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[Mandelson is an exaggeration, not an exception]

#1

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Mandelso...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Today at 05:12 AM

Mandelson is an exaggeration, not an exception

By far the most important thing to bear in mind when you observe the sheer volume of grime and filth which has adhered to Peter Mandelson such that he is finally (finally) sinking below the waves is that this is absolutely not an exceptional set of circumstances. In fact you should really accept this as ‘normal’. Every other version of it let’s our species off too lightly.

Let me kick off with this; when my team asked me if I knew Mandelson (I met him a couple of times but I didn’t know him) and I talked them through the early days of New Labour, I felt myself age. Two of the team weren’t born when I was in Westminster and the other was at primary school. The point is exactly that – it was terribly long ago.

Because my answer to ‘what was he like’ was really simple – charming and creepy and uncomplicated. Mandelson always was what he always appeared to be and repeatedly showed himself to be through his actions. Yet three resignations in scandals and the media was still granting him ‘elder statesman’ status even a couple of weeks ago.

He was venal, extremely clubbable, oblivious to what others thought of how he operated (or disinterested or delusional, I don’t know), enormously smitten with power and wealth and more than ready to compromise himself on the basis of each of these realities.

Yet it isn’t always completely obvious to me why some issues stick and others don’t. I’m not for a second trying to downplay the terrible things Jeffery Epstein did, but what about Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev? An appalling character known for democratic destruction, rampant corruption and widespread human rights abuses.

Tony Blair advised him (via a lucrative contract) on rebranding his image. Nazarrbayev arguably did more harm to children than even Epstein. Does Blair get a pass because he wasn’t photographed in his underpants?

This is the trick you see. In the world in which Blair and Mandelson exist, nothing is connected, there is no line you can follow. Everything is good until a crack in the curtain shows misdeeds, forcing the curtain to be pulled open a little. Then you find that a whole new curtain has been erected just behind the original curtain. The squalid reality between these curtains is quarantined, a one-off, unconnected to anything else.

We see this with the US Department of Justice saying claims against powerful people are ‘unsubstantiated’. That’s the whole point; it is unsubstantiated because you refused to investigate. They seem to think this is a curtain when it’s really just another crack.

The point here is that all ruling classes exempt themselves from the rules that apply to others, but now that is done not in pursuit of sustaining a renowned family name but of pure self indulgence

So the question is who is ‘them’? Who is it erecting all these curtains and doing it with such speed and efficiency? It is a global ruling class, and they’re out of control. I don’t want you to get the impression I think a ruling class is a recent creation. It isn’t, every society has its ruling classes. But how they behave and what they represent changes.

Kings started out as the ‘murder class’. They gained power as the best warriors. But that’s a terribly insecure platform for your power and suggests anyone better at murdering could instead take your throne. So we get the classic model of British ruling class ideology – arrive through violence, stay through heredity.

It became about the blood, a quality passed down. The right to rule was conferred by an intangible something that you inherent and we all had to believe in. This was of course insidious but had one redeeming feature – the ruling classes had to pretend they actually were superior. There was a weird ethical element to the classic ruling classes and it was called ‘honour’. They ruled because they weren’t barbarians.

Then the industrial revolution kind of screwed that up because here was a new route to power – money made through industry. Pure blood was less impressive when you were broke and some northerner with no heredity at all can buy your estates.

We therefore morph into the current era where there are two halves of a ruling class – one with power through bureaucracy, the other with power via wealth. The point of the ‘third way politics’ of the Clinton/Blair eras was to merge them. This has been successful. The World Economic Forum in Davos is the brokerage fair for those who make laws because they top a bureaucracy and those who shape laws because they are incredibly rich.

Crucially, they are not there because of their blood (on the most part) and so the need to demonstrate some kind of superior ethics or behaviour is lifted from them. Honour has been replaced with conspicuous consumption as the ‘theatre of justification for power’. I rule because look how much money I have so it must mean I’m worth it.

The point here is that all ruling classes exempt themselves from the rules that apply to others, but now that is done not in pursuit of sustaining a renowned family name but of pure self indulgence. Wealth and power are not the means of control, they are the goals of control.

Never, ever forget that corruption, greed and the abuse of power by a ruling class creates a single thread which connects abuse through time and space

In that world, Mandelson is the perfect avatar for what they all are really. Ignore all the tricks with curtains and distractions (I assume bombs will be falling on some far-off country soon to ‘move the story on from Epstein’), these realities exist in an unbroken straight line. And that line divides humanity as it stretches out, on one side the ruling class, on the other the not ruling class.

Donald Trump is ruling class, Alex Pretti is not ruling class. Peter Mandelson and Jeffery Epstein are ruling class, Epstein’s ‘girls’ are not ruling class. Tony Blair is ruling class, the dissident journalists jailed by his clients are not ruling class. Paula Vennells and Fujitsu are ruling class, sub postmasters are not ruling class.

Kingspan, Celotex, Arconic, Rydon Maintenance and Harley Facades are ruling class, the people who burned to death in Grenfell Tower were not ruling class. Senior police officers are ruling class, people crushed to death at Hillsborough weren’t ruling class.

But the mistake is not to follow this line to where it goes. Eventually it leads everywhere. The heads of the Water Industry Commission Scotland are ruling class, people who drink water are not ruling class. Isla Bumba is ruling class, Sandie Peggie is not ruling class. Historic Environment Scotland’s Head of Operations is ruling class, waiters of Indian subcontinental descent (the ‘chocolates’) are not ruling class.

CalMac Board is ruling class, islanders are not ruling class. The Glasgow City Council Directors who sorted themselves some very lucrative golden goodbyes are ruling class, Cllr Fiona Higgins who has pursued their dishonesty and is up in front of the Standards Commissioner is not ruling class.

No, Scotlands’ ruling classes don’t generally party on private Caribbean islands ‘decorated’ with young trafficked girls. They party in historic buildings they have no right treating as private property. They don’t deal in money like Epstein, but they do offer ropey businessmen half-billion pound guarantees on what look like an unminuted whim.

Right now they must be delighted you’re gawping and Mandelson in his Y-fronts, because they think it makes them invisible. And if they are invisible, they can just keep taking and taking.

So don’t let them be invisible. Never, ever forget that corruption, greed and the abuse of power by a ruling class creates a single thread which connects abuse through time and space and ties it altogether to explain why our species keeps fucking up, keeps making things worse.

We need to devise a new way of being governed, because neither their bloodlines nor their wealth come close to justifying any of this shit. Mandelson is nothing more than a standard ruling class chancer who pushed it just too far. Making this about him let’s the rest of them off the hook.

Again.

Source: Mandelson is an exaggeration, not an exception

[When did lying become normal?]

#2

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] When did...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Today at 04:06 AM

When did lying become normal?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Sorites Paradox, although in my head I wasn’t calling it that. A Sorites Paradox comes from a thought experiment where you have a ‘heap’ of stand and then you start taking grains of sand away individually. When there is only one grain left, no-one would call it a ‘heap’ any more. But when was that threshold crossed?

That is what has been on my mind throughout the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital scandal. It’s not that I’m surprised that they now appear to be saying the opposite of what they said before despite the facts not changing because I didn’t believe them in the first place. It’s that I got surprised I’m not surprised.

It opened up a very specific question for me – when did this happen? At what point did I shift from routinely believing what public officials told me (though allowing for spin, cherry-picking and exaggeration) to routinely not believing public officials?

It was some time before Covid, because by the time that Public Health Scotland was putting out false data the only purpose of which was to make the then-First Minister look good I was barely surprised. I was reading something, my head was screaming ‘that can’t be right’ and I just knew it wasn’t (in this case claiming that sending Covid-positive patients to care homes had not resulted in additional infection, a claim later withdrawn).

So let’s go to the other end, my earliest memories of politics. Those are from the 1980s. I’m not sure if I exactly believed Margaret Thatcher back then but I almost certainly didn’t assume that she was telling outright lies.

Moreover, that was the Yes Minister era too – it was famously about how to bend rules as far as they can be bent short of things like outright lying or illegality. We expected politicians to play fast and loose with truth in terms of exaggeration and over-statement, but outright lies were rare and I always felt that an official would be along later with a more reliable version of the story.

It was clear to me at the time that the health board had come under pressure to open the QEUH on time whether it was ready or not, it seemed overwhelmingly likely that the deaths attributed to poor water systems were caused by exactly that despite the denials, and so I assumed that the health boards denials that this was the case were only temporary and would be superseded when they had no room left to fib.

