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#1
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] Why so many S...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Today at 05:53 PM
Why so many Scots want NORWAY to beat England in the World Cup: three CRACKING reasons



An audio podcast version of the above video can be heard HERE, and will soon be available on Apple Podcasts HERE.

Other recent videos:

Disaster for Burnham as Labour languish in JOINT THIRD in YouGov Scottish subsample

Another stunning SNP by-election GAIN as the Tories go into FREEFALL in the north-east of Scotland

Burnham in danger of making government from Manchester as remote and alien as government from London

If you'd like to support my YouTube channel and help it to grow further, please visit my Ko-Fi page, where you can either make a one-off donation of any amount you choose, or set up a small recurring monthly subscription.  


Source: Why so many Scots want NORWAY to beat England in the World Cup: three CRACKING reasons
#2
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] Disaster for ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Jul 08, 2026, 08:49 PM
Disaster for Burnham as Labour languish in JOINT THIRD in YouGov Scottish subsample


Source: Disaster for Burnham as Labour languish in JOINT THIRD in YouGov Scottish subsample
#3
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] Another stunn...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Jul 04, 2026, 04:31 PM
Another stunning SNP by-election GAIN as the Tories go into FREEFALL in the north-east of Scotland




An audio podcast version of the above video can be heard HERE, and will soon be available on Apple Podcasts HERE.
 
 
 
 
 
 

If you'd like to help support my YouTube channel, I've set up a new Ko-Fi page.


Source: Another stunning SNP by-election GAIN as the Tories go into FREEFALL in the north-east of Scotland
#4
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] "IS THAT IT, ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Jul 01, 2026, 01:28 PM
"IS THAT IT, ANDY?!" Only a 2% Burnham bounce for Labour with YouGov, as SNP dominate the Scottish subsample


Source: "IS THAT IT, ANDY?!" Only a 2% Burnham bounce for Labour with YouGov, as SNP dominate the Scottish subsample
#5
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Life Aft...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Jun 30, 2026, 07:27 AM
Life After Oligarchy













First published by Common Weal





If you read regularly, you won’t have missed my growing fears that the oligarchs are going to kill us all. Throughout history, they always do, they’re baking endemic risk into our economic system, yet because one nation can’t reform them, our best course of action is to walk away, to build a different system.


Last week, I started to map out what that might look like. What follows is hardly a comprehensive vision of a post-oligarchical world, but this is the outline of my thinking. Some of it might sound familiar, some sounds unorthodox. But these ideas aren’t weird at all in the face of where we are.


Because what is really strange is what we allow. This is a democracy, and the rich promised that if we let them get richer and richer, they’d share it with us (via that great economic hoax ‘trickle down’). Well, they didn’t share it with us at all; they just took more and more. And then we let them use their money to persuade us that it was really because of immigrants. Now that is weird.


Mamdani’s public grocery stores are not, so let’s start there in my trip around the post-oligarchy. The big argument for monopoly capitalism was defined by Robert Bork in the 1970s, who argues that preventing monopoly is perverse because it is efficient, and that’s what the economy is meant to do, maximise efficiency.


Great – so the ultimate efficiency would be nationalisation, because that’s the ultimate monopoly. So let’s take that to its logical extension – what is there in the economy that doesn’t greatly benefit from competition? Distribution and intermediation. That is what US capitalism now specialises in – not making the product but acting as the gatekeeper to the product.


Amazon stands between manufacturers and you, extracting from both. Uber stands between drivers and you, extracting from both. AirBnB stands between property owners and guests, extracting from both. Supermarkets are much the same. None of this is really productive; all it does is reallocate wealth to those who already have it and make production economically unsustainable.


So let’s move to a different system. Let’s take distribution into collective ownership. Ban private couriers and integrate it all into a consistent (and properly paid) delivery system based on saving the Royal Mail. This would be massively more efficient.


