'SNP's 11 public inquiries have cost £258m and are characterised by ineptitude' |
Political leaders are elected and paid to make difficult decisions. They should be pressured to do so rather than hiding behind the cloak of public inquiries whose findings they will no longer be around to implement, says Herald columnist Carlos Alba.
Anyone who has watched a televised football match since the introduction of the video assistant referee (VAR) will be aware of the now-familiar scenario in which the referee is “invited to take a second look” at a particular incident over which he has already ruled.
For the neutral, such occasions have become teeth-grindingly predictable and frustrating, because they always end with the referee overturning his original decision, resulting in a penalty being awarded or a player being sent off.
Referees who are confronted with often questionable or inconclusive video evidence, almost without exception, will ignore their own, on-field judgment, in favour of a man sitting several miles away in a hut surrounded by a bank of monitors. If, as the evidence suggests, the word of the VAR is sacrosanct, then it begs the question, why have a referee at all?
In the governance of the country, the chair of the public inquiry as become the equivalent of the video assistant referee. Whenever the Prime Minister or the First Minister want to absolve themselves of responsibility for decisions often taken by their own governments – or agencies acting on behalf of their governments – they will launch a public inquiry.
Read more Carlos
This has the main benefit of allowing them to kick difficult issues into the long grass, leaving them for someone else to deal with. By the time most public inquiries end, those who have commissioned them are usually long gone, drafting their memoirs and making bucketloads on the rubber chicken circuit.
Who doesn’t love a public inquiry? Certainly not the politicians who use them to promote the impression that they are........