Which means that thereafter when the politician said they didn’t know, I didn’t believe them either and then when health board officials send letters saying that X is true and the only purpose of X is to protect their paymasters, I assume that X is also a knowing falsehood.

Gilding the political lilly is so out of hand these days that the moment when exaggeration turning into routine misleading isn’t entirely obvious to me

That is a pretty shocking and toxic set of circumstances, and I didn’t use to feel like this about the public realm. I write that even though I grew up with the Battle of Orgraeve on the telly and the terminally slow unwinding of the lies and deceit that took place in the aftermath of Hillsborough.

But those were big, massive events which some would see falling into the category of ‘national security’ and when I hear those words I then believe virtually none of what I’m told at face value. It was always the case that even the most liberal parts of the establishment tolerated and sometimes celebrated dishonesty when it came to national security.

Still, in the day to day affairs of government I didn’t feel like this, and I want to know when it started. There is an argument that says it was all downhill after Bernard Ingham who during the Thatcher era turned public communication from being a more staid official-led business and into the era of political spin that followed.

But it really wasn’t until this was accelerated under New Labour that I became more conscious of it. At first it was that perennial favourite the intentional and dishonest double-counting in budget announcements. It is now routinely believed that you need to wait days after a budget until someone or other has untangled all the bits and pieces of spin.

Was that always the case? I don’t remember it being like that, but I was young so perhaps that’s a perception issue. Likewise, gilding the political lilly is so out of hand these days that the moment when exaggeration turning into routine misleading isn’t entirely obvious to me.

Most certainly that doubt was no longer vague by the time we got into the world of lies around the Iraq War. Indeed it may be that ‘we create our own reality’ era of post-Cold War impunity that this really blew up. I am not alone in being sceptical about anything politicians say after the blatantness of the lies around Iraq.

Mind you, around that time I would have placed Scotland as comfortably less dishonest than Westminster. Those were still the early days of devolution and there seemed to be a lot of trust around. I don’t remember it being broken that often.

Take two examples of SQA crises. I was very closely involved in the 2000 crisis where poor administration led to a meltdown of the exams system. It was a real crisis, but I wrack my brains and cannot come up with any memory of anyone actually lying about it. In fact there was a reassuringly high degree of honesty from where I was.

But jump forward 20 years to another SQA crisis (Covid exam marking) and by this point I absolutely do not believe that the SQA was operating with full candour. In fact I know it wasn’t.

Sure it’s the culture, but it is the culture that was created and sustained by the actions of individual people

Whatever happened happened in that time window. So was it the SNP? Did things take a nosedive in 2007 when they took power? I can’t really come up with evidence of that. The Salmond administration was bolshie, headstrong and not averse to over statement, but I don’t remember it being particularly dishonest.

I mean, think of the referendum where Salmond was dragged over hot coals for overstating the extent to which he had taken proper policy advice on the issue of Europe. A few years later that kind of vainglorious boasting divorced from sustainable reality was hardly rare.

So was it Sturgeon? It would be too easy to solely blame her because you’ve got to remember that at the same time you had Boris Johnstone so it is impossible to argue that this was an issue related to Scotland alone.

And yet, symbolically, I still feel that the launch of a ferry whose windows were painted on was some kind of a rubicon crossed. Is launching a ship that is nowhere near seaworthy an honest act? I think not. For Sturgeon spin and reality seemed to merge.

In fact she should have been pulled up for it an awful lot more than she was. I suspect that the media simply hadn’t counted how many grains of sand had been removed from the ‘heap’ at this point and were still calling it a heap.

But by the time we get to the Salmond Affair I don’t think there was much pretence of real honestly left. The official story of ‘what happened’ is to this day literally beyond belief. It almost felt that the dishonesty problem was so out of hand that the only way to cover up the dishonesty was redactions.

And that is the truth; I can give you a solid sense of ‘before’ and I can very much tell you what is wrong now, but precisely when one state shifted into the other? I don’t know exactly. I can’t pin it on a single person and find myself wanting to reach of ‘it’s the culture’ explanations.

But that isn’t enough. Sure it’s the culture, but it is the culture that was created and sustained by the actions of individual people. Some of it is out of control, overly-powerful officials who’ve learned that they can fuck up, tell lies and still be protected. Some of it is the culture of boastful politics which came to define government in Scotland over the last decade.

What isn’t in doubt is that the trust problem is real and that it’s effects are corrosive. I am absolutely certain that Nicola Sturgeon and probably also John Swinney put pressure on the hospital to open early, I am certain the hospital lied about the outcomes and I’m pretty sure the politicians knew they were lying and were happy to let them.

And I could be wrong about any of this, but once you’ve crossed a line where you don’t trust institutions and dishonesty is assumed, it’s too late. Lying has become a routine aspect of public life in Scotland and now that it has we have good reason not to believe anything. And that’s a disaster.

Source: When did lying become normal?

[Politicians need to stop being 'mid']

#3

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Politici...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Today at 03:15 AM

Politicians need to stop being 'mid'

First published by Common Weal

There’s this bump in the road… Not a metaphor, it’s an actual bump. It’s a menace and has caused so much strife to so many people it became famous. But no-one did anything about it. This is happening in the richest city in the world, a city where everyone seems to struggle to make the necessary investments in people’s lives. No-one did anything about that either.

Here’s why – one is too small and the other is too big. It really does come down to that alone. The solution to problems like this is supposed to be ‘politics’, but politics is now a very specific size. It’s far too big to fit in your life but it’s far too small to fight any serious fights. So it fails.

This has a name in physics – it is called the scaling problem. What works at one scale doesn’t work at another, or small changes in one number can cause giant changes in other numbers. The Big Friendly Giant was four times taller than a human so they gave him four times as much food. He was starving – because he’s four times wider and four times deeper too so he’s really 64 times bigger.

Back to the bump for a second; it is known as the Williamsburg Bump because it is at the start of the Williamsburg Bridge in New York. It was just a construction error – a gap was a little too big so they had to put a little ramp in to connect two bits of road, and the ramp is far too steep. It has been a danger to cyclists for years and years.

Everyone knew this and it was famous, but no-one did anything about it. Because politics doesn’t work on that scale. Imagine this was a bump in Scotland – if government did anything about it at all they’d ask KPMG to assess the number of such bumps (that just cost us £100k) and then the Scottish Futures Trust would have a dozen well-paid staff writing a tender for it (costing us another few tens of thousands).

They would eventually produce a contract proposal for ‘all the bumps’. The contract would be lucrative and wasteful and expensive. So they tell the Scottish Government this who reply ‘nah, too much money’. Which means £120k has been spent and the bump remains unfixed.

This in turn needs to be scaled in two other directions. First, upwards. If you take every small problem and turn it into a slightly different big problem because you don’t do small problems, this rampant inefficiency grows like the Big Friendly Giant’s stomach. Waste in government isn’t so much ‘regulation’ as gigantism.

And then downwards – because at the human scale this just looks incompetent. Seriously, how much effort does it really take to fix one bump? Cyclists have been angry about this for ages. If you’re not a giant, this just looks like something where there is no reasonable excuse for inaction.

Well to make a point, new Mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani just fixed the bump. In person. Yes it was a stunt, but it was a stunt that achieved something contemporary politics is dreadful at – making politics relevant at a human scale.

As I have been pointing out for years, the only people on the planet who care about ‘a thousand new jobs’ are politicians. A thousand jobs mean nothing to us; all that matters is the one we have, the one we could get and the one we want. A thousand shit jobs is, for us, just a shit job.

Politicians never get this because they think the world is made up of performance indicators. In a performance indicator, small things disappear. Approximately 99.99999997 per cent of Americans have not been killed by ICE. Statistically it’s a non-issue.

Politics has a scale problem because it came to see itself as small

So let’s look at the other end of the size spectrum. To maintain a Mamdani link, you could read this or let me summarise it. It argues (approvingly) that Mamdani isn’t a socialist but a social democrat because he is doing smaller, pragmatic things that can be done to improve lives rather than trying to alter the ownership structure of the economy.

It is a common argument this one – best not to deal with all that ‘means of production’ stuff, just do some stuff with expanded childcare and some subsidised housing. But it makes me laugh. First of all, the only real successes of social democracy were really socialism, like mass council house building, nationalising public utilities and the NHS.

