Some days I wonder if I’m too rough on John Swinney. As I keep repeating, he’s a good man who means well and compared to the political field in the UK at the moment he at least isn’t gnawing the bones of immigrant children or dancing in the flames of Gaza.
And then he talks about domestic policy and it all comes flooding back. Good man or not, his ambition is pitiful, his vision tiny and his politics utterly cynical. He offers nothing for Scotland’s future other than an interregnum, a gap in our history while we wait for it to start up again.
What has me riled is his ‘energy plans’. Before I got anywhere near this I absolutely knew what it would look like. There is a single formula Swinney uses for all his ‘future vision’ statements. Here’s how it goes; nothing will fundamentally change, it will all be the same as before – but you’ll get a cash bung. Total stasis but with cheque in the post.
For John Swinney, this is the sweet spot. He seems primarily to want everything to stay the same forever but he doesn’t think ‘just this’ is motivating enough but he also doesn’t believe in change so the only story he can come up with is ‘I’ll stick some cash in an envelope for you to look the other way’.
Just as a reminder, that is precisely how Swinney ran the 2011/12 independence referendum campaign until the rest of us took over. His adamant sales pitch was ‘nothing will change after independence but here’s a spreadsheet that says you’ll be £500 better off’. No-one believed it and it failed horribly (for reasons I’ll explain in a minute).
The new energy strategy? We’ll maintained a private sector free-for-all dominated by foreign owners, but I’ll run it slightly better so we’ll take a third off your bills. Or, to put it as it is, Factor John says that if you all stop grumbling about Laird Moneybags and pay your extortionate rents, he’ll have a word with him to see if he can’t spare some leftover roast potatoes from Christmas dinner. No promises mind…
Let me really quickly explain the brazenness in this. First, their perpetual claims that they can’t do anything just now are wrong, wrong, wrong and the only reason they get away with saying this is because mainstream media won’t challenge them on it. We’ve shown half a dozen ways to own energy in Scotland right now.
What really set me off was the idea that 20 per cent of energy might be ‘community-owned’ There is zero prohibition on doing that right now, either through condition of license or via public funding. The Scottish Government has chosen neither to negotiate this nor to fund it, so it is hollow and dishonest to claim it needs to wait for independence.
UK energy policy so centrally-planned and market-insulated the Soviets would blush
The truth is they do not want to do this. You just need to look at the pitiful-going-on-non-existent community benefit funds attached to the ScotWind contracts. The Scottish Government prioritised corporate interests and barely paid any attention to the public good.
It always does. Last year the entire wind farm industry paid a total of £30 million in community benefit payments. Scotland gets no other real benefit from these wind farms now they’re constructed, and £30m is joke money. The value of the exports of surplus electricity from Scotland alone came to £1.5 billion last year.
Wind farm licenses are a license to print money. You can barely lose. This market is a monopsony because there is only one real buyer of the product and that buyer has created a pricing formula which means generators cannot lose money.
I repeat, the wholesale electricity market is designed to guarantee corporate profits even if it is at the detriment of households. Last year we paid these private operators about 15 times as much for electricity we didn’t use (so-called constraint payments) than the entire industry distributed to communities.
That is public policy so centrally-planned and market-insulated the Soviets would blush. It is a kind of communism for energy generators. The only sane thing to do is take this into public ownership so that this regime of largesse makes its way to you and me and not more US equity funds.
Just to be clear; in France about 90 per cent of its energy is generated by EDF which is 100 per cent publicly-owned and uses its profits to maintain an energy price cap, to pay for all its infrastructure and to run a major insulation programme for households as well as to invest in overseas assets on behalf of the public.
John Swinney is currently promising to keep negotiating shit deals that protect corporations until he delivers independence (i.e. never) at which point he’ll be fighting to ensure this gift horse remains at least 80 per cent privately owned. What do we get? Perhaps ‘up to’ 20 per cent community ownership some day.
It is a fundamentally empty gesture that doesn’t feel meant or prepared or fundamental to the ‘Swinney story’
I’ve listened to Swinney for nearly 30 years now and it is relentless – don’t change the system but if I could count the beans more efficiently then perhaps we can find you a few bawbees to be going on with. That’s it, that’s the towering sum of Swinneyism and it is the fundamental reason that his track record as a politician and political leader is so poor.
He is running a kind of combination of a Jam Auction and the Spanish Prisoner (or Nigerian Prince) – see this for fuller explanations. The former is a form of confidence trick in which you try to persuade people that something they can’t see (a box whose labelling has been ‘washed off’) is valuable (probably – it’s deliberately not that specific). The Spanish Prisoner is simply ‘I’ve got lots of money to give you but to get it I need some of your money first’.
Swinney seeks to build confidence by offering what he thinks is an achievable-sounding prize (Jam Auctions promise microwaves, not sports car). He then creates a condition why you can’t see it now and you can’t be sure exactly what it is until you buy it (there is always a good reason why there are no labels on the boxes and why they can’t be opened first).
In a Jam Auction you usually realise you’ve been conned quite quickly. That doesn’t work in politics (which is by nature a long con) so now there’s a Spanish Prisoner in need of freeing first. Or independence as Swinney puts it. Gimme the thing I want (votes) and that will unlock a process whereby I will eventually give you a smallish thing wrapped in brown paper.
I don’t even know if I need to explain why this won’t work. First, these are different cons; one relies on a feeding frenzy of irrationality (a Jam Auction never hangs around) based on moderate ‘returns’. The Spanish Prisoner is a patient con with a very big ‘prize’ which is always a long way off. The former is about creating short-term emotional highs, the latter is about making the mark think they’re being rational.
These are both charisma-based cons – but they’re two quite different kinds of charisma. To pull a Jam Auction off you need to sweep your mark up in collective excitement and enthusiasm while the Spanish Prisoner is about inducing individual over-confidence. One the work of the carnival barker, one of the erudite charmer.
Swinney is neither and has pulled this out of the blue. There was no excitement or buzz about the short con, no build up and story-telling for the long con. It is a fundamentally empty gesture that doesn’t feel meant or prepared or fundamental to the ‘Swinney story’. It just sounds like something they thought up in the absence of a good idea.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticising the con-trick structure here. Most politics acts like a confidence trick because they need an audience to buy in but you will never get a guarantee that they’ll deliver so it operates purely on whether you believe them or not.
And that’s why the build-up and story-telling is crucial. This fell out the sky and seems counter to everything the current Scottish Government is doing (which is avoiding doing anything) and seems to be counter to the Swinney persona. I could have believed Yousaf meant it and I could have believed that Salmond would deliver it. This sounds like what it is, Swinney desperate to motivate his demotivated base to turn out for an election.
Then again, perhaps it will work, because I’m clearly not the target. The Spanish Prisoner and the Nigerian Prince aren’t quite the same con. The former is intensive and targets an individual mark, wooing them with luxury and making the prince thing sound feasible. The Nigerian Prince is a game of wide broadcast with small margins – they only need a fraction of a percent of people to fall for it.
So Swinney’s energy nonsense might drag a few thousand people to the polls and that could make a difference to his parliamentary arithmetic. But for independence and democracy generally, this con is just more corrosive game-playing which will do nothing but harm.