Then accept that the means of accessing products are ‘infrastructure’. Like a road just takes you somewhere, a supermarket just lets you buy something. Let the producers compete in a fair market on price and quality. Any producer can put their food on the shelves, nationally or locally. People can buy what they want. The supermarket itself would just take a ten per cent ‘facilitation’ fee or whatever.


Now we have a rapidly expanding economy of high-quality and innovative food producers. So help them out by implementing an externalities tax. The rich get away with what they get away with because while they’re counting their profits, we are left with the bill for the mess they leave behind. Ultra Processed Foods kill and cost the NHS a fortune.


Just like environmental harm. Just like social harm. So let’s make the producer pay. Let’s add a tax to products to capture this real cost. So now our better quality domestically produced food is more competitive, and we have a thriving economy.


Then just tell Amazon they have to unionise and, when they leave, take their premises. Now we have a distribution hub for other goods. Again, let sellers sell. That might mean the actual producers, but it could also mean Scottish sourcing businesses or businesses setting up to commission Chinese manufacturers to make core products. After all, that’s what Amazon does now.


So we can have goods and services in a genuinely competitive market, facilitated by treating distribution as infrastructure and using it to drive quality for customers and economic viability for producers.





Consumption is how the rich take our money, so we need a different model





Now let’s deal with the risk of global markets. As I argued last week, buffering saved us from a massive oil supply shock this year. There are aspects of food where competition makes sense, like ‘who makes the best jam’. Then some aspects don’t – staples. The cost of staples in the supermarkets are pretty steady across different companies, because these are basically global commodity prices.


So set up a national company to buy and stockpile staples. Have a large buffer to which you add more when prices are low and from which you sell directly when they’re high. Lentils, beans, pulses, legumes, coffee, olive oil, tea, rice, grains, pasta, noodles, nuts, dried fruits, cereals – these can be stored long term. We could create a system where you guarantee prices a year ahead.


Then let’s start making things again. I go on about this a lot, but the reason we don’t make things is that we rely almost wholly on the upfront capital cost of a product when making purchasing decisions, so the marginal costs of labour really matter. But consumption is how the rich take our money, so we need a different model.


Set up a National Leasing Company. Set up factories to make the best white goods you can – best washing machine, best dishwasher, best fridge freezer, best microwave, best oven… Make them durable, upgradeable and repairable, and so now they last. A £800 washing machine would be out of reach of most people, but if it lasts 20 years, then at five per cent interest, it would cost a touch over £5 a month.


So for £50 a month you could have a completely equipped house with the best gear you ever had, made here by us on environmental principles, and you’d never have to put your hand in your pocket for an unexpected expense ever again.


Replant Scotland’s empty land, use hemp, bamboo and nettle crops to make fabrics. Create a high-quality ‘national clothes library’, driving a surge of new fashion design and manufacture in Scotland. Grown here, designed here, made here, unique to us. Then let people rent, say 20 outfits a year. No more fast fashion, just quality, stylish clothing instead.


Do the same for things that only get used for a while. A leasing tier for children’s toys (average play time – oh, three months), for tools (average screw gun use – ten minutes for a shelf perhaps), for equipment (only play golf occasionally? Rent the clubs). All this is much cheaper and more efficient, and cuts out the oligarchs in the middle.


Then encourage a flourishing of small leasing shops. Your local music shop, for example, could be supported to refocus on leasing instruments to people. A gamer shop would lease you game consoles and games. Both would make much of their business about building a community and providing services.


This creates a sort of actual capitalism in a system guided by data that facilitates real innovation and is owned by the public. You can keep expanding the model to anything where competition doesn’t make sense – a national car leasing services for example.


But if that is goods and services, the environment around it must be right. We should set up a national mutual bank, a safe, steady savings and loans. There is no need for banking competition if it is a mutual. Just provide core services. Then we need to get equity investors out of the picture.