The role of social democracy has really been little more than ‘now don’t fuck it up’. But creating new things that last? Social democracy has been woeful. I can tell you what FDR, Attlee and Mitterrand did because it was socialist in nature and changed the world and we still live with it today. Clinton, Obama, Merkel, Blair, Hollande – what did they leave behind? Only decline.

Here’s why; social democracy, as defined by contemporary social democrats, is the definition of ‘never small, definitely not too big’. For the social democrat, above them is the market and below them is the citizen. Messing around with the former is above their pay grade and worrying too much about the individual experience of the latter is just stressful.

So instead they exist in between, doing social policy to handle the worst outcomes of this unequal citizen-versus-market battle they have walked away from. Sure, they made asbestos illegal, but they didn’t demand that housing corporations properly insulate the new houses they build. Medium-sized.

The reason social democracy leads to decline is how easy it is to undo. That is the point. Social democracy exists inside a more powerful superstructure of ‘the market’ so the things it does are portable, not permanent. Then the right comes along, dumps the social democracy stuff and structurally increases the power of the market.

Then the social democrat returns, leaves the market as is and gets back on with some more temporary, portable social policy initiatives that no-one objects to too much. But that snarling, empowered market is now more destructive than before. And at the citizen scale they don’t believe in the politicians any more because that’s what they’ve been conditioned to believe through experience.

Politics has a scale problem because it came to see itself as small. The lords of the market call this ‘agile’. But it’s really a failure to govern. Look at the polling; people hate this stuff, precisely because they feel this split; they get neglect and performance indicators, the powerful get deference and law change – and we’re supposed to be chuffed at Swift Bricks.

Don’t get me wrong; Swift Bricks are good things, but if they are making the newspaper then government is skew-whiff. It’s a perfect medium-sized problem you can play politics with and no-one much really cares.

Meanwhile last week I was in Cumnock with the wonderful 9CC Group (a group of nine community councils who took over the wind farm community payments locally and distributes them without interference from government or the local authority). I saw precisely what you never see in Scotland – a £3,000 grant to fix a roof and another few hundred on some new chairs and tables for a tiny clubhouse.

These sums are transformative – a £150,000 building is saved from decline, a community organisation can attract new members now it’s facilities aren’t dreadfully dated. But where else in Scotland do you get that kind of money? Can you imagine a civil servant in Edinburgh saying ‘we can solve this by giving them a few hundred pounds’? Can you imagine a local authority?

In a democracy what matters is small things and big things – if you get those right, medium-sized things take care of themselves

Here is the reality, one politics cannot come to terms with. In a democracy what matters is small things and big things. If you get those right, medium-sized things take care of themselves. Literally no-one in government says that ever and it is why they are so useless.

But if people live in a world where bumps are fixed, roofs are mended and broken chairs are replaced, they see their democracy delivering for them. They feel their tax to be worth paying. They get that this is a system that is working for them.

Meanwhile throughout history the biggest consistent truth is that ordinary people’s lives are shaped by the whims of the powerful – medieval feudal lords, AI data centres, doesn’t matter. They do it, you pay the price.

Right now the Scottish Government is running around trying to manage medium-sized performance indicators such that the NHS looks like it is working. But its food policy is weak as dishwater because despite an enormous amount of the strain on the NHS being diet-related, you don’t muck around with the profit margin on multinational food corporations.

A ‘top and bottom, not middle’ approach would focus on the ‘journey’ of patients as they move through the system, would realise it needs a better data structure and proper signposting, more information, a sense that this is patient-centred. It would begin to streamline our experience and feeling.

And then they should be cracking down hard on Industrially Produced Edible Substances (or Ultra-Processed Food if you must), abusive social media, poor housing quality – because obesity, a mental health crisis and poverty remain at the heart of demand for health services. It fixes the NHS without so much as a performance indicator in sight.

This reality requires two things that don’t exist in Scotland – real decentralisation and brave politicians. It’s not just that politicians don’t do small things, they can’t. People mocked Mamdani by sending pictures of other potholes and bumps to fix. If he responds to all of them he’ll get nothing else done. You need to give budget and power to people near to the problem.

That is the opposite of Scotland’s local authorities, a definition of ‘wrong size’ – too giant to be local, too small to be strategically regional. It was a market ultra-purist who created that system…

And brave is the opposite of our politicians. The outcome? A hard right government might get elected and make this all worse because people in England are sick of declining high streets which is becoming a totemic issue for communities that feel ignored. You try and get a politician to take town centres seriously – they’re busy boosting AI data centres. Who has time for the small stuff?

There is this bump in the road, and this time it’s a metaphor. The bump is politicians who have curled up in a position of power above the rest of us but underneath where real power lies, preening themselves like cats on a sofa in a burning house. Unless they can overcome there scaling problem, they won’t fix anything.

Source: Politicians need to stop being 'mid'

[It is time for artists to tool up]

#4

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] It is ti...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Today at 12:38 AM

It is time for artists to tool up

I wanted to follow up on Common Weal’s briefing today (which you should really sign up for). Political support for the arts sector in Scotland has never been actually ‘good’ since devolution and in the last ten years it has undoubtedly been ‘bad’.

The fast version of the briefing is that in reality arts funding has been cut in real terms almost every single year since the independence referendum while Radio Scotland is decimating its support for new Scottish music and the film funding body has given up on Scottish filmmaking in favour of hawking Scotland as a ‘location’ for what it thinks is economic development purposes.

Here’s the heartbreaking thing – it has worked splendidly. The more the funding for the arts has been cut, the more it is controlled by the ruling classes and distributed in a pattern designed to impose discipline and obedience, the quieter and quieter artists in Scotland have become.

I know this for a fact; I have now spoken to loads of people in the arts who say ‘it’s absolutely dreadful and someone should do something about it but if I speak up I’ll get no chance of funding my next project’. The only people who seem able to do so are the established names, and even they do not appear to want to get too far on the wrong side of politicians for various reasons.

To quote Renton, it’s a shite state of affairs. I keep quoting Renton not just because so much just now is a shite state of affairs but because it reminds me what it was like when I was growing up. Artists were scary back then. Politicians worried about what artists thought and said.

In my school days (throughout the 1980s) art was sharply political. This was very largely a response to Thatcher, and it was coordinated, purposeful and visible. Art in the 1990s was perhaps less directly political (especially after Blair made it into Downing Street) but it was still edgier and riskier.

In Scotland that meant Rebel Inc publishing shocking, provoking tales of working class life, drug use, violence and the many realities of ordinary people who lived here (along with much more), giving us Trainspotting. Then along came devolution…

The invisible hounds of domination bark their silent barks and everyone gets back into line and shuts the fuck up

There has been a lot of reevaluation of the 1990s suggesting that there was too much provocation for its own sake, which is possibly true. But drifting into a period of safe and cosy art is decidedly not better. Art which never provokes is lacking. Take this exhibition which seeks to ‘free you from mundane ways of thinking’.

It seems to think whimsy is a challenge. It seems to believe that making you stop for a few seconds and think ‘that is sort of funny I guess’ is a radical act. It seems to me to have a perspective problem where it’s own self-importance is blocking out the reality of what we’re supposed to pay to go and look at. Say what you want about Damien Hirst but you didn’t chuckle politely.

As far as I can tell, Scotland’s ruling classes have created a new expectation of what art is. At times it seems to sit comfortably inside either an airport bookshop or your bellybutton, either an economic earner or a polite investigation of someone or other’s ‘spiritual journey’. This matters very much to accountants and whomever’s spiritual journey it was.

But here’s the truth; even people in the arts sector tell me they’re bored of another ‘tasteful one-person play about a moment of awakening’. I’ve seen a couple and honestly, they can be as formulaic and predictable as a Marvel movie. It’s not that they’re not worth having, in the same was as Thor Ragnarök or Black Panther are worth having. They’re just not enough.

I have all the sympathy in the world for the artists in this. Again, I know quite a few and they produce what they can fund; of course they do or they couldn’t produce it. But I think it is changing them and I think it is changing us and our expectation of what art is ‘for’.

There is nothing wrong with art as decoration and absolutely nothing wrong with art as entertainment, but art as emotional decoration? Art as sales figures? Who is gaining from this? The ruling classes get safe weekend entertainment, validation and control. The artists eek out a living unless they break through.

But society as a whole? The social role of art? Where is that these days? The situation is so bad that we can’t even talk about the problem. Disguising everyone and everything involved, I was in a discussion about programming for an arts event and suggested that a session should be included on why art and arts funding has become so risk-averse.

