Mandy Rhodes interviews Jim Mather, Minister for Enterprise, Energy and Tourism
IIf ever someone was to write a self-improvement book to inspire a nation then Jim Mather would be the man. Mather’s unfettered enthusiasm for business gurus and mind-mapping mystique is legendary and well rehearsed yet he manages to get you over the threshold of cynicism and into the room called ‘I believe’.
Basically, for a politician with such a long-winded title – Minister for Enterprise, Energy and Tourism – he does what it says on the tin. He believes in Scotland’s potential to stand on its own two feet and his mantra is simple and single-minded; there is no economic argument for Scotland not being independent. It is this that drives him and he admits that he would not have gone into politics had Scotland been independent but says the fact that it is not is “serious unfinished business”. And it’s personal.
Mather’s own political epiphany came with, quite literally, a bump to the head. Having studied Economics, Law and Accountancy at Glasgow University, he followed a fairly conventional career path; apprentice chartered accountant with a company called Welsh Walker MacPherson in Greenock before qualifying as a CA and joining Chivas Brothers. But at the age of 26, he made his first early break with convention, and recognising the potential for new technology, he joined IBM where he spent ten years, initially in sales – selling mainframe computers – before rising to marketing manager by the time he left in 1983 to set up his own computer business, fuelled, he says, by the “sheer terror of having a headstone that said ‘here lies Jim Mather a 35-year wage slave of IBM’ and the realisation that the worst thing that could happen would be that he could lose a bit of money. As it happens, the business did incredibly well and Mather and his partners walked away with a cool £6m profit. But it was in the late 1990s while as a director of another business, Startech Partners Ltd, that his political fate was sealed when he cycled at high speed into the back of a lorry and ended up in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary for six weeks with a broken back.
“I am great lover of Neil Munro and the Para Handy tales and Para Handy says, ‘we will just pause and consider’ and I had never paused to consider,” he says. “I was living my life 24/7, living a very high-pressured life and I was forced to stop and think because I was left on my back wondering if I would ever walk again and I just re-evaluated what I was about.”
Mather had always been convinced by Scotland’s potential to be economically independent and it was while lying prostrate, staring at a hospital ceiling that this galvanised him into the realisation that he should and could take practical steps to realise that.
He had been a member of the SNP since 1974 because, he says, “of a fundamental belief that we were custodians of a potent, important and powerful brand that was in a state of decline”. This argument was then consolidated for him when he read Christopher Harvie’s first version of  No Gods and Precious Few Heroes which, he says, rekindled a childhood memory of when he was five years old and his policeman father was visited by the local superintendent just after the family had been installed in the police house in Inverkip. “I remember my father being told that there were only two priorities; look after number one, Sir Guy Shaw-Stewart, and number two, look after Lord Inverclyde. As a five year old, I just thought that was wrong. It was forelock tugging, deferential, nonsense and not likely to benefit the totality of society in Inverkip.”
So persuaded by the economics and armed with an absolute belief that Scots should not kowtow to anyone, Mather turned his back on his own pursuit of profit and put himself forward for active politics. For a party that had been previously seen as antibusiness, Mather’s offer to step forward into the breach was warmly welcomed and his star rose fast. He became SNP National Treasurer from 2000-04 and elected to the Scottish Parliament in 2003 where he became party spokesperson on enterprise and then the natural choice to fill the enterprise brief in the first SNP Government following the 2007 elections.
“This is undoubtedly the hardest work I have ever done but once you have put your tie in the political wringer, there is no way back out, you are compelled to follow it through. A lot of people in this business will say it is a privilege to do this job and I listen to that with interest. At this point in time it is an absolute privilege because no matter what happens, and I could be hit by a meteorite on the way home, this group of people, the SNP, has changed Scotland for ever and there is no going back
the SNP, has changed Scotland for ever and there is no going back 
.”
How does he view the antipathy displayed by his predecessors in government? “We are a big competitive threat to Labour and I was an IBM trainer for many years and they had a firing offence if you showed antipathy or bad mouthed your competitors. These were two reasons that you would be fired because IBM knew that was a boomerang that would come back and clout them. It’s sad that they are in that position but it’s probably a process of a right of passage that they need to go through if they are to start to understand why they are in that position and that this is reality.”
Mather may not be the most sophisticated of politicians, probably because he is more a practical nationalist than a seasoned political animal and he hasn’t had long to master the art but he is a sophisticated man and it is his charm and his undoubted passion that has won over many non-believers. He is totally and utterly convinced about Scotland’s potential. A patriot with brains; and that’s a heady mix. And although he does tend to stray into eye-watering management gobbledygook, he’s believable because he says it with the conviction of a true convert and given that he is a chartered accountant, a salesman and a self-made millionaire, he does have some authority to know what he is talking about. It is this qualification and his 24/7 enthusiasm for the job that has opened doors to a whole host of Scotland’s best-known business leaders and once there, his approach is pretty basic; get people in a room, ask them what they want and need and tell them that government will try to help deliver it for them. “The magic,” he says “is always in the room.”
