Keep civil service out of party politics

AS CORRESPONDENCE to The Scotsman (Letters, 12, 13 December) indicates, it has taken some time for people to access, digest and evaluate the weighty volumes issued by the Scottish Government on 26 November on its proposed plans for independence.

There are numerous aspects of the documents that raise profound legal issues. Particularly worrying is the way that the papers mix proposals for constitutional change with party political propaganda. Civil servants who are supposed to be politically neutral appear to have been involved in an unpre-cedented way in preparing an election manifesto for a governing party to fight the Scottish Parliamentary elections of May 2016, whether or not the country is by then an independent state.

The current government was elected under the Scotland Act of 1998, the principles of which were approved by referendum the year before. Under these rules the government has no legal powers on constitutional change. The SNP achieved a majority of places in the Scottish Parliament in 2011 with about 45 per cent of the votes cast on a platform of holding a referendum on independence and that commitment is being respected. 

But preparing the case for an independent Scottish state is a very different matter from proposing policy for whatever government might come to power under such a scenario. If Scotland was independent, there is no way of knowing what policies the electorate might support and the government might enact. The policies proposed for an independent Scottish government in the white paper are party political and civil servants should not have been involved in framing these parts of what is now officially to be renamed the “guide” to independence.

Civil servants were rightly involved in helping coalition partners develop policies for coalitions that were being formed in previous devolved administrations after elections but they should have no role in sketching policies that theoretically might be followed by an independent Scottish Government.

The party political elements of the independence white paper are indications of worrying trends in ­Scottish Government and do not bode well for constitutional government in the aftermath of a possible Yes vote or the possible advent of independence.

Norman Bonney

Palmerston Place

Edinburgh