Everyone said ‘it’s terrible isn’t it – but will this threaten next year’s funding?’. And the invisible hounds of domination bark their silent barks and everyone gets back into line and shuts the fuck up. They fear the alternative – to be shut the fuck up.

So there is no way out of this trap for many in the culture sector and not the slightest hint of a politician who would like art to be more challenging lest it be challenging to them. So we exist in a world where arts are getting smaller and smaller – and so are the artists.

Arts figures no longer bestride Scotland. If an ordinary person sees someone in the arts and they’re not a movie star its probably another shot of Val McDiarmid hanging out with Nicola Sturgeon (the woman who presided over the cuts). It’s the London Underground upside down – don’t see it, don’t say it, sorted.

Hugh MacDiarmid did more to shape modern Scotland in his lunch break than Scottish Enterprise will have done in its whole existence by the time it is mercifully abolished

I can only think of one solution to this – for artists to tool up and fight back. I wish politics wasn’t like that, I really do, but it is the politicians who are to blame for this culture and so they must pay the price. Because in modern Scotland if you don’t threaten harm to a politician you don’t get anything. Not physical harm obviously, bad headlines.

I really, really mean this – the only way you get the attention of a senior politician in Scotland is to threaten them with bad coverage, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. I used to do it myself – ‘it would be a shame if we didn’t get this funding and we needed to call the media and tell them you’ve betrayed this great Scottish institution…’ or whatever.

I wish there was evidence-based policy but there isn’t, there is power-based politics where whomever can do a politician the most harm gets what they want. And it was the politicians who conditioned us to behave like this because they constantly ignore evidence in favour of ‘good publicity’.

Unless artists start making their life hell, this is going to keep happening. But somehow the artists need to be protected – hence ‘tool up’. None individually should be made to wield the weapon. Which simply means they need a campaign body to inflict the harm on their behalf.

Two people on modest pay can bend a politician to their will if the politician is scared enough of negative coverage of the subject concerned, and politicians (and particularly SNP politicians) don’t like to be on the wrong side of the arts community.

I really believe that the only option is massive structural reform. Common Weal has set out a model where practicing artists form a kind of ‘academy’ which elects a Council (a Scottish Arts Council) and it is that which governs the allocation of arts funding. Because I no longer believe politicians can be trusted with the arts.

But to get there or anywhere else different than today, pain must be inflicted. Scrape together some cash (there are arts figures with money), create ‘Arts Crisis Scotland’ or whatever, hire a couple of people who know how to make trouble and inform Scotland’s political classes that it’s only going to get worse and worse for them until they stop trying to control Scotland’s culture based on their political self-interest.

I believe very, very deeply in the arts and I really do believe that they are an essential engine of our future. Hugh MacDiarmid did more to shape modern Scotland in his lunch break than Scottish Enterprise will have done in its whole existence by the time it is mercifully abolished.

Instead I’m watching the arts fade from view in Scotland, resigned to stepping back and providing the decoration while Scotland is sold out to overseas investors. The arts must at least feel a bit threatening to the established order. To get to even that low base needs the threat to be brought to the politicians. I wish it wasn’t so, but you can only play the game that is in front of you…

So artists must tool up and bring the fight to Holyrood. In a way more real than most people accept, Scotland’s future depends on it.

Source: It is time for artists to tool up

[Everywhere you look, weak political leaders destroying democracy]

#5

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Everywhe...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Feb 04, 2026, 11:41 PM

Everywhere you look, weak political leaders destroying democracy

Ask a structural engineer – weakness isn’t something you can identify from a distance. A stress factor in a steel girder doesn’t advertise itself. Real strength and the appearance of strength are not the same thing.

Likewise, with politicians, ingore the show and watch the other stuff. There is a ‘big political book of how to look tough’ and they’ve all got a copy on their shelves. And yet they all appear to be incredibily weak, incredibly delicate. The outcome is the death of our political parties.

At the moment the big political players all have leaderships that appear simultaneously obsessed with the show of strength yet act like they are petrified of their own shadows. None are led by someone who in the last year or two hasn’t taken paranoid steps to try and protect themselves from challenge.

This is most obviously the case with that most perplexing conundrum Keir Starmer. A man who made his reputation in part through a ‘decisive’ (i.e. undemocratic) purge of legitimate members of the Labour Party because he didn’t like their political ideology. This was disgraceful, but the British Establishment likes nothing more than a display of strength against the left so praised what they should have condemned.

Since then Starmer has been bent further and further into the shape of a hard man, being ruthless in throwing people out of cabinet or out of the party altogether, of talking to and about protestors like a thug talks about their victim. Yet none of this has ever really disguised what was clearly weakness.

Because put him in front of someone whom the British Establishment doesn’t reward you for crushing or badmouthing and he melts like snow (or more accurately, crawls around on the ground picking up the papers you just dropped like the secretary to the deputy finance officer of a regional sales department). Starmer is a coward in the face of the powerful.

But more to the point, he is a coward in the face of challenge to his failed regime. There are uncontacted tribes in the Amazon who woke up this morning and said ‘did you see that Keir Starmer wet his pants when Andy Burnham applied to stand for parliament?’. Keir is busy trotting out lines about the rules and cost implications and running the country.

Meanwhile sentient human beings just see a failure who everyone knows his party wants rid of, blocking one of the people they might replace him with in what is patently a vague hope that if all competent challengers are sleeping with the fishes, perhaps he’ll get to play at being Prime Minister a bit longer.

As a reminder, when John Major faced a challenge from John Redwood in 1995 he showed some actual courage

As a reminder, when John Major faced a challenge from John Redwood in 1995 he showed some actual courage. He resigned as Tory leader and turned up for the fight, beating Redwood and making himself untouchable at the top of his party.

More pathetic than John Major? Oh that it were only Starmer…

Because in the seemingly endless degredation of democracy in the SNP, you may have forgotten that John Swinney has made Keir Starmer look brave. Starmer only blocked one potential challenger, John Swinney altered the constitution of the SNP to block every and all challengers forever.

It now takes 1,500 individual nominations from at least ten different branches before you can put yourself forward as a challenger to the leadership – and the SNP effectively bans members from contacting other members. I am unconvinced John Swinney could get that many party members to endorse him in a leadership election.

It was outrageous, but such is the sad, decrepit state of the SNP it was just nodded through. And of course this comes off the back of ten years of near constant meddling by Nicola Sturgeon to banish anyone critical of her from the party. The move where she overturned the democratic decisions of the membership by getting the NEC to require that only a disabled person could top each list was breathtaking in its cynicism.

The Scottish Greens pride themselves on democracy – just as soon as the leadership has bullied any opposition to its extreme ideology out of the party and made it clear they’re not allowed back. Just in case members imagined they got to think for themselves or make their own decisions.

In all of this, the Tories actually come out rather well. The worst Badenoch has done so far is just to make the usual round of the TV studios claiming a challenge to her would be a distraction (after dreadful local elections increased speculation about her future). That’s North Face of the Eiger brave by comparison to the others.

It is no more Andy Burnham the victim here than it was Kate Forbes or Andy Whightman before – it’s us, all of us, our democracy and our future

Here is the point; politicians have reasonable cause to be paranoid because it is an unusual job where there are a bunch of people constantly trying to get you fired. But that’s the game. It’s like footballers objecting to being tackled.

In fact let’s extend that metaphor for a second; imagine footballers acted like politicians. Every time a promising young player emerged, the senior squad would break his legs, in case he takes their place one day. All new talent would be hampered, pushed out, bad-mouthed – anything to stop them flourishing.

And what kind of football team would that produce? That’s what’s wrong in our political parties. It really started with Blair whose moves to control who was selected to stand for the party was unprecedented at the time. The SNP took that and ran with it, creating the most repressive system of parliamentarian selection I’ve ever seen.

Starmer appears to have learned from that. His purge of the left was barely constitutional and his faction’s control of the party had little to do with anything other than brute force. So let’s have a look – how is it working out for them?

Well, the fact that Burnham (who was never previously considered anything other than mediocre) is their best bet tells you everything. There is no talent, only compliance. Ther SNP has no credible leader after Swinney (his level of credibility is not high either). The Greens came up with Ross Greer and Gillian McKay, a ways short of convincing.

