If you’re not a gamer or familiar with gamer lingo, an NPC is a ‘Non Player Character’, any character in a game not controlled by a human. Think the space invaders and their preset swooping patterns or the ghosts in PacMan (the first ‘intelligent’ NPCs that responded to players’ actions).
Gradually they became more and more sophisticated, to the point where now some NPCs have seemingly novels-worth of dialogue options, never repeating themselves, regularly starting new conversations.
Well in that spectrum, the SNP is very PlayStation 3, sort of early internet circa 2006. It is supposedly a key character in Scotland’s drama but mostly it seems to lurch around repeating the same three or four lines of repetitive dialogue over and over again, trying to simulate life but very much giving the impression of an automaton stepping through its programming.
I wasn’t surprised when I heard that the SNP was blocking all rank-and-file members’ resolutions on independence at the party conference in favour of a carefully placed leadership-sponsored one because they literally always do.
I was a bit more startled at how completely, almost line-for-line the planted motion lifted language from a Common Weal project we are about to launch because few people know about it at the moment (giving me a pretty good idea of who is passing this information to the SNP leadership).
But I’m certainly not surprised that, having got hold of this information, the SNP took steps to try and undermine a civic initiative and prevent it from gaining traction. That too is because they always do, because the SNP does not want independence as much as it wants control. It only ever undermines the cause, it never progresses it.
Then comes the news that Swinney is introducing another referendum bill. This actually did surprise me, because a (pointless) referendum bill was passed in 2020 as part of a previous bout of SNP performative back-filling. We have the Referendums (Scotland) Act 2020 which could be amended. Introducing a new bill is positively silly.
It was another milestone for me. This was the point when the SNP really, finally seems to no longer give a fuck about even presenting the illusion of credibility to its own membership. There is no possible reason to introduce another referendum bill other than to be able to do something harmless to fill time.
It is like the SNP doesn’t have any self respect left and has gone beyond the point where it is particularly worried about being plausible
But this has happened too many times now. It seems impossible to begin to try to take this seriously. It is like the SNP doesn’t have any self respect left and has gone beyond the point where it is particularly worried about being plausible.
All weekend I had been shaking my head at the sorry, sorry state of Scotland’s ‘independence party’. I could no longer see how anyone would act like they were a serious proposition. I am hardly being shaken out of that dubiety by today’s Programme for Government.
We’ll do a proper Common Weal assessment later in the week and we’re digging into the one weird thing in it a bit more in tomorrow’s Daily Briefing, but basically I watched the content of this announcement with weary resignation.
We are to get our fourth sprawling consultation exercise on some vague chat about ‘local empowerment’ (or third if you don’t count the ‘Citizens Assembly’ they solemnly promised then didn’t bother holding). We have been discussing this for 12 years now and already have the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act of 2015, which achieved nothing and empowered no-one. Why again when we know they don’t mean it?
Swinney is weirdly obsessed with ‘delayed discharge’ in the NHS, like he’s heard this one issue mentioned once at some point and can’t get it out of his head. We’ve been ending delayed discharge since the 1990s and it’s hardly our biggest problem.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before but otherwise it’s a new name for another Foreign Direct Investment agency (so more firesales of Scottish assets), another air source heat pump target, they’re replacing Monklands hospital again (though it does seem there is an actual timetable now), and they’ll ‘keep The Promise’ by 2030 – so four years to get all those care kids ‘loved’.
He’s going to let the AI data centres rip but add the word ‘green’ before them to make his problems go away. That’ll be green freeports, green oligarch data centres – can’t wait for the green internment camps. He wants private equity to have even more control over housing. He is going to completely centralise health boards and local government – and therefore probably the care service by default.
And then we get the weird bit – he’s still harping on about his price caps. He’s issued a consultation and I can only assume that this too is exactly what it looks like, the same shit they always do. We’ve looked at this and, like the ‘Universal Basic Income pilot’, there seems to be no way this is legal or that they have the power to do it or that it could be legislated for and policed.
So again, this is a consultation to make it look like they’re doing something on cost of living which they’re not. Which all adds up to a relentless drive on further centralisation while repeating a bunch of regularly-broken promises and a couple of pointless distractions and re-announcements, the latter three mainly there to stop you noticing just how right wing and conservative this agenda is.
This is easily the most conservative and right-wing administration since devolution. It has the fewest ideas and the most repetitive strategy, along with perhaps the brassiest brass neck. It has a repertoire of about 12 phrases which it repeats over and over. I mean Swinney has now said no child should go to school hungry – which is literally what Nicola Sturgeon said when he was her deputy 11 years ago.
What’s different now is that all credit has been burned through, all benefits of the doubt expended, no suspension of disbelief left to deploy
Now it is unfair of me not to highlight the good along with the ridiculous and there is a total of two thing in this that looks potentially exciting. The minimum income for artists policy currently offers scant detail and I fear that all this will do is butcher other existing arts funding.
Also why are we’re piloting something that was piloted in Ireland nearly five years ago and has now been implemented? Has the concept not already been proved and measured? But it could be really transformative if done well. There is also a promise to roll out universal breakfast clubs next year. That might prove important if delivered.
But that is thin gruel. My question is this; if what is effectively a single government can spend nearly 20 years promising Council Tax reform (I think five times), community empowerment (the aforementioned four times), ending child poverty or closing the educational attainment gap (too many to count I think), referendums (I chalk that up as five separate promises), more promised conventions and Citizens Assemblies than I can remember…
If all these can be promised over and over again along with lots of other things that are promised over and over again, and if literally not a single one of these things has happened on any occasion they have promised they’d happen, how are we expected to respond? To report this faithfully and truly like it might happen?
Now at this point I often take a pause, look over what I’ve written a few times, have a break, look again and see if I have gone further than I intended or been more critical than is merited. As I was about to do that I got a message from someone who is well-informed and hardly intemperate. It says:
"This is the worst PfG ever, 80 pages of relentless garbage and ignorance and ego – 15 photos of Swinney". Yet here’s the funny thing; it probably actually isn’t all that much worse than a number of the other PfGs (the post-Covid PfG was mind-numbing). What’s different now is that all credit has been burned through, all benefits of the doubt expended, no suspension of disbelief left to deploy.
Out of ideas and talent and shorn of credibility, the Scottish Government is now going to allow the public realm to be picked apart by equity capitalism as the civic world looks on in the certainty that the data centres won’t be green and the communities won’t benefit and the heat pumps won’t be installed and the prices won’t be capped. It’s all just noise, the death rattle of a dying administration.
The SNP is finished as a credible vehicle for change. It is becoming imperative that Scotland looks at its democracy and asks how long we can continue like this. At this rate there will be nothing left, except a pixelated SNP wandering through a low-res Scotland mumbling about referendum bills until someone pulls the plug out.