Of the many baffling and implausible revelations which made up last week’s news, the information that Colin Beattie, the SNP MSP for Midlothian North & Musselburgh, is regularly working 84-hour weeks in the service of the electorate is every bit as jaw-dropping as the latest shenanigans in the White House.
What is he doing? I have no doubt that there is plenty going down in Dalkeith and Bonnyrigg but this is a work rate that would make a Japanese yen trader look like a slouch — let alone a 73-year-old former party treasurer who holds two surgeries a month by appointment only.
His annual report for 2024 ought to give us a clue. But while worthy activities such as ensuring patient access to the Riverside Medical Practice and campaigning on the future of Brunton theatre and visiting the Straiton Asda for their national food drive feature, it’s hardly toiling at the Gradgrindian grindstone, even when his membership of two Holyrood committees is factored in.
We have Beattie himself to thank for the insight into his working week. In a recent leaflet to constituents, the former international banker argued that politicians should stop “whining” about long hours, adding that those elected to public office should accept “the job is far from family-friendly”.
According to Beattie, he works 12 to 14-hour days “as standard”, as well as most weekends. He “tries” to keep one day a week free. “You know what you are signing up to when you decide to stand for election,” he writes.
The statement has been interpreted as a dig at Kelly Parry, the SNP leader of Midlothian council — a job previously held by Beattie’s wife Lisa. Parry, who is standing against Beattie in an attempt to secure the candidacy for the 2026 Scottish election, is the mother of two young children and has previously spoken about a lack of support for women in local government.
What is it about elections that makes politicians lose any sense of perspective and open themselves to ridicule? Lord Hague of Richmond, the former Conservative leader at Westminster, infamously told GQ magazine that between the ages of 15 and 21 he drank 14 pints of beer a day during his summer job hauling crates of drink into pubs across South Yorkshire for his family’s soft drinks firm. Beattie’s 84-hour week has the same level of credibility.
He might as well have the word “dinosaur” tattooed on his forehead. One of the very few positives to have emerged from the pandemic has been a re-evaluation of the way we work. Hybrid working, working from home, flexi-time and the associated reduction in the commute, has given a flexibility to work, which for those whose formative jobs were enmeshed in a macho culture of presenteeism, is highly welcome.
There are jobs that by their very nature cannot be performed outside of the workplace and there will always be employees who abuse such freedoms, but they tend to be the ones who are equally unproductive in an office setting.
Employers who trust their teams to work gainfully in a manner that suits them within set parameters, inevitably see productivity increases. Employers who don’t trust their employees to work autonomously shouldn’t have hired them or should examine the culture of their workplaces to see why their workforce is disengaged.
The technological advances of the 21st century are immense. The entire repository of world knowledge is ours at the touch of a button. Internet access is virtually a birthright. The processing speed of computers is astonishing to one who started her journalistic career in the age of hot metal.
Organisations that take full advantage of new tech and train their teams to use it effectively quickly see the benefits. The first mass-market generative AI tools are less than three years old but are growing more sophisticated by the week. The first agentic AI tools — characterised by their ability to operate autonomously, make decisions, and take actions without constant human interventions — are already available.
Employees have been taught to fear such technology, and many corporations, understandably, ban AI from the workplace for fear of intellectual property violations. But what if, instead of taking their jobs, technological improvements allowed workers to become so much more proficient that they freed up additional leisure time?
In his essay, In Praise Of Idleness, Bertrand Russell predicted a future in which nobody would work for more than four hours a day. “The road to happiness and prosperity lies in the organised diminution of work,” he wrote. Russell was kicking against the Presbyterian notion of the virtue of work and the vice of sloth, but his vision may soon become reality. The key is in the word “organised”.
Last week I used a new agentic AI tool, still in beta, to solve a difficult and unusual technical problem that ordinarily would have taken a developer hours, if not days, to fix. Using AI, I got four potential solutions to the problem ranked in order of priority with step-by-step instructions and the necessary code provided. It took two minutes. The first solution none of the humans had thought of, despite extensive consultation. It is hard not to embrace it.
But Beattie’s rant against whiners who want family-friendly working conditions is less a luddite cri de coeur as a misogynistic one. The people who push for family-friendly workplaces are often women because they are the ones who still bear the bulk of the administrative and mental load in many families.
Equating those employees with “whiners” because they aren’t prepared to work 14-hour days takes us into Gordon Gekko territory. As both an employer and an employee, I know that the qualities that make great parents are the same ones that make great employees — an ability to work autonomously, a striving for mastery and a sense of purpose.
Diversity of gender and race across the workforce has been proven to improve productivity in corporations. There are many mothers who have returned from maternity leave to discover they bring a newfound efficiency to their jobs.
We need mothers in all job roles, including politics. Children have a humanising effect on political leaders who may be surrounded by sycophants at work and who are occasionally in danger of believing their own publicity.
Without wanting to sound all Dame Andrea Leadsom, pomposity and arrogance are quite hard to maintain when you have a posse of toddlers or teenagers back home ready to deflate the bubble of self-belief.
Politicians have autonomy in their role and while they are answerable to the electorate, they are rarely held to account. If Beattie can’t manage to do a good job for his constituents without working 8am to 10pm six days a week, there is something far wrong.
Far from being a stealth-boast about his commitment to the job, the voters may see it as a mark of alarming inefficiency.
