LAST weekend, a journalist was advising the Scottish Government to be honest about its mistakes and not to be defensive when challenged or criticised. I agree, not least because I think the Scottish Government’s record is a good one, which more than withstands scrutiny.

Yet responding positively every day of the year is hard in the prevailing political atmosphere. Take, for example, the way in which the shambles of ferry procurement has been approached by the Scottish opposition parties and covered by elements in the Scottish media.

No-one could defend the process, nor is it victimless. Communities are feeling the lack of these vessels. There do need to be lessons learned from what went so badly wrong, because the record of the Scottish Government on major infrastructure projects has usually been much better than that of successive administrations south of the Border.

In fact, it still is when placed alongside spectacular failures such as London’s Crossrail – which is almost £5 billion pounds over budget and four years late – or the Ajax Armoured Vehicle Project which, after spending almost £4bn, has produced only a handful of finished items which appear more harmful to those within than without.

READ MORE: Gulf crisis as missing CalMac ferries are discovered and scuttled

These fiascos are, of course, burdens on the Scottish taxpayer too.

I suspect there is a range of reasons for the ferries failure, involving mistakes by many people. However, instead of looking carefully at the detail, some politicians and journalists, egged on by others with axes to grind, have used the mess as the raw material with which to build a variety of increasingly fantastic scenarios, which include systemic incompetence, political manipulation and even incipient dictatorship.

Of course, if anyone in Scotland really wants to see what a corrupt, devious, and immoral government looks like they need only raise their eyes and fevered imaginations from Holyrood and focus on Whitehall, where this week, in an attempt to divert attention from law-breaking by two of the holders of what used to be called the “great offices of state”, a cruel, immoral and degrading plan has been hatched to dump desperate migrants in Africa, probably for the rest of their lives.

Attempts to delegitimise the whole idea of Scottish self-government with unremitting and usually false attacks on the record of the SNP in government are nothing new. Nonetheless, it is hard not to be a tad defensive when faced with them day after day and month after month.

There is also another serious downside to this type of attack, and that is the narrowing of the necessary space in any democracy for open, free-thinking discussion of policy – something that is much needed as the local election campaigns are getting under way. So far, most of the opposition party manifestos have trumpeted issues that have nothing to do with the responsibilities of local government and could not be acted on by our councils.

There is, admittedly, a common theme of giving more powers to councils, which is a commendable initiative. However, by their works shall ye know them, as the Bible says, and the reality is that in office the Tories at Westminster have decimated English local authorities. Labour were not much better when in power and therefore the opposition offer in Scotland is really about undermining the ability of the SNP government – chosen by the people of Scotland – to deliver on its pledges and little else.

Undermining Scottish democracy is a constant Westminster theme in any case, and one that is now in active operation, as money is steered away from the Scottish Government in order to deliver, the Tories hope, electoral benefits for them as a result of blatant pork-barrel politics

Localism was a key element in the response to the pandemic, with communities working hard to provide support in their own areas, and it should now be the keynote of the local elections.

In fact, these elections should provide a place for constructive and positive discussion of the whole issue of local democracy and local decision-making. Some parts of the system, such as the city councils, appear to be about the right size and have a range of appropriate powers. Others are unwieldy constructs, far too big to inculcate any sense of community, too spread-out to allow for

cost-effective delivery from the centre, but too small in population to be able to effectively provide everything which people expect.

Argyll and Bute Council, for example, extends from the northernmost point of the Island of Tiree to the western outskirts of Dumbarton. The criteria for building a house, the pressures on the local primary school, or the putting in place of arrangements for disposing of rubbish are and should be vastly different, and yet the local authority has to find a unified way to cope with all such issues.

READ MORE: Ferry failures are not the fault of the workers or the RMT trade union

It would be fair to argue now that one size does not fit all, and that a variety of local governance models might be better suited to Scotland’s wide range of geography and demography. Joint boards for some things that need economies of scale, but with the retention of local delivery and the very localised exercise of other powers need to be talked about by the communities themselves and then their views acted on as a key determinant of change, if any is required or requested.

While extreme partisanship and the unrestrained abuse inherent in some social media continue to dominate in politics, and while those things are reflected by those in the mainstream media who cannot understand and do not accept the choice of government made by Scottish voters, it will remain hard to make these points without being either attacked or sneered at.

We do need positive policy debates in Scotland that look to the future and are undertaken without defensiveness and with the acknowledgement of imperfection.

In order to let that happen, though, we first of all need a context in which positive discourse replaces the perpetual litany of “SNP bad” denunciation and disparagement.