One of the more immediate tasks I had after losing my seat in the Scottish Parliament election was to clear out my office. Something that really struck me as I ploughed through the piles of papers was just how much stuff I had been sent NGOs over the four years I was an MSP. And I was also struck by how much of it remained unopened and unread.
Now, given the fact that before becoming an MSP I had worked producing publications for NGOs, and blithely sent great bundles of them off to MSPs, this seemed pretty depressing. If I’m not reading them, then probably very few other MSPs are. So why hadn’t I read them?
At the top of the piles I was sorting were the most obvious failed NGO attempts to influence my thinking: the election manifestos various NGOs had kindly sent me during the election. Very worthy publications, full of great material – closely argued policy proposals, radical visions for reform. But they were sent to me during the campaign, or the mad few weeks running up to the campaign, at a point where they would have absolutely no influence on my thinking. The Scottish Green Party manifesto was discussed over the summer and nailed down by Christmas. The time for external influence was June 2006 (when SCVO produced their manifesto), not April 2007!
So my first plea to NGOs is to think about when you send out your publications and, if you are trying to influence the parties’ manifestos, yours needs to be published before the parties have started writing theirs, not after they’ve been published.
Another thing that struck me was how extraordinarily dense many of these publications are, containing great reams of policy. Now I know the world is complicated, and detailed solutions are required for the intractable problems faced by society, but MSPs tend to have severe constraints in terms of the time and space available to put across policy, however worthy. In the Parliament you have, as rule, a four-minute speech. In the manifesto you have to condense policy to cover a massive area like ‘communities’ in a very limited number of pages. All of this means you have to be clear what the key demands or key polices are. It is an uncomfortable process to boil down masses of policy to get the sound-bites that a politician might use. But it is better, surely, than if the politicians attempt to do it themselves or, worse still, ignore the publication because they can’t work out what the important policies are from among the vast quantities of material with which they are faced.
Sadly, another reason why publications tended to appear unopened in my files was because they lacked any apparent relevance. Generally, there are good reasons why you should read a publication – they may, however, not be immediately apparent to the MSP receiving the publication. Tailoring your covering letter, to make sure that the recipient feels they really have to look at the document, is a major investment in time – but surely it’s worth it if it means the publication will be read. Otherwise, it goes straight on the not-my-problem pile without a second glance.
And finally one of the weirdest meetings I had with any NGO during my four years was with a group who seemed absolutely clueless as to why they had met me. To spare their blushes I won’t mention their name, but while the issue they were working on was important enough, after racking our brains for some time we couldn’t think of a single thing an opposition MSP could do to help them. If it’s not something I have any power to do anything about, and it’s not clear to the NGO what they want me to do about it, then I do think it’s a bit of a waste of everyone’s time.
So that’s my brief prescription – if you want MSPs to read and be influenced by your publications, make them timely, useful and relevant. I may sound as though I’m stating the obvious, but I have the evidence of how often this is not done. That evidence is sitting in boxes in front of me, waiting to go for recycling.