You know I would dispose of bond markets through a carefully controlled system of central bank finance directly to the government. When the government needed money, the central bank would create it, not bond markets. We would only be in debt to ourselves. Now use the same system for a proper Scottish National Investment Bank.





A life lived in fear is a life half lived. Get the oligarchs to fuck and let's do something better





Elon Musk is no longer a trillionaire – which just shows that he never really was. The reality is that the rich basically just invented a lot of their ‘money’ through chicanery. We can just ‘invent’ our own. They are rich because they used quantitative easing for share buybacks, which made them giant profits. We could have used it for something else. This idea that ‘they’ have money and ‘we’ need it is one of their tricks.


Money isn’t real (in the sense most people think of it). That’s the dreadful truth of it all. We just all pretend like it is. So whether we borrow it from others or just print it doesn’t really make any difference – what matters is how much of it there is in the system and how it gets used. So stop borrowing from others. That only applies to the domestic economy for the most part, but we do not need oligarchs to give us money.


As long as we manage international finances. We need to make sure we have deals with key suppliers globally and that we maintain a foreign currency reserve to trade with them. In fact, I am increasingly wondering if Scotland shouldn’t trade domestically in our own currency but internationally in Euros. Just quit this idea that ‘they’ have money, we need. It isn’t true.


But to keep all this running, we need the underlying systems, and today that means tech. We need an oligarch-free software environment. That is much easier than you think. I am in favour of building a new operating system (built on top of Linux, which runs most of the world’s computers, though you wouldn’t know it).


Then, with this new open source operating system, get a really good software suite. There are loads and loads of high-quality open source clones of US applications – Photoshop replacements, Digital Audio Workstations (for music), Computer Aided Design (for product design). I haven’t used a piece of US software for writing or editing for 15 years now (I use OpenOffice).


So gather all these alternatives, create an Open Source Institute and build an entire open source software environment. Build everything into it – the systems which run government, store patient health records, make the court system work… Built in the mutual bank. Build in the leasing service, the newly-nationalised Amazon. Think of it as ‘a nation in a box’, linking all of this together. Then users pay a small monthly subscription to fund the Institute.


And once you’ve done that, build a new internet, a new information environment. Take what you want from the internet, but let’s build our own, a place where you can find recipes, television, shopping, advice, news, and magazines – don’t be afraid to imagine a world of content we build ourselves, not one foisted on us by others.


Now work with others on open source chip design. Buy sovereign chip capacity (the top-end machine that makes computer chips costs about one year of Scottish Enterprise’s budget). Create the capacity to build good, solid computers here. Now make one, stack it on top of a large capacity battery, a communications hub and a second data server. Put that in a box.


Now put one of those in every house in the country. Everyone gets fast, cloud-like computing capacity, an energy storage capacity across the whole of society, and distributed data servers to replace Amazon for hosting the internet domestically. Then get on with a proper Public AI model and ban all proprietary AI.


At which point the US may try to sanction us, so as long as we’ve played nice with China and India, just tell them we no longer recognise their IP laws and clone all their medicines for the NHS. By this stage, we wouldn’t need their dollars or their code.


All this will generate enormous collective wealth, so redirect it to the public via a Universal Basic Income. And that’s the end of the oligarchs. Damn, I’m way past my word limit. I want to show that so much more is possible (particularly a democratic underpinning for all of this, and a governance model).


Imagine Scotland created this ‘nation in a box’ model as preparations for independence. Now imagine we told any other nation that wanted its own sovereign independence that they can just have it too. Now we have a partner nation. Now two. Now ten.


This isn’t all that hard, this post-oligarchical world. You can imagine it quite easily, and that is the biggest challenge. We don’t need to be serfs. This is our fucking country, and we can run it differently if we like. A life lived in fear is a life half-lived. Get the oligarchs to fuck and let’s do something better.










