Scotland’s dependence on public inquiries and the political culture that keeps creating them.
The lesson is not that Scotland needs fewer inquiries. It is that it needs fewer crises. And crises do not disappear through rhetoric, or exceptional mechanisms, or retrospective narratives. They disappear through investment in the institutions that keep the state standing when everything around it begins to sway.
A confident state would implement the recommendations it receives. A capable state would strengthen its regulatory, investigative, and accountability systems so that failures are caught upstream.
A serious state would present guidance that clarifies the purpose of inquiries, not one that inadvertently reveals how reflexive their use has become.
The guidance Scotland has published does none of this. It reads like a government warning itself against its own habits, without the political courage to break them.
Public inquiries are no longer Scotland’s emergency brake. They have become its compensation mechanism – the emotional aftercare of a political class that too often delegates its responsibilities to a statutory process it neither reforms nor respects.
The problem is not the inquiries Scotland commissions. The problem is the state Scotland refuses to build.
Until ministers learn to govern in the present tense, Scotland will continue to spend millions investigating its past – because that is the only arena in which the state still seems willing to tell the truth.