“I am a great fan of W Edwards Deming, who turned around the Japanese economy and he says that in any system, be it a factory production line or a company or a country then senior management is 97 per cent responsible for the outcome because in a factory context, they pick the products, the raw materials, the suppliers, the machines, the maintenance, the recruitment, the training, the routes to market, the sales, the price, - the whole damn lot, so they are responsible. So what we have just now in Scotland is the responsibility of management; the UK Government, the Scottish Government, local government, schools, parents, the people themselves and what we want to do now is galvanise better results by engaging all these folks.
“We are all in this together and by sitting down together, we can actually get much better solutions, where everyone wins and you get unlikely stakeholders to come forward and play a fulsome part in that change like, for instance, the business community understanding that if we are creating more aspirational, more disciplined, more able youngsters to come through the pipeline then what we are doing is creating more taxpayers, creating economic growth, more consumers, healthier citizens that will take the burden of the healthcare and social care because more people are self-sufficient and in good shape. These are really exciting dynamics and that’s why we are spending so much time on the less heralded part of the National Conversation where we are filling rooms with people and listening to what they are saying and getting a debate with them.
“I have now done 49-plus National Conversations which involve: laptops, projector, mind-mapping software and asking the room what they want to achieve, what’s holding them back, who can help them get there and that discussion creates energy – the magic.”
He calls it mind mapping and is evangelical about its use, peppering his conversation with examples of where and how it has worked but he is also charming enough and of this world enough to concede, to my eyebrow raising, that it could also just be called ‘good old-fashioned common sense; talking, listening, discussing and acting…’ His success at finding a receptive audience among Scotland’s previously unconvinced-about-independence business community could also be that he talks their language. In just 18 months, he and his boss, John Swinney have conducted a breathtaking series of engagements selling the SNP story and there is no doubt that while they may not have had a Damascene conversion of the financial community, there has been a tangible shift and the ‘independence’ word is now being openly discussed in the board rooms of big business as a possibility.
For Mather this is not soon enough.
“The stark truth is that Labour has been trying to run Scotland along with their Tory predecessors on a housekeeping allowance from another place for 30 years and it is an experiment that did not work, the people at the bottom of the spectrum tell us that, the low life expectancy tells us that, the low growth tells us that, the lower than average incomes tell us that, the population decline, the demographic challenges tell us that; all these signals telling us that it didn’t work and they persisted with this ignoble experiment and still they persisted. But now the penny is dropping and you give me anyone in a room for an hour to put pitch and answer questions and interview them before and after about their attitudes to the SNP and independence, and you will see movement because people have not been given the message before but it is so utterly logical. We want to run both sides of the profit and loss account in order to strengthen the balance sheet, to have a strong cash position, to build the notional share value of Scotland and build the asset base in terms of people, infrastructure and skills, and that is the argument. Nothing scary and utterly normal and it is the model that every successful country is taking and this model that we have followed so far doesn’t work.”
He makes no apology for his frustration at the way process can get in the way of action and is always exploring ways to circumvent the system and deliver results. His way of relaxing is, he says “to clear out his computer inbox”, much to the dismay of the 9-5ers in the civil service who have had to shoulder the manifestation – emails at 5.30am – of his enthusiastic approach to ministerial office, which he still describes as “an absolute privilege”. Mather is a man, literally, always on the move.
And maybe he is making up for lost time because the MSP for Argyll and Bute came to active politics quite late on in life and is refreshingly enthusiastic about the power to get things done. He once described himself as a “kind of non-mentally retarded Forrest Gump” and like Gump, he still displays a childlike wonder at the possibilities of life
like Gump, he still displays a childlike wonder at the possibilities of life
. Yes, his inexperience has caused some mirth in more cynical circles – who could forget his comment that the economy of an independent Scotland could be helped by “fiscal fairy dust” during the 2007 election campaign? And he also caused disquiet in SNP quarters when he warned that an increase in income tax would be “naive” if the Scottish economy was to keep and attract knowledge workers – even though income tax bills would rise under the SNP’s flagship proposal to replace council tax with a local income tax.
But it is also this ability to shoot from the hip that is one of his virtues, even when it gets him into trouble because he is not afraid to admit he doesn’t know all the answers and people like a bit of humility. He’s also a genuinely nice man and puts in an effort way beyond the call of duty.
We meet just after recess and just before the economy goes into meltdown and I ask him if he has had time for a rest.
“I did have a break and I had two weeks where I didn’t drive and I was at home, read and kept the inbox empty, which is important to my wellbeing.” But then quickly adds in a torrent: “Having a break when you are in this job in this phase of Scotland’s history – what’s the point?
