ALBA - Unofficial Forum

"Let them eat cake" said Marie Antoinette – and it became a motto for contempt for those beneath you and a failure to empathise with the suffering of others. But that’s a bit of a mistranslation and it misses part of the point.

The archaic, aristocratic formation of ‘let them…’ just sort of means ‘can’t they?…’, and the cake she refers to isn’t a sweet gateaux but a form of very basic peasant staple. A more accurate modern translation of the exchange for a Scot might go something more like ‘Marie the poor have no bread to eat’; ‘well, can’t they eat porridge’?

This is important because it picks up the more subtle but important problem with Ms Antoinette’s outlook on things – of course there is a reflexive, aristocratic contempt for the poor, but equally important is the simple failure to have any basic understanding of the reality of the conditions of life of those beneath you. For a Marie Antoinette, the concept that there was just no food at all wasn’t one she could grasp, so divorced was she from the lives of the poor.

Which brings me to the Scottish Government, probably mostly at senior civil service level but it is hard to tell where the officials stop and the politicians start these days. The Antoinette comparator helps to unpick the mix of contempt and simple failure to empathise which marks the starting point of many government failures.

It explains the collapse of the National Care Service and the incredible waste of money (£27 million on nothing) involved. From the beginning the officials simply failed to understand how care actually works and would not listen to the professionals, so sure were centralised policy managers that the problem in care isn’t the regime they created but the fact that they haven’t created a new one in a few years.

It was contempt from the outset. I have tracked the Care Bill really closely and even I don’t know the goal. I know the politicians thought it was about emptying out hospital beds, but I don’t know who told them that because it would have achieved no such thing.

I still think the officials were trying to create a privatisation mechanism where a centralised service would buy ‘care services’ from the cheapest provider, basically unwinding the public, professional provision of care. Certainly that’s what the many, many corporate consultancies involved usually want.

What no-one involved seemed to understand was the actual practices of caring for someone with complex needs. That was never part of the legislation or considered during its preparation. And when the entire care sector told them this was a non-starter the contempt really kicked in. They set up separate groups of people who had been through care and people who delivered care and tried to set them against each other to use care-experienced people as a battering ram to force through the proposals.

Round and round this went for three years – half-baked idea, crap work by ideologically-motivated consultancies, bad legislation, front line worker resistance, more consultancies, more half-baked ideas, lots of working groups and manipulation, refusal to adjust the bad legislation… The end result was complete failure and enough money to provide 330,000 hours of care down the tubes.

When I want to get a picture of why this is not acceptable I remind myself that the people who failed here, the senior civil servants and politicians, are all back at work today earning their giant salaries and bustling around like nothing happened, and a low-pay care worker is back at her (almost certainly her) job on virtually minimum wage with no time to complete the work on her daily rota and damn-all chance of actually doing a good job of care.

Failure to understand those they rule, the gap in knowledge filled with an assumed contempt, did for the care service. It was also high on my mind this weekend. This is now Monday evening and I have written this in a cafe and am posting it from a pub because we are still 48 hours away from getting our electricity back. We’re rural. Our bills are the same as yours but our service is worse. We’re always, always the last in the queue.

Once a number of fallen trees were chainsawed into a degree of passibility I was at a local community meeting on Saturday morning. Many there were also rural, and the story from everyone was the same. It’s tough, but it is perfectly survivable with a bit of effort and preparation, on one condition. You have to have a log stove.

Every person there had been in to check on neighbours and the picture was clear – those without log stoves were in trouble. It was subzero all day and there was snow. Without heating life was unbearable. Anyone who says ‘solar panels’ or ‘heat pumps’ can seriously fuck off to whichever spreadsheet they emerged from.

Round these parts an emergency back-up heating solution is not optional and we have a really good range of local sources of local logs. A Scottish Government which bothered to stop and understand the lives of those they govern would have understood this before they tried to ban them. A Government that bothered to ask would have heard this.

It is right that new log burners in built up urban areas should be banned. You urban bastards get your electricity fixed as a priority and belching fine particulate matter into streets that capture and concentrate pollutants is a terrible idea. It literally kills people with asthma and is terrible for the lungs of babies and children.

In a rural area there is zero chance of the build-up of particulate matter. There is no sense in a ban. Any competent government would either have understood that or made efforts to learn before opening their mouths. But this lot frankly lack subtlety or sophistication and still see the public as a problem to be banned into submissive conformity.

Where there should be understanding there is ignorance, when they should be listening they’re talking, what should be empathy is instead contempt, who should be the servant instead acts like the lord. Over and over their arrogant contempt drives them straight into a wall, creating an expensive mess that we have to pay for. They never pay a price.

An old story of mine but important. A number of years ago I was at a Scottish Government horizon-scanning strategy day (all that staring at the horizon and still dawn seems to catch them by surprise every time…). I was in a group with five other people, a chief executive of a major multinational, a very senior lawyer, a high-grade civil servant… – that is to say, the people who actually run Scotland.

We had to look at a number of future challenges (post-it notes, natch) and place them on a quadrant which ran from ‘uncertain’ to ‘certain’ on one axis and ‘unimportant’ to ‘important’ in the other. One of our challenges was ‘the decline of towns’. To my horror and against my strong objection, my group voted to place that in the ‘certain, not important’ category.

Like Trump looking at Gaza, they didn’t view people who live in former industrial towns as real people. For this class of person, there are much bigger issues than the lives of town-dwellers. Sure, they vote and pay taxes and they should no more be considered ‘unimportant’ than anyone else in Scotland. Sure, the people round that table should have understood they were there to serve these people, not dismiss them as irrelevant.

But that’s not how it works. To the governing classes, the people of Motherwell should be cleared out ‘temporarily or for the long term’ to Indonesia or Egypt while the property developers reclaim what should rightfully be theirs.

To my mind someone who says something like this should be excluded from public life, exactly as if they had said ‘endemic racism is inevitable and not important’. But nope, the chief executive on my group was invited to join the Executive Board of the Scottish Government, almost literally the boss of the boss of the civil servants who behave like this.

So yeah, like I say, Marie Antoinette. A severe lack of guillotines though.