Way back in the sands of time, when I was a Glasgow City Council worker and part-time political activist, I saw a lot of stuff going on that raised my hackles and made me wonder who the department I worked in was being run for. I also heard a lot of stories about “the good old days”, those shortly before I started and which seemed, to me, to have been jolly good times for all, with decent people at every level of the organisations.
What had happened by the time I started there was that the place had begun the steady creep towards what’s farcically termed a “modern management style” where the whole upper echelon was filling up rapidly with business school types whose priority was “doing everything by the book.”
Except when it suited them.
For example, if you dared to suggest that this meant “work to rule” – the old trade unionist’s strategy of adhering to everything in the rule book exactly as written; nobody covering other people’s jobs, doing everything in the order in which it’s laid down in the manual (time consuming to say the least), strict adherence to health and safety policies and procedures, the initiation of grievance procedures at the slightest provocation from management – and it was seen as something akin to a declaration of war.
Doing things by the book was supposed to create a uniform standard; the level playing field, in other words, where everybody had to maintain the same level of work and follow the same set of rules. Done right, it could have been positive.
Done wrong, and you got petty tyrannies forming up.
You got jobsworths who wanted to make their own names.
I know of one manager who actually made a phone call to his yard, from the airport where he was about to fly out on holiday, to check, on a Friday afternoon, if anyone had sloped off early and to recommend final warnings for any who had.
He went on to make an historic number of appearances at successful dismissal appeals in front of the council. On one occasion, and I know the case by heart because it involved a mate of mine, he sacked someone for his sickness record when the guy was off work due to a brain haemorrhage.
His mantra, whenever called out on this deplorable style, was that he was simply doing things “by the book.” And that brooked no compromise.
Except when it did.
Because the people who wrote those rules in the first place were not heartless swine, like those who came to view them later as almost biblical tomes of truth. The people who wrote those regulations wanted structure, but within that they also allowed for some flexibility. And so it was that they wrote little added on extras for all but the most inviolate of regulations, stuff like, “except in exceptional circumstances.”
But ultimately, someone had to decide, often on the spot, what “exceptional circumstances” were and what that phrase actually constituted. And so in those moments, such a thing was left to either “the supervisors or managers discretion.”
And right there, they created a whole new problem and one that hasn’t gone away and which permeates every rule-making and enforcement organisation.
When you give people such sweeping authority, to decide where and when they won’t enforce the regulations, you create the conditions for corruption. It simply cannot be helped. Rules need a little flexibility, and when you make allowances for it people will always appear to take advantage of that.
And some of them are quite brazen about it.
In the council, I saw people refused last minute holidays they should have got; family dramas, personal issues, in one case of my own, late in my time there, a sudden face to face appointment with the admissions office at Stirling University. I got refused the request, nodded, went out to work, told the guys I’d see them later and went anyway. I ended up with a disciplinary citation and, there in the manager’s office, I wrote my appeal letter on the back of it.
Yet in the very same yards, and via the very same people at the top, I saw people get days off on the spot because they’d been out on the piss at the weekend and had come to work still half cut and suffering the early onset of a day’s long hangover.
If you were the gaffers mate “managerial discretion” worked out very nicely.
If you were somebody they weren’t particularly happy with, flexibility didn’t apply to you.
On top of the corruption aspect, managerial discretion also led to some people throwing their weight around, knowing they’d get away with it.
Managers didn’t have to be venal or corrupt to give certain folk whatever they wanted.
They only had to be scared.
I saw example of that as well.
We know full well that one football club in Scotland exists in the grey area between what’s in the rule book and what should result in disciplinary proceedings. “Except at the discretion of …” is where they do the bulk of their business. Whether it’s shirt colours needing to be filed by a certain date, or dodging FFP procedures with a lot of smoke and mirrors, or whether it’s appointing managers who don’t quite come up to code … this is what that club does.
They live inside the loophole, the one that was there for clubs who suffer unforeseen disasters or make simple mistakes.
Not that these clubs necessarily get any benefit from the existence of said loopholes; in November 2011, East Stirling and Spartans were expelled from that season’s Scottish Cup in successive months. In East Stirling’s case, they had made a mistake in failing to get a player’s loan extension paperwork to the SFA on time. In Spartans case, they had simply failed to put two dates on a document, putting one instead.
By the book, right? No complaints, yeah?
Except for the fact that by that time a lot of people in Scottish football were well aware – including Campbell Ogilvie who was President of the SFA – that Rangers had over a dozen improperly registered players, going back over a decade.
And nothing was ever done about that.
No consequences ever came to pass because an SFA employee, Sandy Bryson, offered a ludicrous and shamefully brazen “excuse” in mitigation when he appeared before Lord Nimmo Smith, a commission which itself had been hamstrung by the “no title stripping” Five Way Agreement.
A little “manager’s discretion” if ever I’ve seen it.
And the thing of it, the SFA continues to look the other way and give Sevco all the latitude that it wants, letting them sit on the fringes of what’s right and wrong whilst every other club in the lands scrambles to play it by the book.
What is it with this club that it can’t simply get things done and run its business in the same manner as the rest of the teams? Is it so completely incompetent? No, it just chooses not to. It chooses to exist and do things in this manner because time and time again they’ve been able to get away with it.
They’ve been able to ask for, and get, leeway and approval.
And their lack of compliance is excused and waved aside even when it is not simple incompetence or accident but open and wilful violation.
And this is what has to end at Hampden.
No club should be allowed to do all its business in a fashion that runs contrary to the rulebook because the governing bodies continue to make exceptions for them, and that’s one of the things that angers Dave King so much. He sees the presence of “Celtic minded” people at Hampden and he’s not concerned that those people will bend the rules for us … he knows that would never fly. His concern is that the rules will no longer be bent for them.
The era of Ibrox minded “management discretion” at Hampden is what’s coming to an end.
The rulebook allows for flexibility because some clubs need it at certain times. Those loopholes aren’t there for clubs to simply live in them and rely forever on their protection. No other club in the country has so many question marks over its operational side or its long term future. No other club in the top flight is going into Europe with doubts over the validity of its licence application. No other club has so many board members and ex board members who ought never to have passed fit and proper. No other club has such opaque funding sources or a business plan so fantastical that it could have been signed off on by C.S. Lewis.
Sevco will never voluntarily adhere to the rules as they are written.
They have to be forced to do it by the book, and King knows it’s coming and that’s why he’s screaming.