Source: Life After Oligarchy
#6
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] The ‘med...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Jun 30, 2026, 06:53 AM
The 'media pen' is bad for democracy













First published by Common Weal





When I’m doing the Common Weal Daily Briefing I can’t really write ‘this is utter scumbag-ery’. But the Holyrood media pen is utter scumbag-ery. There is no category of difference here than any of Trumps abuses of power. Retribution is taking place because it can, because the political classes have engaged in and then covered up scandal after scandal and yet in Scotland’s degraded politics they barely pay a price.


So where do you think they go from there? John Swinney painting the pools outside Holyrood in SNP livery? Anas Sarwar adding his name to the Royal Concert Hall? Perhaps our new Justice Secretary Neil Gray will prosecute Sean Clerkin for treason. There is a reason I am so endlessly critical of the impunity in Scotland. I know some of you will assume it is because I’m annoyed at what someone just got away with. It isn’t. Is because what getting away with it means they will do next. And chaining journalists to the radiator is what it turns out to be…


The briefings are all here, you can sign up here.


 


Democracy is not a material thing, made up of ‘structures’ or ‘rules’, it is something more than that. Democracy is a promise about relationships – the relationships between those who choose their leaders and those who lead them, between the people who have power in society and those who make the rules they must live by.


And it is a promise about the relationship between those with power and those who are there to scrutinise those with power. It does not matter if the rules are nominally in place; the success or failure of democracy will always rest on whether the promise made by democracy (of the people, by the people, for the people) is reflected in these real relationships.


That is why the Presiding Officer is dead wrong that the Scottish Parliament’s ‘media pen’ is benign. It is absolutely anything but; it is yet another small betrayal of the principle of democracy, and all of these betrayals mount up.


For those unaware of why this is an issue, it is generally accepted that journalists in Western democracies have conditional freedom of movement in the parliament they are reporting on. They do not have anything like unrestricted freedom – they cannot ‘doorstop’ politicians in their office or wander the corridors housing elected politicians eavesdropping for gossip.


But they clearly must have unrestricted access to the chamber (though not all areas of the chamber), and they must have a methodology of interrogating politicians making decisions on our behalf and spending money that requires us to be taxed. Crucially, it cannot be the politician who decides whether they are scrutinised or not.


 





Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also believe that their own mounting restrictions on media freedom were appropriate and necessary





The Scottish Parliament has just chosen to significantly restrict the conditions that govern access to the parliament. Rather than being able to approach and challenge politicians who are there to represent citizens, who are paid well to do so and who have power over them, Scotland’s journalists are now penned in, permitting politicians to approach them when the politician wants, but to evade scrutiny whenever the politician doesn’t.


The new system is devised by politicians, and they have clearly reassured themselves that their shift from something that looks like ‘mandatory scrutiny’ to something much more like ‘optional scrutiny’ is entirely appropriate because they are morally upstanding and so will voluntarily act in ways that enable scrutiny of democracy.


They have told themselves that the procedural equivalent of tying troublemakers to the radiator is appropriate because every so often they will pop over to the radiator and ‘do the right thing’ and necessary because the journalists have ‘crossed a line’. This is hardly rare; Donald Trump also believes that suing journalists to intimidate them into silence is appropriate and necessary.


Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also believe that their own mounting restrictions on media freedom were appropriate and necessary and resulted from journalists ‘crossing a line that exists mainly in the mind of the politicians concerned.


It is almost never – never – a good sign when journalism is restricted. Regulating ownership, or moral standards, or creating privacy laws to protect the public are all perfectly reasonable responses because all of these are about keeping the promise of democracy. Each of these are steps to protect the civil liberties of citizens or ensure democracy is supported by a diverse media base.


But restricting access to politicians absolutely is not. It is a charter for arrogance, corruption and impunity. And it simply should not be in the power of politicians to make unilateral decisions to cancel or restrict freedom of journalism where it relates to scrutinising them themselves. It is a clear conflict of interest.