“I think it’s true that we in the SNP are always on a campaigning footing and that is right when you are both a party and a cause. We want to have this country of ours independent and that is hugely motivating, especially now when we are in government, getting results, and getting the energetic feedback from people that we talk to and getting the message across. There is a legitimacy that comes with being in government that gives people a basis to pause and consider that there may be a big opportunity with independence.
“Economies move in cycles - so no country is immune from downturns especially in an increasingly global economy - however, I believe that an independent Scotland would be able to create the cohesion across Scottish society and the Scottish policies that would ensure better outcomes for Scotland and its people. Our objective is to optimise the brand, the economy and the life chances of the people of Scotland and that can best be done with the full array of policy
interventions that comes with independence.
“What worries me is the time it is taking to get to independence because I know it will be transformational when we get there and I want to get there very quickly. There is a great phenomonen happens with independence. I call it the Lazarus effect. You’ve got a situation where Scottish businesses are taking over businesses down south and they become branches and give us independence and they resurrect as Scottish businesses so let us make sure that we ably protect Scotland and we have as balanced an economy as possible and that we call to account any company that is trying to run Scotland by remote control from Basingstoke or Slough and we encourage them to place investment here and balance it on the basis that independence is absolutely coming, financial powers are absolutely coming, and they don’t want to be left in the station in a bad place, in a poor corporate social responsibility position, because if they are running that business by remote control to deliver a particular service in Scotland, then I will do my damndest to bring a Dutch company, a German company, a French company, an Irish company or a Scottish start up in here that can deliver that service.”
Given the current economic situation, do we need to rethink capitalism?
“It needs to be better regulated and we need to learn from recent experience. We can see that the current crisis is a function of the unprecedented increase in credit, the erosion of regulation, the rise of new and complex financial products. This has proven to be a damaging blend, particularly in the USA and we need to ensure that we have a more stable basis in the future and I am sure that can be achieved.”
How would he reign things in?
“We are all in a learning experience and there is a very good book out at the moment by George Soros which is essentially making the case for taking a more balanced approach, with financial institutions playing a part with government, trying to optimise the total system in their long-term best interest so you have more people becoming custodians of a healthy economy rather than trying to optimise any particular part. If any of us try to optimise our particular bailliewick then the danger is you sub-optimise the total system. The big case now is how do we all work closely together? We have had sessions with 31 individual industry sectors and my ambition is to get more and more of them together and look at how we optimise the competitive advantage for Scotland. How can the banks work with Scottish business to make them more competitive to ensure that effectively, we bring more money back into the banks?
“There is a role for government to essentially be custodian of principle and good sense and good business practice in order to maintain long-term competitiveness in the country and to that extent, what we have seen is a total failure of government in recent weeks and to that extent, I accept the premise that we are all in this together and we should all be helping each other.”
Does that mean a rethink about the value of the Union?
“The current crisis is breaking on Scottish shores, and the Westminster Government is not producing policies that could optimise recovery and growth here in Scotland. Independence gives Scotland the powers and the focus to achieve the optimal results that are needed. Scotland is showing resilience, which is clearly helped by the policies and new-found confidence that has come from this current SNP Government.
“There is absolute, categoric evidence of our proposition for independence being right. There is no level playing field in the UK, we have created a wealth sump and people, the decision-makjng, the wealth, the capital corporate ownership is meant to flow down to the sump. To hell with that, it’s nonsense. What we need to do is have policies that level the playing field and that is what we are about and we are going to level the playing field big time. We are doing it already if you look at council tax, small business bonus relief and what we are doing at community level or council level or industrial-sector level and getting people to sit in a room together and start to actually move things forward together and it is that joint and several management that will work. I am not saying that the management that gave us the rotten result was just the fault of the UK Government, there were a lot of people involved in the management but what I am saying is, we need a better management and we now have that.
“We have been out there for six years making the economic argument using the theory of constraints and proving that the lack of economic power was the key constraint and we are seeing the business community understand there is an opportunity in independence.”
What was the best piece of financial advice he was ever given?
“Face reality, live within your means – essentially, play the ball as it lies. It was advice I followed at a critical early stage in the development of the ComputerLand business in Scotland back in 1983. For it was then that we realised that we were unlikely to have sufficient capital to fund the stocking levels we needed. And that reality check opened up the option to use invoice discounting that avoided excessive dilution of our equity position and gave us the stock we needed to grow the business.”
Is wealth the route to happiness?
“Absolutely not – the route to happiness is doing the right thing and enjoying the journey and the respect that comes from that approach
the route to happiness is doing the right thing and enjoying the journey and the respect that comes from that approach
.”
Although completely absorbed by Mather and his economic arguments for independence – it is hard to doubt a man so full of conviction – I venture to ask, ‘what if we don’t like it when we get there’? He stops, for the briefest of moments and laughs: “To paraphrase the former Bank of Scotland Group chief executive, Peter Burt, I think you will find the absurdity is in the proposition.”
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