It’s like that football team – all fresh young talent has been purged and now the second tier is in complete control of everything forever. It’s destroying party politics. If you keep destroying the best new talent because it might prove to be a challenge to you, you display your weakness for all to see and you kill the chance of a stronger future.

Apart from weakness, there is another unifying factor of everyone I’ve mentioned – they are very personally ambitious and little encumbered by principles or ideology they can’t ditch along the way. Even Ross Greer (the most committed of this group) finds it easy to justify rolling back on public policy, as we saw when Green government ministers repeatedly delivery a weak broth of non-solutions in their portfolio areas.

And that’s where we are now, an era of David Camerons, a whole generation of people whose main belief is that ‘I’m the kind of guy who should be running things’ but who can’t back it up with the courage to stand on their own feet and fight their own battles.

It is no more Andy Burnham the victim here than it was Kate Forbes or Andy Whightman before – it’s us, all of us, our democracy and our future. All because parties keep selecting weak men (and women) based on how tough they pretend they are.

Source: Everywhere you look, weak political leaders destroying democracy

[Scotland's future is now clear; ambition or subordination]

#6

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Scotland...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Feb 04, 2026, 10:37 PM

Scotland's future is now clear; ambition or subordination

First published by Common Weal

Last week I was bemoaning Scotland’s stultifying governing class orthodoxy and outlining the ways in which it is holding Scotland down. Since then I have found myself facing that orthodoxy again more than once, and actually I don’t think it is holding us down, I think it is cutting us to shreds.

The various examples that I have encountered in under seven days don’t really matter; what does matter is that you understand this overriding orthodoxy and that it angers you enough that in some near, foreseeable future you join the fight to get rid of it.

The governing orthodoxy I want to slay is that Scotland can’t do anything. Nothing Scotland tries could or will work and in any case it is all illegal and that is that.

Well let me give you a different perspective, because this is a code red, seven bells emergency on multiple fronts. Geopolitically, democratically, socially, environmentally, Mark Carney couldn’t have put it better – this is a rupture not a transition. The old is gone so if you can’t build the new, you’re fucked. You really are.

Just like no-one believed us when we were saying this five or six years ago (the Mark Carney speech at times sounded like he’d lifted his thinking from Common Weal), soon no-one will not believe that this was a moment when serious, radical, bold action was needed. So why is Scotland so against it?

You might be amazed just how much effort Scotland’s rulers put into this. They have wall after wall of highly paid officials whose job seems to be to prevent things happening, just in case. You get promoted for saying what is impossible and for imposing that nihilistic certainty on everyone who foolishly believes they might be able to do something.

This is a case of becoming what you say; officialdom in Scotland has been trying to block change for so long that it has slowly morphed into a superstructure of failure. It is no longer just trying to block change, it has come to believe change is impossible.

Some of this is corruption. I have been told so many times that something or other is illegal under EU law that I just glaze over, knowing full well that the thing which I’m being told is illegal is common practice in other EU countries. And it is always something which would have challenged the interests of a corporation with a close relationship with those telling you it is illegal.

I have been told that reforming procurement to give Scottish businesses a chance was illegal. I was told that a state-owned shipbuilder was illegal. I was told that land reform was illegal. I am still being told that public ownership of energy is illegal. It’s like if you challenge corporate interests or the interests of the powerful, someone just shouts ‘illegal’.

But it’s not just ‘you’re not allowed’, there is also a lot of ‘that could never work here’. We cling to outdated public sector software systems because we’re afraid to develop fit for purpose ones. We never start big initiatives like National Energy Companies or National Care Services because we don’t really have the courage to try, and we bottle it if it challenges a vested interest anyway.

Just as the Scottish Parliament and those in it have sought to make themselves small lest anything hits them, so the threats and challenges have grown and grown

In fact there is an entire framework of failure built into the system, so many sceptics littered all over the policy landscape and empowered to slow or stop new developments, so many would-be ‘village elders’ who owe their position to sucking air through there teeth with a world-weary sigh.

And then of course there are all the external forces who want public policy to serve them and their clients by making sure nothing ever replaces them. Among the worst of those are the big consultancies that control policy development and specifically want us to ‘buy’ goods and services from their corporate clients. All roads always lead back to yesterday, that decade when they all made themselves rich. They want it to last forever.

For them the process is the outcome. For them another round of commissioned powerpoint slides and target operating models is how government is done. Delivering something isn’t the point; the working group to discuss the thing being delivered is the point. And eventually it will all (and I really do mean all) lead to the private sector. We don’t build, we issue contracts.

Let me quote the excellent Carney speech again; this is not sovereignty, it's the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination. Hear hear. Scotland has been performing sovereignty since devolution – look at our big parliament! Watch as we do nothing just in case doing something doesn’t work! Marvel at our working groups! Our targets! Our performance-unrelated pay bonuses!

Now dolly out (which is when a cinema camera rolls back on tracks to reveal a wider picture). What is towering over Scotland as Scotland cowers? Big Things. Big, Important Things. Like climate change. Like the breakdown of the world order. Like unstable US technology platforms. Like potential global trade disruption. Like internal rebellion from scunnered citizens. Like AI.

Just as the Scottish Parliament and those in it have sought to make themselves small lest anything hits them, so the threats and challenges have grown and grown. It is all out of proportion now. The performance of sovereignty means John Swinney is offering to send troops to Ukraine when the truth is that we can’t get a ferry full of passengers across to Arran.

Corruption, low quality leaders, convoluted policy structures, quangos that act like speed bumps to slow everything down, corporate lobbyists who undermine change, consultants who deliberately undermine good government, a general lack of national self confidence – choose your reasons but accept the reality.

I really have had enough of our addiction to pre-emptive failure and I'm becoming deeply concerned about how far behind we are being left

Novelist Tomassi di Lampedusa said of his home island "In Sicily it doesn’t matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all". Likewise, in Scotland the only true sin is to try, and the only true sinners are those with an idea.

I rather fear that if the current Scottish regime had been in power in 1939 it would simply have surrendered. Britain’s leaders back then managed to increase coal production by five million tonnes a week in the course of two or three months, yet if I ask a policymaker to at least consider rationalising Scotland’s public sector data or to start a National Energy Company, they dismiss it with derisory laugh.

If you think I exaggerate any of this, go and try and find someone who has tried to do something in Scotland and tried to get Scotland’s public sector to support them or act as a partner and ask them how they got on.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week because of a conversation I had at the weekend. The subject really doesn’t matter, but the tone of the conversation does. I was asking someone I know about how to go about doing something that I think is now pretty urgent, but is fairly large in scale. She kept telling me every reason it couldn’t be done.

Then I pointed out that it was being done just now in another European country. Oh sure, she replied, they could do it there. And yet there is no fundamental difference in the two nations being discussed other than in their heads. Because it comes back to that absolutely spot-on quote from Henry Ford; "whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right".

Because fundamentally there is nothing wrong with Scotland – quite the contrary. Scotland has enormous resources, a phenomenal track record of innovation, discovery and creation (if you go back a bit), a highly educated population, a developed economy and a relatively stable democracy. We have some skills gaps and we lack a proper domestic industry based, but none of the fundamentals are ‘missing’.

The problem is us, our expectations of ourselves. We have vacillated between politicians who were scared to try big initiatives and politicians who wanted to talk about big initiatives without having the nerve to push through delivery in a risk-averse system.

It needs people to step forward and say not ‘we can’t’ but ‘we will’. And by ‘we will’ I mean setting out a bold and ambitious plan because we believe it is needed and making it happen without watering it down to a fraction of the original ambition. I mean a leadership class who will say ‘no, properly, try again’ not ‘oh, that’ll do then I guess’.

We 100 per cent know this can be done because it happens every time there is a war (both Ukraine and Russia have absolutely innovated their economies because they were left with no choice). We know that people who have unlimited money and little fear of failure can do it. We know that China can do it. We know that we used to be able to do it.

I really have had enough of our addiction to pre-emptive failure and I’m becoming deeply concerned about how far behind we are being left in this ‘best small country leading the world in an arc of prosperity’ (to mangle the catchphrases of three First Ministers). Because we’re not the best small country if measured by outcomes, we’re not in an arc of prosperity and we’re leading the world in very little.

I don’t doubt Scotland, but I have enormous reservations about its gatekeepers. They are like succubus, seducing us with their self certainty then sucking the life force out of the nation as they roll over and let corporations run our lives.