And in the end, the political parties imposing these restrictions have themselves all crossed all sorts of lines – Labour and allegations of Chinese spy rings close to government, the SNP and sexual abuse and embezzlement cases, Reform on unsavoury donations and unacceptable political rhetoric, the Tories still emerging from the many scandals of the Covid era.


All have crossed lines, and what action have they taken to rebalance a system to force them back onto the right side of the line? None. No action has been taken over the SNP refusing to act on internal complaints of sexual abuse, or its lax governance standards, or over Labour’s shady corporate lobbying relationships, or over personal gifts to Nigel Farage.


Instead, they have tried to neuter the people who should be holding them to account for these scandals. This is why Common Weal wants a Citizens’ Assembly to regulate the operating rules of parliament and not the politicians.


Because if there is something worth noting in the interview with the Presiding Officer on this subject, it isn’t his refusal to consider whether this step is ill-judged; he attempted to refuse to answer questions on the subject itself. Self-regulation doesn’t work; self-regulation by legislators is a risk to democracy. It certainly does not live up to the promise of democracy.










Source: The 'media pen' is bad for democracy
#7
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Starmer,...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Jun 30, 2026, 06:15 AM
Starmer, Swinney and the rest are as bad as the public thinks they are













Look where you will and see if you can find a sign that politics isn’t screwed. Worse, look and see if the commentator class has an explanation of why politics is screwed. The politicians are bemused, their media chums are bemused – whatever can be going on?


The answer is that weak but entitled men think they have the right to change the world without bothering to learn anything of substance about why the world needs changed, so they sit atop the machinery of government and expect it to deliver adjectives on demand. Then, when it doesn’t, they get tetchy, angry and try to suppress dissent and scrutiny. Why they fail and why we hate them isn’t complicated, but the media class think it’s beyond the wit of man to understand,


The current saviour of Britain was an irrelevant afterthought the last time he tried to lead the party a few years ago. Burnham, the ‘oh yeah, I’d forgotten about him’ man of the Blair years is now a dynamic Mayor who can (checks) make busses run like they do in every other European capital city! He can commission a bus using public money! Quick! Suspend the constitution and make him emperor!


Then there is Scotland. Here the liberal commentator classes are still on a Sturgeon come-down, totally taken in by her routine, unable to see what she really was, they still can’t bring themselves to accept that she was bad at her job. So they have no meaningful frame to understand Swinney, because they don’t have an analysis of the Sturgeon failure because in their hearts they don’t think she failed.


They’re wrong. The Sturgeon/Swinney SNP is failing for the same reason Starmer Labour is failing – neither of them have any defined mission. Wanting things to be ‘better’ isn’t a mission any more than wanting to be at the other side of a river is the same thing as building a bridge. Go and try and put your finger on what the SNP theory of change is and drop me an email if you come up with one.


Both Swinney and Starmer are incredibly limited politicians. Both fundamentally think politics is a ‘machine’ that you ‘run’ because ‘you’re the kind of person that ought to run the machine’. Neither of them has got far beyond that – its a system you run, not actual decisions you make or a direction you choose.


Starmer seems to have been a proxy for something else his whole life as far as I can tell. He was made Prime Minister for the same reason he was made chief prosecutor in England – the people who really run things needed a hollow man to front for them.


Swinney is just a mediocre family accountant who happens to exist while a weird set of circumstances happen to have coincided which means that it literally doesn’t matter how bad he and his cabinet perform, nothing can touch them ever. So he just keeps running the machine.





It almost goes without saying that these politically-ignorant hollow men are then susceptible to those they think are powerful





Here’s the reality though – government isn’t a machine. If you need an analogy it’s more like a factory which contains machines. The machinery of government is there to make things happen and it is the politicians who are supposed to decide what that is, what the factory makes. But both Swinney and Starmer fail to understand this. They think the factory is all set up – all they need to do is press the start button each morning and take the salary.


