its own political interests before everything else – including the elected responsibility for Argyll which they sought and for which they gave broken promises in exchange for votes. This is a party that will always do just that. And if they intend to change – which will only be tested in the next crisis and may well be found wanting – they ought to be prepared to give proof of intent by doing modest hard yards here first.
Argyll and Bute Council is a horror show – but in fairness, if one looked at most of Scotland councils with the intensity with which we interrogate this one, the likelihood is that they would be little different. Local government is well beyond its design date.
While For Argyll is an unrelenting campaigner against bad and unfair practice, we chose not to be manipulated into seeming to have joined a covert unitary campaign with a variety of public faces and an underlying aim we consider to be morally unsupportable.
This is why we are addressing, at this independent stage, the position in which Councillor Breslin finds himself – and have clarified the key question of the relationship between the enforcement of a code of practice for councillors [which is, of course, generally necessary] and an undemocratic, abusive and macchiavellian council.
While it would probably be misguided, in the ongoing nuanced political chess game in Argyll, to crown Councillor Breslin an unequivocal ‘local hero’, his actions raise that fundamental question whose proper answer would be to allow him just cause.
Postscript
For the avoidance of doubt as to our sanity, For Argyll has no doubt whatsoever that its own puritan stance on the issue of the SNP in local government in Argyll will count for nothing.
We have every expectation of another surging win for the SNP in the 2016 Scottish Elections [and the high probability that the party will grab its only real chance of independence by putting the matter to the electorate in its manifesto for that election]. Our expectation is of a similar outcome of massive SNP gains in council administrations across Scotland in 2017 – including here in Argyll.
There are times in history when people act helplessly in concert and this is one of them. One has to recognise that reality while standing against it. And we do – on both counts.
Reading the runes, we predict that the SNP Council Leader in 2017 will be Councillor Breslin; and that Helensburgh’s Councillor Vivien Dance, a canny recent SNP convert, will be his number two.