Let me offer a final warning on this; in ten years from now the world in which we are living is likely to be pretty unrecognisable from the one we are in now. Little is going to stand the test of time, much will be replaced, rebuilt and rethought. None of that is going to happen all by itself.

It’s a rupture, not a transition. We have to start believing we’re the kind of people who can. We can't perform sovereignty any longer and pretend it isn’t subjugation. The worst thing of all is that our first surrender has been to ourselves. This cannot be allowed to go on.

Source: Scotland's future is now clear; ambition or subordination

[New security environment is a boost for independence, not a threat]

#7

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] New secu...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Feb 04, 2026, 09:42 PM

New security environment is a boost for independence, not a threat

First published by The National

The idea that the breakdown in the world order (so far as there ever was one) counts against Scottish independence is becoming a consistent theme. It is argued that we can’t defend ourselves in an unstable world.

This is to see the whole issue back-to-front; what is happening just now is a great argument in favour of Scottish independence if we could only see it, understand it and respond appropriately. The barrier to doing that is SNP policy.

In 2012 a group of people on the right of the SNP set out the current defence strategy; make yourself as small a target as possible, politically-speaking. The idea, espoused explicitly by Angus Robertson, was that if we tried not to talk about defence and security and in as far as we did we only said the same thing as everyone else, then they wouldn’t be able to attack us. It would go away.

It didn’t, it hasn’t and now it is an albatross around our necks. Because the SNP’s current defence plan really is vulnerable in the current world. Relying on Nato while slowly building up a Nato-compliant force highly integrated into the Nato structures, was always a sop rather than a policy, and it has fallen apart.

The alternative is much stronger. That is to go on the attack and to say very explicitly that it is the British defence establishment which has left us undefended, equipped with ego-boosting toys like Trident and aircraft carriers that do nothing whatsoever to defend us and are all-but unusable for anything but following the US around in its adventures.

We should have prioritised defence spending that secured our territory, but instead we spent it on vanity to please the Americans. That is a weak point for the union, not for us. But to exploit it we need credible, coherent and very different approach.

That is and always was to focus first on territorial defence. The ludicrous sums we spent on Trident could have equipped Scotland with a coastal defence system. That should be our focus. Scotland is hard to invade (as our history of not being invaded shows) and we can make it very hard indeed.

I don’t want to offer a blueprint for this because things are changing rapidly and there is an enormous amount of innovation taking place. But I can pretty well guarantee you that our focus should be first on detection, then on disabling, then on interception.

The former would be comfortably the big ticket item. I wouldn’t have contemplated this ten years ago but I think an independent Scotland should look seriously at putting up a satellite monitoring system so we can track exactly what is happening in Scotland’s land, seas and airspace.

The cost of this would vary depending on approach, but could be anything from half a billion pounds to £2 billion. Remember, ‘we’ are currently spending well over £5 billion on the UK’s ‘defence’ every year.

Britain's defensive capabilities being exposed as the Emperor's New Clothes is not a weakness for us but a strength

Once you know you have ships or aircraft in your territory and if you have confirmed hostile intent, the next step should be to be able to disable them. This almost certainly means fleets of drones (both arial and aquatic) ready to launch from a variety of coastal sites. We probably want some anti-aircraft missiles as well.

There are many options for disabling ships (Scotland couldn’t be successfully invaded by air alone). Once that is done we need a basic coastal naval defence – cutters (intercept ships) would predominate.

After that the ‘must have’ is a proper home guard, a military equipped to either overpower or to make life hell for anyone who actually set foot on our soil. We should be training in guerilla war not because anyone is actually going to invade us but because we want to deter anyone thinking about it.

From there we can discuss priorities. Should we be aiming to protect ourselves from missile attack? Do we want to create a system of intercept missiles, or could a defensive ‘curtains of cheap drones’ be viable? To what extent to we really want an expeditionary army at all?

Otherwise it’s helicopters and troop transport – we have very little need for fast jets. The rest is about the real areas for security – proper intelligence services, proper awareness of the threat to infrastructure (data cables, telecommunications, energy systems). It is time we were sinking more of this vulnerable infrastructure underground.

And we need a much better plan to deal with outages – as much for civilian purposes as anything. How do we communicate internally if a hostile power was able to cut the internet?

Ideally we would have taken this seriously years ago when it first became clear that this was the real battleground of the future, not posturing along behind America and its Nato hangers-onners. That’s not what happened and establishment-pleasing soundbites took the place of seriousness.

But nevertheless, Britain’s defensive capabilities being exposed as the Emperor’s New Clothes is not a weakness for us but a strength. It wasn’t that hard to defend Britain and it isn’t that hard to defend Scotland. Both were sacrificed for sycophancy to America and a desire to pretend we were a world power.

If the independence movement can’t take that situation and turn it to our advantage, hell mend us.

Source: New security environment is a boost for independence, not a threat

[Ruling class impunity is out of control]

#8

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Ruling c...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Feb 04, 2026, 09:11 PM

Ruling class impunity is out of control

You may know this. In February 1567, Mary Queen of Scots’s husband Lord Darnley was murdered. More specifically he was murdered by the Fourth Early of Bothwell, James Hepburn. It wasn’t really a complicated case and should have resulted in a simple conviction.

But instead Bothwell flooded the city with his armed followers and intimidated the witnesses to the point where the trial collapsed and he got away with it all – I mean really got away with it given that he then went and kidnapped Mary and coerced her into marriage.

That is how the world worked for the powerful; justice could easily be evaded by using their power to quash legitimate procedures designed to hold people to account equally. It is a long-standing Scottish tradition which is being faithfully upheld by the Scottish Government to this day.

That is the only conclusion I can draw from the news that Craig Mearns is back at work. As I hope you know, I generally do not like picking on individual people who do not pursue political power, I’m not a fan of the culture of calling for someone to be fired every five minutes and for all I know he might be a lovely person.

But here are the facts of the case; he is the Director of Operations at Historic Environment Scotland on a salary of £130,000 (dear god), who was at a work event when he referred to waiters of south Asian descent as ‘the chocolates’ (WTF?), who was not suspended but rather allowed to be signed of on full pay with ‘stress’ (how on earth…) and is now coming back to work like nothing happened with only one condition…

…He’s got to do a training course on racism. Racism is an obscure subject which has been little discussed of late and is little known among the governing classes so it is perfectly natural for them to be running around shouting nasty racist shit at waiters. These are honest mistakes anyone could make.

Except that is the opposite of the truth. It is (checks) 2026 and we have just been through a decade of extensive debate about racism and our failure to come to terms with it. Someone in a promoted position who missed this should be fired anyway. An organisation which at no point in the last decade sent any kind of memo to staff saying ‘don’t be racist because its wrong’ needs disbanded.

Is there any ruling class sin not absolvable through the introduction of some token training course or other?

And absolutely anyone (a welder, a cleaner, a high school kid) who doesn’t know that using racist epithets to describe an entire category of people based on their skin colour is absolutely unacceptable in the work place is a liability. My kids were put straight on this at primary school.

It is farcical. At this rate the truly inexplicable level of organisational failure at HES is going to be ‘sorted’ by sending another one of them on ‘why you don’t twerk on guests at a work function’ lessons, another to ‘using public property for personal entertaining purposes isn’t allowed’ school and then getting Angus Robertson on a ‘how to be a Cabinet Secretary’ degree. All good then?

This should really be expanded, no? We could get Michael Matheson on a ‘how to use an iPad and why pretending you didn’t watch the football and really it was your kids is a bit off’ training and he could just slot back into government. Peter Mandelson could do a class on a ‘it’s not real corruption until you’ve been fired four times for being dodgy so don’t do it again’ course then we could get him straight on Donald Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’.

This approach appeared to have been used on Jefferey Epstein who at some point seems to have acquired such a dossier of evidence of abuse that powerful people sent him on a ‘stop raping underage girls’ course and called it a day at that. Oh had Jimmy Saville only seen that bright dawn…

Is there any ruling class sin not absolvable through the introduction of some token training course or other? If Peter Murrell is found guilty, will he be sentenced to arithmetic?

So why are we mucking around? I can tell you one thing for sure; this is the definition of government efficiency. A £100 training course and done? We could empty the prisons with an investment of peanuts. "Mr Ferguson, I hereby unsentence you on condition that you do a class on why breaking into your neighbour’s house and beating him up is really not on."

