ALBA - Unofficial Forum

Let’s do a quick checklist then shall we:

• Start by playing the victim – worst week of your life perhaps. All the best sociopaths make themselves the focus of emotional consideration when caught out over something.


• Firewall yourself with legal niceties – like pretending that not being investigated by the police is a special and valuable characteristic possessed only by you.


• Then make an appeal to your honour – love your country perhaps, working hard for your constituents. That sort of thing. Anything that says ‘one of the gooduns’.


• Get your children and use them as human shields. From absolutely nowhere drag them into this and then pretend you did it so no-one drags them into this when really you just want an empathy prop.


• Think carefully about language; accusations are ‘gossip’, being arrested for a crime is ‘speculation’ on the part of the cops, being concerned is not rational but ‘feverish’. Again, make it sound like you’re the victim here.


• Then pretend that getting fired was your choice. In fact make it more than that, make it a sign of just how really honourable you are. You aren’t resigning because you’re caught up in a pretty nasty scandal, you’re resigning to protect the integrity of the very democratic system itself.

So congratulations Joani Reid – you get the full house! You have now now graduated from the Peter Mandelson School of Scurrilous Manipulation. Gold star, double-plus, you’ll be ambassador to China in no time.

I do not want to write about corruption. I definitely didn’t want to write another piece at all this week, and definitely not another piece on corruption. But I set up this site to do what others weren’t doing and there is still far, far too much reticence in the mainstream media to call corruption corruption.

I totally understand this. In normal parlance corruption is generally taken to mean ‘something that is illegal’. That is a terrible mistake. Corruption in office or in bureaucracies or bureaucratic systems is much better thought of as ‘isn’t working as it should for reasons other than normal error or human limitation’.

A quick reminder; transactional corruption is the illegal bit where you take direct benefit by abusing the system, operational or cultural corruption is where something is either known to be at least a bit wrong or a grey area but because everyone does it no-one thinks of it as unusual, and systemic corruption is when corruption is written into the rules.

The first is a brown paper envelope stuffed with money, the second is an ‘independent’ committee setting your salary which is made up of exactly the names you suggested should be on it, the third is PFI.

So let’s get back to Ms Reid (who I should emphasise isn’t accused of wrongdoing but of being married to a spy). Why do I use the word corruption when nothing has been proved? For the same reason I use it in relation to Murrell though it hasn’t been proved. Very simply, it is not normal to be arrested for spying and it is not normal to be charged with embezzlement. If these things are happening, there is corruption.

Either the police have lost their heads and are pursuing some kind of personal vendetta, or you’ve done something you shouldn’t, or (best case scenario) the checks and balances that were supposed to stop it getting to that stage have failed completely.

The ruling classes really, really give the impression of being a different species. Remember when Nicola Sturgeon was clambering her way out of a police interview room telling us all it was just a routine, everyday, normal arrest, like might happen to anyone. Well I was arrested once and I know exactly what I did (got into a fist fight in a pub). It was only routine because of what I did.

Likewise, Joani Reid appears to want credit for not having been charged with spying herself, only her husband. Then again, I suspect things are going to get a lot worse for her. Why is she receiving tens of thousands of pounds from someone accused of spying? Yet again, 99 per cent of the people in this country will never, ever received £20k from someone who is arrested for being a spy shortly afterwards.

Then again, few of us would have a mid-level job as a ‘policy manager’, do a few years as a councillor and then be able to convert that into a £400k in one year image consultancy income. I know a lot of people in this field (I was more senior than any job I can see Ms Reid having had) and they’re not making £400k a year. It isn’t very normal.

So goodness knows what this is all about, but for almost everyone watching it is not something that should ever even nearly have happened. That everyone who has ever been within a mile of Morgan McSweeney or Labour Together appears to be utterly appalling and involved in activity the rest of us would be fired for really does make me think that Labour Together is the most corrupt piece of shit think tank ever to have been spewed into existence in this country. Why hasn’t it been closed down?

The problem with this is that corruption has now become a miasma. It is sort of everywhere among the ruling classes. There is nothing relatable at all about being married to someone who has millions of pounds go through their bank account and then be arrested for spying. So in that regard Sally Donald is ‘one of us’.

I mean, she only fiddled the benefits system. Given how many people in this country can’t feed their children I’m largely in favour of benefit fraud by the needy. But to have multiple well-paid jobs, be caught and still believe that you deserve the money you too? Yet again, that isn’t normal, that is bug-eyed entitlement.

And the problem with all of this is that miasma doesn’t mean ‘a few bad apples’ but the whole ecosystem around them. Much hilarity is had by people mocking John Swinney’s daily chant of ‘I can’t comment on live legal proceedings’. Not enough energy is being put into asking how he came to be surrounded by quite so many legal proceedings on which he has questions to answer.

To be clear, Swinney is a cynical party hack who will happily abuse the rules of his party, but almost everyone in the game accepts that ‘all is fair in love and politics’. He himself is not an avaricious man and is honest. That’s what I mean by miasma. Somehow he is just in it, surrounded by it, sometimes condoning and defending it, never doing anything about it.

But this miasma spreads and spreads. I am gobsmacked at the rank and file SNP members who seem willing to defend Sally Donald. When did dishonesty become OK? How did they ever end up in a place where they are defending it?

Do you have any life outside of political bubbles? If so you are bound to be aware of the utterly jaundiced view the public has of politicians. Everyone I know thinks ‘they’re all at it’. They absolutely aren’t, but they all exist within that miasma and damn few of them speak out against it. If you stand next to corruption and you stand in silence, you become part of the problem.

I really do not want to write about corruption but given that nothing else is happening in Scotland just now, corruption seems to be the primary national issue. It is why, like the Ancient Mariner, I find myself compelled to come back to it over and over again.

We finally see the antics of the oligarch class for what they are, but we still struggle to see the abuses of the governing class for what they are. Pocket-stuffing quango boss, benefit-cheating political candidate, spy, liar, embezzler, fake. This is what Scotland’s public sees when it switches on its TV.

I don’t want to be on my own shouting about this. If you have a voice in Scotland and you’re not shouting about this, what are you doing? Has someone convinced you that it’s unseemly to use the word the dictionary sets aside for this precise purpose? Do you think possibly you’re allowing this to happen, that you are making yourself complicit through silence?

At this stage the citizens who has the most logical explanation of their actions is the citizen saying that they will not vote for any of them because they’re all as bad as each other. It’s a fucking mess and if it isn’t stopped, the untold damage it has already done so far will only be the beginning.