Viewpoint / ‘It is not for everyone – and it certainly wasn’t for me’
After resigning as a councillor at the end of October, Tom Morton reflects on his two and a half years representing the Shetland North ward as well as Scottish Labour.
I WANT to salute my fellow councillors for their forbearance, good humour and generosity. I have been unable to match their commitment: their willingness to spend time in seminars, meetings, ‘pre-meetings’, informal Scottish Country dance get togethers, outings to Frankie’s and Pete’s, for chips and sassermaet, and those horrible team-building yoga exercises.
Seriously, I wish I could handle the endless conventicles, those deep dives, confidential briefings, seminars and godless repetitive Powerpoint presentations.
Back in my evangelical days, we were taught that the maximum attention span of a human was 20 minutes. In local government this seems to have stretched to 72 hours, with breaks for intravenous caffeine and stern admonitions to be nice to officials, no matter what they’ve done or not done.
I’m looking at the public agenda and the colossal pile of verbiage that contains the series of reports and never-ending appendices for one particular meeting of the Sheepdog Welfare and Horse Control committee (toenails and hoof sub-group), and a familiar sensation grips me: physically expressed in a deep-seated, gut-wrenching pain; it’s quite simply, doom.
Come that morning, two, maybe three hours are going to be spent as councillors question the progenitors of these reports, making random or pertinent points ranging from the spurious and ridiculous to the wise and incisive, the banal and the self-serving (and that’s just me) and then leaving the officials concerned, sighing with relief, to get on with things for another couple of months.
Consultants will be commissioned or paid their regular stipends – one ongoing rural project involved no less than a dozen consultancies – good money sloshed away after bad, the Shetland gravy train hauling who knows how many (I don’t) sooth consultants into shops where they can buy whiteboards and Post-It Notes, felt-tip pens, catering packs of Haribo and expensive cameras. Let’s Consult!
Then they will miss their planes north and arrange Zoom calls to ‘stakeholders’ – the usual suspects, nominated by someone somebody once met in Whighams Wine Bar, who went birdwatching in Unst five years ago, or maybe it was North Ronaldsay. “Yeah, I know this fella…”
To quote Theodore Agnew, consultants infantilise government.
I was on other committees: education, development, pensions, joint staff and employers consultative consulting consultees, SOTEAG and the Sullom Voe Association. And of course there are the actual meetings of the full Shetland Islands Council, which can stretch into the afternoon or eternity, whichever comes first.
That ‘Dog and Pony’ meeting will arrive during a holiday for me in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where most of my family and its extensions now live, so I would have dialled in using the online software known as Microsoft Teams. This means your digital image glowers over the council chamber when in vision on giant screens, and you’re afforded a god-like perspective of proceedings and participants on your computer screen. It also means you can knit, surf the net or walk about a bit with camera off and microphone on mute. Something I once forgot to do with embarrassing results and much committee-officer shouting: “Put down the ukulele!”
I’ve used remote attendance a lot over the last two-and-a-half years but it doesn’t provide the weird pseudo-camaraderie that Shetland Islands Council depends on. As a ‘non-political’ council the lack of party groups means there is a loose notion that everyone should act together ‘as a council’, displaying corporate responsibility and loyalty to decisions individuals may disagree with personally. This, I think, is dangerous and counter-productive. It also enables officers to wield much more power than in mainland councils, where a party administration will evolve and dictate policy, and enforce it, often noisily. In Shetland, the raggle-taggle ‘independents’ are at the mercy of the well-intentioned and mostly well organised, if occasionally not entirely competent, officials. They vary. I love most of them.
Of course there is Policy and Resources, the semi-secret ‘magisterium’, as a certain redoubtable old Trotskyite calls it, comprising committee chairs, the great and the good; there are the private pre-meetings where kinks and curmudgeonly carping are kicked into oblivion, and the councillors’ own private weekly get togethers, for gossip, wrestling and bouts of competitive Scottish country dancing. P&R makes too many unchallengeable decisions without even the poor bloody ‘ordinary’ councillors knowing much about them, or being able to participate.
There is also the question of finance. This is not a ‘biscuit tin’ economy we have in Shetland – it can’t be assessed in terms of household economics or even the small business finance some of our councillors have experience of. Multi-million pound grants and loans, not to mention the colossal and under-used reserves, need to be dealt with in the context of providing value to the community. ‘Best value’. And that value is not a matter of saving Scrooge-like pittances from meagre cuts made so the council looks half-competent in the bleary eyes of the Accounts Commission. I still feel considerable pain at the loss of potentially life-saving swimming lessons for secondary pupils to save a few thousand pounds a year. Best value? I think not.
