Councillor Thomas Heald is a Scottish Conservative councillor for Dunblane and Bridge of Allan, former Scottish Conservative and Unionist candidate for Dunfermline and former political advisor in the Scottish Parliament.
I’m going to begin with an unfashionable opinion among Conservatives: John Swinney was right to go to America.
Scotland had waited 28 years to return to a World Cup and, as the United States is one of our most important international markets for whisky, research and financial services, the First Minister would have been castigated if he did not take advantage of the opportunity that being on the world stage gave to Scotland.
So there, I’ve said it. The First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party was doing his job, for a change.
What is rather harder to understand is why getting him there appears to have required nearly £18,000 for an airline ticket.
Figures published by the Scottish Government last week showed that Swinney’s business class flights for his visit to Boston and Kentucky cost the taxpayer £17,893. The ticket for his private secretary cost exactly the same and a special advisor travelled business class for £9,864
That is £45,650 on three airline tickets before anyone has booked a hotel room or hailed a taxi.
As we have already established, there were perfectly legitimate reasons for the trip. Strengthening Scotland’s links with the United States, promoting trade, tourism and the whisky industry, all absolutely fine and part of the job.
But supporting the purpose of a government trip does not require us to suspend all interest in its cost.
Andrew Neil, who is not exactly unfamiliar with crossing the Atlantic, raised the obvious question of how on earth the bill get so high?
The Scottish Government’s own travel guidance says Ministers and officials should use the most ‘efficient, economic and environmentally sound’ means of travel and ensure that the fare options reflect these priorities.
There may well be some truth in Swinney’s assertion that the intense pressure on his time pushed up the price of tickets. As someone who has worked on itineraries of this nature before, I know that airlines are not renowned for their charitable instincts and getting the right person in the right place at the right time somewhat limits flexibility.
Nor do I particularly object to a First Minister travelling business class on a demanding international visit. There is a performative strain of politics which insists that Ministers must always seek out the most uncomfortable seat available, preferably beside the toilets, to demonstrate solidarity with the taxpayer. I am not convinced that is sensible either.
The issue is not whether Swinney should have been sitting in business class.
It is whether a business-class seat really needed to cost £17,893.
The Minister for Mental Wellbeing, Public Health, Sport, Alcohol and Drugs Maree Todd MSP (yes that is really her title), subsequently travelled to Miami with her private secretary. Their economy flights cost £1,471 each. The circumstances and routes were different, so it would be unfair to pretend this is a like-for-like comparison, but the extraordinary difference in cost ought at least to provoke questions.
So should the wider bill. Once accommodation, officials, expenses and transport are included, the two ministerial World Cup visits cost taxpayers close to £100,000. Car hire alone for Swinney’s visit came to more than £10,000.
None of this will bankrupt Scotland and that, inevitably, will be part of the defence.
Against a Scottish Government budget measured in tens of billions, £45,000 for three plane tickets barely registers. Even £100,000 compared with the sums spent on health, education or social security seems an insignificant amount of money compared to the benefits of trade with United States.
That is missing the point however, and as a Councillor I could write another 30,000 words on how £100,000 could better be spent in the community I represent. This is particularly the case when we are consistently required to cut local government budgets or raise council tax due to decisions made in Edinburgh.
The great danger of public spending is that once the numbers become large enough, individual sums cease to feel real. A million becomes a line on a spreadsheet. A billion becomes a rounding error in a budget announcement.
As Conservatives we know that there is no such thing as Government money, every pound began as somebody else’s money.
That is why this apparently small story matters.
As with anything in Scottish politics at the moment, there is also an irony in the timing of the discussion.
From April next year, the Scottish Government will introduce its new Air Departure Tax, taking over from the existing UK Air Passenger Duty in Scotland. Its first-year rates will match those applying elsewhere in Britain, before the Scottish Government develops its own future policy. It also intends to introduce an additional tax on private jets from 2028.
Ministers have been keen to stress that choices about aviation have financial consequences and that those who can afford to pay more should make a fair contribution. We can have that debate another day but fiscal responsibility cannot be something that government imposes exclusively on everybody else. If Ministers believe price signals matter when taxpayers decide how to travel, they should remain sensitive to price when taxpayers are paying for ministerial travel too.
If we are to take a broader perspective on the whole issue then we should do so comfortable in our acceptance that Scotland should be ambitious and our First Minister, whoever holds the office, should be selling Scottish businesses, promoting Scottish tourism and investment from around the world. I have never been of the opinion that sitting in Edinburgh doing nothing is the best option. Nor am I of the opinion that the UK Government should be doing all the heavy lifting in this regard. One of the strengths of the United Kingdom is that our constituent nations offer something unique on the international stage.
However, ambition and thrift are not opposites and a government confident enough to champion Scotland should also be disciplined enough to ask whether £18,000 for one airline ticket represents reasonable value.
We, as Scottish Conservatives, have allowed the SNP to dominate the narrative of ambition for Scotland and have too often fallen into traps laid by nationalists. Our argument therefore with this fiasco, needs to rediscover the language of patriotism and financial stewardship. Not simply to criticise the First Minister for doing his job, or promising to spend slightly less, but remembering what public money actually is.
It is the wages of the nurse, the shop worker and the engineer. It is money taken from businesses trying to expand and families trying to make the household budget add up. Those people are entitled to expect Ministers to treat it with at least the same care they would treat their own.
The deeper issue here is one of culture. Governments do not become careless with public money because of one extravagant decision. They become careless when a mindset develops in which the price of things matters less simply because the taxpayer is picking up the bill.
That is particularly dangerous in a government as large and centralised as Scotland’s has become. When Ministers and officials deal routinely in budgets of hundreds of millions, even tens of thousands of pounds can begin to look insignificant but it is not insignificant to the people who earned it.
There should be a healthy instinct inside government to challenge cost: do we really need this, is there a cheaper way of achieving the same result, and would we make the same choice if it were our own money?
Those questions should not be regarded as penny-pinching. They are the basics of responsible administration.
The contrast with local government is striking. Councils are routinely expected to justify relatively modest expenditure, while community organisations compete for grants worth a fraction of the cost of a ministerial trip. Residents are told that repairs must wait, services must be reduced or projects cannot proceed because money is tight.
Against that backdrop, it is reasonable to ask whether the same culture of restraint exists at the centre of Scottish Government.
The £17,893 airfare matters not because it will make or break Scotland’s finances, but because of what it may reveal about the attitude towards the money behind them.