It never ends, it recurs again and again, a national fuck you to a population that is growing sick of being lectured by people who never face consequences no matter what they do

I’ll tell you why, because fuck the plebs. Sandy Peggie didn’t get to pop of for a couple of months on semi-dignified health leave and then come back with some token training course and all else good. Nor did any of the other hundreds of ordinary workers who will have been harshly judged by public organisations all over the country for failures of behaviour.

Because impunity is for people on a salary of £100,000 or more. For them there is no consequence, ever. So complete is this impunity that the government doesn’t mind if you know. Even when it is really pushed into a corner it just shouts ‘look, there is nothing you can do about it so off you fuck you nobodies’.

This is really massive, screaming, undisguised class warfare now. You put a foot wrong you’re fucked, one of us puts a giant big clown foot wrong and he’ll get a £170,000 payoff for working three days at a ferry company which no-one seems to have thought he was competent to run.

But it’s all a lovely redemption arc, isn’t it? Social media is just bad cinema and likes nothing better than a redemption arc. "See, even Darth Vader got to be the good guy at the end of Return of the Jedi and he literally blew up whole planets, so we should all be sorted".

There is a ‘twitter satirist’ called @dril who is perhaps our best guide on this. He is brilliantly adept at capturing and distilling the shallowness of social media commentary, and he produced a tweet which demonstrated this problem with the redemption arc perfectly. I can’t find it but it went something like:

"My cop movie concept; there is a bad cop who murders women at night but then he decides it is wrong to murder women so he stops and then we like him."

And that about sums it up. In the real world, redemption is difficult and painful. Holywood gets this in a way that the Scottish Government clearly doesn’t. A redemption is meant to be earned through sacrifice. Remember, Darth Vader has to suffer and be about to die before he gets his redemption arc. He didn’t take three months paid leave and do a training course.

It is utter, disgusting, two-faced, self-interested abuse of every power granted to them by the ruling classes of Scotland. It never ends, it recurs again and again, a national fuck you to a population that is growing sick of being lectured by people who never face consequences no matter what they do.

So I guess it’s best just to lean into it then. After tea I’m going to knock together a training course on ‘why lying about dead babies is wrong’. I have a feeling it may do lucrative business some time in the near future.

Source: Ruling class impunity is out of control

[Central bankers are reliable – but not in a good way]

#9

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Central ...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Feb 04, 2026, 08:14 PM

Central bankers are reliable – but not in a good way

Life is just a string of disappointments. As Reform was winding up to announce its Scottish leader, my fingers were firmly crossed – let it be Winston from Still Game. He’d be perfect – angry old white man at war with the world. But nope, that was always too good to be true. It’s Malcolm Offord.

On the other hand, there is a group of people who never disappoint; central bankers. Eras come and go, crisis mount upon crisis, finance brings the economy down then inflation lays waste which the bankers ‘cure’ with unemployment and the world careers further and further towards chaos and universal disillusionment.

And yet one thing remains entirely reliable – the central banker belief that they are responsible for none of this. The poor souls are there, sent by god to try and save us all from ourselves, and yet the mortals don’t understand the sacrifice they make on our behalf. It’s not easy you know, making unpopular decision that ruin other people’s lives.

At least that’s what you’d derive from Andrew Bailey. At the end of last week he was warning people about the dangers of populism. He had quite a clear sense of what populism is and so was entirely adamant that it had to be stopped.

So what exactly is Andrew Bailey’s vision of populism? It has three components that bother him. First, he identifies a ‘tendency towards domestic production’, which he sees as a challenge to ‘international openness’. In other words, offshore the good jobs and then be glad of a minimum wage job stacking shelves.

It is quite remarkably tone deaf in this day and age to be championing, unqualified, an economic system that even its greatest advocates would admit has hit large groups in society hard. You have to be at some remove from the experience of ordinary people if you think that this has been a universally good experience.

But then again, you also have to work hard to not remember the cost of living crisis which used breakdowns in long supply chains as an excuse for rampant profiteering given that countries can no longer meet their own basic needs largely from domestic production. Security second; ideology first, says Mr Bailey.

It’s someone else’s fault when central bankers screw up but when people are hit by austerity and the cost of living crisis, attributing blame is verbotten

The second disaster of populism (he thinks) is the process of ‘attributing unfavourable conditions to outside forces’. This in itself shows an absolute ignorance of what populism actually is because in its proper sense populism is about attributing unfavourable conditions to inside forces like immigrants. It is the ‘enemy within’ which defines populism, not the enemy without.

And yet are we saying that outside forces are not responsible for our malaise? I mean it is the (dishonest) orthodoxy of Bailey’s City of London that the 2008 banking crisis was not their fault but entirely a blow-over from reckless behaviour in the US. It is them who claim external malignant forces caused it.

So make up your mind guys – is the problem you lot or not you lot? Were you not also blaming Putin’s invasion of Ukraine for all this? Or energy prices more generally? Or Chinese imports? Are these not ‘outside forces’? What is this, pick and mix? It’s someone else’s fault when you screw up but when people are hit by austerity and the cost of living crisis, attributing blame is verbotten?

The third element of Bailey’s nightmares is that populists are undermining trust in domestic and international institutions. Now here he has at least some more legitimate point to make, but only if you have partial hearing. Because let’s not kid on that these institutions have not done rather a lot of work of undermining confidence in themselves.

Globally, who are we meant to trust? The International Monetary Fund and its reign of destruction across Africa and South America? The United Nations Security Council and its decisive action on Gaza? The European Union’s Commission and pathetically weak negotiations over a US trade deal?

Or what about home? Who has devalued Westminster? Populists or a bunch of anti-populists who were claiming expenses for a duck house? Who were taking cash in brown paper envelopes to ask questions for corporate clients? Whose denizens endlessly parlay their democratic mandates into personal enrichment or lifelong sinecures in the House of Lords?

What other institutions did the populists undermine? Was it them who sent spycops out to impregnate activists? Are they the people who set up all those awful, offensive racist WhatsApp groups that seem to define life in the Metropolitan Police? Was it populists who claimed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

Or let’s look closer to Mr Bailey’s home – did the financial conduct authority act in the public interest to prevent unstable, risky banking practices which were to bring down the economy? Of for that matter, how many of the rest of us engaged in the kind of economy-destroying gambles the entire finance sector was engaged in?

I trust it is clear that Andrew Bailey is demanding that politics be kept out of central banks so that he can maintain and protect his own political ideology and force it on the rest of us with no real democratic mandate to do so and none of those most likely to be affected having any say over any of it.

The argument behind all of this is that there is a moral hazard in letting politicians set interest rates because they can’t stop themselves cutting interest rates to goose the economy before elections, even if it results in inflation.

But what about the moral hazard of a lot of wealthy bankers setting policy for each other with the express goal of boosting stock prices and assets which are overwhelmingly owned by the very, very rich? Or what about the fact that in protecting those assets it is doctrine that other people’s immiseration is a primary tool for doing that?

It isn’t just the deliberate act of pushing people into unemployment so people generally have less money and so less spending power, bringing down demand in the market and releasing a pressure valve on prices, it’s demanding that everyone else undergo pay restraint to achieve the same thing. Naturally you could tax the rich and achieve the same broad effect, but…

I am no longer in favour of central bank autonomy and Bailey’s comments reveal why – too much power, too one-sided in its wielding, no accountability

The big bogeyman that the bank holds over us is inflation. It is, they claim, bad for everyone. That is mostly true. Then again, so is wage restraint and higher unemployment. What they are desperate to hold onto is that the only tool for inflation is high interest rates and pay restraint. That places the burden of tackling inflation on ordinary people.

There are other options; for example price controls would mean that corporations shoulder the burden for bringing down inflation. Taxing excess profits is another option. But these aren’t discussed and are outside the purview of the bank. And I think that’s the point.

The Bank of England has lots of power to fuck over ordinary people like you and me but the power to fuck over powerful people is in government. It suits all concerned (i.e. all the rich people in consort with all the powerful people) that the body tasked to deal with this has only the powers to harm citizens and that it must be independently able to harm them to its heart’s content without interruption.

What no-one is really allowed to say is the truth; that Britain’s finance sector is bad for all of us and we’d all benefit if it was shrunk and kept under control. I am no longer in favour of central bank autonomy and Bailey’s comments reveal why – too much power, too one-sided in its wielding, no accountability. That is policy feudalism.

The world is falling apart and it was finance and corporate profiteering that caused it. Andrew Bailey should stick to shovelling enormous wealth into the pockets of rich people while he beats the rest of us with a stick. He’s good at that.