I once worked on building a communications strategy for the SIC, back in the Alistair Buchan days of 2010. As, well, a consultant. I remember our watchwords then were openness, transparency and accountability. At the time, there was no communications department and the fallout from the departure of and compensation paid to former chief executive Dave Clark was considerable.
I think great strides have been made since then, but in terms of communication and openness, the council is often circumscribed, not to say hamstrung by what it sees as legal and political obligations for confidentiality – notably on an issue like the Fair Isle Ferry. But there’s also a default position of…not so much secrecy as a kind of bunker mentality. Fear. Also, I think relationships of trust between some elements of the media, officials and councillors need to be better or built from scratch. The media is part of the political process. And so is social media, which is regarded with a mixture of ignorance and suspicion.
The meetings I’ve felt were generally worthwhile were those of the Licensing Court and Board. It’s the only ‘council’ function where as a councillor you have to sit and pass an exam, and one where you are directly affecting the lives and livelihoods of individuals. And where you have to look into the whites of their eyes when making sometimes really tough decisions.
Sometimes I know we made the wrong calls, but still – from taxi drivers to publicans, it’s hands-on, visceral, career-altering and delicate stuff. The Community Safety and Resilience Board is also where you come face to face with the earthly realities of life in Shetland – the fire, ambulance and police services have to report there and a hard time is often handed out. Both these groups have been instructive for me and being part of them has I hope been useful.
In addition, councillors are meant to attend community council meetings, and for north councillors, that means, or should mean three a month – Nesting, Northmavine and Delting – though my erratic attendance has basically been at Northmavine, with one foray each to Delting and Nesting. I have to say I did not find these meetings particularly constructive.
It seems to me that community councils are largely a way of occupying, giving voice to and often frustrating good people anxious to improve their community. Unadopted road grants are useful to many here, but you don’t need a separate layer of local government to distribute them. And then there’s the whole bizarre saga of the Shetland Community Benefit Fund, chunks of which are in the hands of community councils who often struggle to find outlets for that Viking Energy cash.
In the end, the problems for me were time, tedium, health and family. I have spent my life doing my best not to be bored, and not to bore other people. Journalism and public performance, constant reading and consumption of media, getting out and about on every form of vehicular transport, cooking, crofting, fishing…anything but sitting drinking very bad coffee and listening to endless, prolix grandstanding from councillors ranging from the egomaniacal to the charmingly shy, the intentionally to the unintentionally hilarious. The bad and the good.
I’m old now, and I thought I would settle into a groove of good works and community action, of letting the frustrations and furies slide on by, perhaps occasionally having a snooze as meetings peacefully passed in a haze of Nescafé. But the thing about being a councillor is that it cannot (in my case) be the whole of my life.
I have a couple of major writing projects happening, podcasts, journalism, books. Constant cooking, dog walking and motorcycle maintenance. Cleaning. I need to spend time south with my children and grandchildren. I need to take better care of my cardiac health. And not get Covid for a fourth time. Having acquired it at a committee meeting. Of course. Never trusted that Teams.
I think there have been two or three personal accomplishments in my time as a councillor, nothing anyone but the constituents involved would be interested in. Having the platform has enabled me to have my say on various things, from the disastrous Fair isle Ferry saga to the wind farm. Progressing a new Brae School has been important.
But in the end I think I’m a better observer and critic than floundering participant and ineffective legislator. Life is short and shortening, and you have to prioritise.
I will watch, uninvolved, as the whole ‘fixed link’ tunnels-and-bridges farrago gets kicked into the next decade and new ferries have to be funded from somewhere. The Saxa Vord rocketeer club, mysteriously quiet since the Great Fire, will probably be superceded by newer tech and more convenient launch sites. The Fair Isle ferry saga will almost certainly go apocalyptically awry, despite recent assurances that the Tory bribery Levelling Down £27m is secure. That will literally be a drop in the ocean as costs soar.
I became a councillor by accident – standing simply to give the Labour Party a voice in the election process. I’m grateful to my Labour comrades for their support, sympathy and forbearance. That nobody stood against me at the election was a shock. I hope there is competition for my seat for the next two and half years (remember: wage rise in April 2025!) but be warned. It is not for everyone.
And it certainly wasn’t for me.
