To paraphrase the great Hank Hill, I’m trying to prevent an outbreak here and the Scottish Government is driving the monkey to the airport*.
It is clear as a bell to anyone with a head that the SNP is heading towards a defeat in little more than a year and a half. I’ve spent all summer talking to lots and lots of people and writing proposals with the primary aim of trying anything to give the party any fighting chance of avoiding that fate. That’s more than the party leadership has done.
Because dear god alive the Scottish Government seems determined to make the loss as bad as possible. It’s like someone failed to explain that the purpose of a gun is not to shoot yourself in the foot. In reality it is a free-fire zone round about John Swinney’s tootsies and it’s him holding the weapons. What follows is just one day of the blood-spattered shoe-carnage.
When the strongest political hand you have had to play for quite a while now is your moral and popular position on the inhumanity of the Israeli genocide in Gaza you then have one of two options. One of those options is that you meet the Israeli Deputy Ambassador. The other is that you don’t.
If you do you get nothing good out of it. We’re tiny and a long chat about cultural cooperation with Israel does nothing but launder their reputation while making you look like an absolute fucking hypocrite and undermining your Westminster leader. Not doing it results in nothing happening at all. It should be an easy choice.
If Angus Robertson isn’t fired, the membership should censure him at the upcoming party conference. But the reality is that either Swinney was in cahoots with this from the start or he isn’t in charge of his Cabinet and is too weak to fire Robertson.
So at least, having talked about it again and again and again, always from atop precisely the same high horse from which they talked about how Israeli leaders should be punished by international courts (which we now know was said with fingers crossed), we are now celebrating the launch of a Scottish-crafted replacement for the Erasmus programme, aren’t we?
After all, the party was absolutely right to take a strong moral position on Israel and Gaza, and it was also right to take a strong moral position on cutting Scottish students off from the chance to travel and experience other cultures as part of their study. And Wales has managed to put together a successful £65 million replacement programme.
There is a simple arithmetic in all this – the more fights you fight, the less well you can fight them, so if you’re creating fights you don’t need then you’re doing a less good job of the fights you have to figh
No, we’re not celebrating anything. The Scottish Government has been caught in yet another giant fail so has cobbled together a tiny and pointless pilot scheme to spin out the fraud just a little longer. It is a fraud like the Citizens’ Income was a fraud and the four-day working week was a fraud and the climate targets were a fraud.
This is happening on GERS day, the annual unionist-fest where the Scottish Government produces figures that make it look like an independent Scotland would have a giant budget deficit, the anti-independence forces make hay and the SNP stands there frozen like a bunny rabbit in the headlights of an oncoming HGV.
It’s not like that’s not enough shit for one day, but it isn’t enough shit for one day. The Scottish Government is fighting a weak rearguard action to defend already weakened rent control legislation from a giant lobbying campaign from Scotland’s financial elite (who are just there to help out you common people who rent flats because they took on being a landlord as a public service apparently – which is why the housing situation in Scotland is going so well).
It is inevitably announcing that it too has to means test the winter fuel payment for pensioners. It has to face being criticised by social housing leaders whose budget was cut to pay for a ridiculous Council Tax freeze they thought up as a Hail Mary to save their General Election (which it didn’t).
Meanwhile at work I’m sitting on a story we need to put out which has revealed a quite astounding act of wrongdoing at the heart of government. I mean should-be resignation stuff. That is coming too.
The Scottish Government has got to fight the financial elites and their utterly dishonest landlord-profiteering campaign for the national good. It probably has no option on the Winter Fuel Payment. GERS is a nightmare every year. Dealing with these things is the hard stuff government’s have to get right.
Fighting battles over hypocritical genocide meetings, defending avoidable cuts to social housing, getting caught over the failure to deliver schemes you’ve promised, allowing corruption to go ahead, hiding in a corner and looking scared of GERS? These are fights of choice or incompetence.
There is a simple arithmetic in all this – the more fights you fight, the less well you can fight them, so if you’re creating fights you don’t need then you’re doing a less good job of the fights you have to fight. Or put another way, if you’re bad at your job, you’ll just keep getting worse and worse.
The really difficult thing for the SNP to face up to is that its leader is bad at his job. That the two preceding leaders were also demonstrably bad at their job clearly suggests there is a more fundamental problem. There is. There is no culture of competence in the SNP and its senior team is massively substandard.
Against every emotion that I feel every day when I wake up, despite the fact that there is nothing I’d like more than to see this lot justifiably punished for how bad they are, despite all of this, I need to suck it up and play any part I can in at least trying to rescue the party from its inevitable fate
A culture of competence addresses failures and it is fairly ruthless about people who are causing failures. The SNP has a culture of trying desperately to sweep failures under the carpet and protecting people who are clearly miles out of their depth in turn for unthinking loyalty.
Among the things I’ve been finding out over the summer is the depth of emotional anger people feel towards the SNP just now, people the SNP needs. I don’t mean voters, I mean senior pro-indy figures in business or the media or who were elected politicians or experienced activists. They feel betrayed, hurt, bruised (many were relentlessly bullied) and exhausted.
Their emotional reaction is one I share, but it is one I cannot allow to shape my thinking. In the same way, in my day job trying to influence the national policy agenda, more or less everyone in every organisation big and small that I’ve had anything to do with is utterly sick of them. Everyone is just waiting until May 2026 to get rid of them.
They’re tired of being asked to sit on years-long working groups that are ignored. They’re tired of promises that never materialise. They’re tired of targets they don’t believe. They’re sick of consultations that change nothing. They are absolutely burned out trying to make any sense of a government that isn’t really interested in governing. They too have an emotional antagonism to this administration.
Their emotional reaction is very much also one I share. I’m utterly sick of these dilettantes. They’re all useless. John Swinney hasn’t done a single successful thing since the 1990s – other than interfering with inquiries and preventing reform of the SNP. He has no achievements and a day like today shows why. He’s not good enough, not even nearly good enough, to dig this lot out of their mess.
But I can’t afford these emotions. The approaching Anas Sarwar administration wants to convert the Scottish Parliament back into being a regional council implementing Starmer dictat in Scotland and that is going to do none of us any good. Independence remains my best hope for something that looks like a better society in Scotland and an SNP loss will set that back even further.
So against every emotion that I feel every day when I wake up, despite the fact that there is nothing I’d like more than to see this lot justifiably punished for how bad they are, despite all of this, I need to suck it up and play any part I can in at least trying to rescue the party from its inevitable fate. So that’s what I do; I suck it up and I try to help.
And then I wake up and the Scottish Government has that disease-ridden monkey in a cage and it’s on the tram to the airport. It’s like it has lost the will to live and wants to hasten the end. It is utterly useless.
So I’ll keep trying, but this lot seem determined to make the rescue impossible.
*Just in case the reference is lost on you, the joke is a play on the film Outbreak in which the transportation of a diseased monkey creates a devastating global pandemic.
And If you follow that King of the Hill reference and don’t watch the episode to the end you might get the impression that it is all about making fun of effeminate boys. It isn’t; it’s about a prejudiced dad learning that his son’s love of cheerleading is nothing to be ashamed of. In case a partial viewing of that gets me into shit.