Capable of seeing that the rise of populism is a response to the abuses of central banks and out-of-control financiers and corporations? Able to understand that offshoring wasn’t good for most of us. And perhaps most gallingly, telling us that this is about raising standards of living by making people’s standards of living worse while making a tiny group of people ever more powerful?

Those central bankers; they’re nothing if not reliably out of touch with reality and the world.

Source: Central bankers are reliable – but not in a good way

[Happy to be an embarrassment]

#10

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Happy to...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Feb 04, 2026, 07:05 PM

Happy to be an embarrassment

First published by Common Weal

When I got my first house I had more wall space than things to fill it. So I got some poems and literary extracts printed in large format and I stuck them onto mounting boards. There was one I would see every morning when I woke up and it became my favourite. It is from Nietzsche:

"Just as the clouds tell us the direction of the wind high above our heads, so the lightest and freest spirits are in their tendencies foretellers of the weather that is coming. The wind in the valley and the opinions of the marketplace of today indicate nothing of that which is coming but only of that which has been."

Well I’ll tell you what; Scotland hates the lightest and freest spirits. It positively detests them. It is barely up to checking the wind in the valley. Scotland struggles to see the past never mind the future. And it is doing us enormous harm.

Unless we can find a way to listen to voices which do not trot out orthodoxy unrelated to reality or the world in which we actually exist we will keep being surprised by the future. And if the future keeps surprising us we will make a mess of it.

What prompted me to think this was a number of things that cropped up across the media this week. The media is now awash with people arguing that we must reduce our reliance on US software platforms and technology. There is also no shortage of commentary on banning social media for teenagers.

The breakdown of the Western security alliance has endless people gnashing their teeth and calling for Europe to act. There is increasing awareness of global food supply chains which Covid showed us were fragile in a volatile world. And who isn’t now saying that breaking the social contract has undermined faith in democracy?

Plus in Scotland people are beginning to wake up to the tyranny of the quango classes who rule the country in unaccountable ways, and there is finally debate about overseas ownership of our economy and our assets.

Here’s the thing; Common Weal has been warning about all of these things for a very long time. In fact we have been mocked as ‘not serious’ because we said these things. We were told that turning our back on US tech was luddite, that ownership doesn’t matter if the profits are coming in, that social media is a force for good and asking kids to give up is unrealistic.

Someone actually laughed at me when I said in 2018 that global food systems were fragile and the UK particularly vulnerable. We’ve been warning for ages that you can’t just keep increasing tax and reducing service levels without democratic harm but the ‘serious’ people just kept saying ‘no, more cuts’.

The more we’ve warned that politicians don’t run Scotland, bureaucrats do (often not very well), the more the bureaucrats have been protected and empowered. And it is only three years since we were being called ‘useful idiots’ for questioning the stability of Western security arrangements.

I don’t know how else to put this; we told them so and they didn’t listen and now we’re here. The radical out-there-ness with which we were treated has morphed into everyone pretending they always thought the thing we were mocked for thinking.

No, it doesn’t mean we get everything right all the time. For example, I thought city centre commercial property prices would have fallen precipitously by now given homeworking and online shopping. We proposed a whole bunch of responses. Instead prices seem to have been sustained by the shift to ‘student housing’ in commercial property markets.

Politicians trade on ‘credibility’ and if they feel they are straying from perceived orthodoxy, they get really nervous

So why were we able to see things others didn’t? Well, for that it is worth turning to an unusual source – Dominic Cummings. I can’t find the reference but he wrote something like ‘if you give a politician the option to lose in a business suit or have a chance of winning by putting on a monkey costume, the politician will chose to lose’.

I have seen this in real life in real time. Politicians trade on ‘credibility’ and if they feel they are straying from perceived orthodoxy, they get really nervous. Politicians virtually never lead change, they follow it. So if the orthodoxy isn’t changing, more often than not the politician isn’t leading.

Which opens the question of from whence the orthodoxy came? This is easy to answer; from early cities to the medieval church to modern neoliberalism, orthodoxy is set by whoever has most social power, and it is always set in its own interests. Just as the priests created orthodoxy in the interests of the church, so lobbyists now create orthodoxy in the interests of corporations.

It is them who have been saying US IT platforms are good (they’re not, they’re just good at exploiting us). It is them who tell you that the answer to military threat is the military hardware their companies make. It is them who persuade you that selling all your national assets cheap is a good idea. They are the ones who want to control the food system and tell you it is all fine when it isn’t.

This is where the Nietzsche quote comes in; it’s not that he’s proposing that there is ever going to be a world without powerful people trying to impose an orthodoxy that suits them, it’s that he suggests that if you look above that orthodoxy there are some people who are less bound by it who can rise higher and see further. He is suggesting we listen to them sometimes.

They have a characteristic; they don’t trade in reputation or ‘credibility’. After all, if credibility is your goal then the best thing to do is listen to whatever the most powerful person in the room is saying and agree. You have to not care, at least a little bit, before you can say what others are nervous about saying.

So who are these people? I know you’re thinking ‘well, he’s going to say think tanks’, but I most certainly am not. Think tanks are not what you think they are. They were not created by the policy community but by the PR community. Think tanks were invented specifically to launder ideas on behalf of power. That was their original purpose.

It also explains why you often get useful data in think tank reports but you may find yourself underwhelmed by the conclusions. Their funders do not like ‘risky shit’. And that is replicated ten-fold in modern academia. Ever since a system of rating research was created, social research has converged more and more on a safe consensus, the sort of thing that gets you good scores (and so money) and doesn’t rock the boat.

You can free a nation from cowardice and equip it to respond rapidly to the future, but you yourself must scrape together some courage

Academia is no longer a good way to see further distances (it used to be, but not now, not in the social sciences). Then there were ‘writers’ – from philosophers to pamphleteers to oddball hobbyists who just did things because they were interested. Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t design helicopters to make him money or gain anyone’s respect…

But who publishes oddballs any more? Worse still, there is no filtering of oddballs. In the modern world Leonardo Da Vince would be thinking big thoughts on a Substack channel, struggling to be noticed over the top of anti-vaxers (because who is interested in helicopters when you can get furious about Anthony Fauci).

The other source of free spirits was the arts, but they are in their own credibility-seeking doom loop. What is the balance of art which is challenging our society versus the art which is calibrated to deliver the safe, bland identity-based narratives of the last decade?

I can barely think of a moment when I’ve felt kicked up the arse by art since Renton stood at the bottom of that hill and did his "colonised by wankers" speech. Surely Scotland has never been in such need of a kick up the arse – so who is administering it?

The problem with all of this, top to bottom, is largely the same thing – our politics is failing. It is getting safer and safer, retreating further and further into caution, relying more and more on orthodoxy, ceding power and responsibility to corporations and a ruling elite because challenging them is harder.

It is why our universities are run by people who think they should take massive financial risks investing in overseas student recruitment but that academic research should never be risky. It’s why arts funding is directed by people who wet themselves if you say ‘political’ or ‘constitutional question’ or ‘challenge the powerful’.

It is why the media is left to do whatever it’s right-wing bias wants to do without intervention. Best not act, best not even see this as a problem. It’s why politicians never stand up and say that lobbyists are chancers who should routinely be ignored because ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’. It’s why they refuse to listen to Common Weal.

To put it more simply, if you govern cautiously you create a cautious environment. If every appointment is ‘the obvious person’ then there is no room for free spirits. If every funding decision is ‘de-risked’ you just keep funding the same things forever and nothing changes. If every budget is to keep lobbyists happy you only entrench lobbying. And then you’re stuck with a system incapable of seeing beyond yesterday.

The corrective to this is crisis, the moment when orthodoxies fall apart. The heartbreaking thing is that if you need a crisis to make you believe that the future is real and may not be the same as the past it is too late, you are in a crisis you didn’t prepare for.

You can free a nation from cowardice and equip it to respond rapidly to the future, but you yourself must scrape together some courage. That is courage that Scotland’s governing classes would run a mile from. They are just the wind in the valley, obsessed with the opinions of the marketplace of today, always living in the past.

Hell mend them. Common Weal refuses to comply. We won’t pretend there isn’t a future, only an ever-present past. We’ll just keep embarrassing ourselves by trying to be right, not safe. And if the outcome is calling things as correctly and as often as we have, we’ll be entirely comfortable with it.

Source: Happy to be an embarrassment