Except someone set the factory up to make plastic dog turds and now neither Swinney nor Starmer can for the life of themselves work out why everything they touch comes out looking like shit. So they ask someone to increase the tension in the belt that takes the unformed brown plastic to the mould and hope that this time it won’t be a shit that comes out. Then a shit comes out.


They have not failed as governments because of ‘external factors beyond their control’ (you know that ‘external factors beyond your control’ is the definition of being alive, right?). They are failing because no matter how bad those external factors get, they do the same thing over and over.


The second problem stems from this. The liberal classes in England can’t begin to fathom why Starmer is so unpopular and consider it to be some flaw in the public – that they’re just angry or stupid or bad ‘uns or something. The same class of person in Scotland are still on that Sturgeon come-down for the same reason. They were all taken in when they shouldn’t have been and now they’re all too embarrassed to admit it.


Why does everyone hate Starmer? Because he’s a fake. The gap between what he says he is and what he actually is is so vast you need to be blind not to see it. He says he’s competent but he’s not. He says he’s bold and that’s just daft. He talks about ambition but has none (other than for himself).


There are various personality types in life where we can see their flaws very clearly. A fake is much harder to spot, not least because they’re often very compelling. But once you get a sniff that someone actually is a fake, it’s over. No-one likes imposters, traitors, spies, conmen and all the other ‘say they’re one thing when they’re the opposite’ types.


The liberals commentators just think Starmer isn’t a great communicator. That he is an absolute imposter doesn’t cross their minds. Do you believe all the Union Jack stuff? Because people who care about flags don’t. Do you believe the human rights stuff? Because those of us appalled at Israel do not. He is unique – he has an individual lie for each of us.


Swinney is a fake too, but in a much softer way. He is the safe pair of hands who has messed up so often listing the messes would take up the rest of the article. He is the ‘wise elder statesman’ who seems to have no basic awareness of what is going on. From asking for Kneecap to be banned from Scotland to not understanding why anyone would object to a data centre, he seems to have no grip on the big issues of our era.


So he keeps footering around with a summit here or a bung there (today he seems to be dealing with the racist violence over the weekend with… a £200k racism training fund for schools amounting to about £80 a school, which would be funny if it wasn’t so pitiful). People don’t hate Swinney, they just don’t pay much attention to him.


It almost goes without saying that these politically-ignorant hollow men are then susceptible to those they think are powerful. John Swinney is the Factor; but so is Starmer. Swinney keeps the countryside safe for big landed estates by refusing to pass serious land reform legislation and refusing to enforce that which has been passed, Starmer is a middle manager waiting for the Tony Blair Institute to tell him what to think.





Politics has become a home for weak yet strangely self-entitled men and women who have never put the effort into finding a mission in life but have never let that get in the way of their self-importance





Which takes us to the final feature of both. They are weak, and so like all weak men they tend towards authoritarianism. Swinney’s performance since the Murrell scandal is so craven and so dishonest he should be utterly discredited – so he uses power to crack down. He fails so often that refusing to comply with the law (while he ‘has a wee think about it’) is just a normal day.


Above all, him and Ross have the scumbag journalists in a little jail cell now. Well, a holding pen, which is just potatoes/potatos. Two weak men with no great purpose in life who actually think they should be allowed to put people in parliament on a student visa or biological men in a women’s prison even after ruled illegal – and because neither has a good answer they expect not to be asked.


Swinney and Greer as thugs is funny (though that’s how they’re behaving). Starmer makes a reasonably compelling thug, his belligerent and patently unconstitutional all-out war on the Labour left was something he carried out with a glee in his eyes. Again, as the liberals in the media wonder why we don’t like him, perhaps his brutish, lying track record towards those among his own core support might be a place to start.


Do I think Burnham has it in him to escape the gravity of all this failure? Here’s my guess – he’s going to turn out to be a Sturgeon, compelling-sounding until you notice that nothing has actually changed.


Why is our politics so totally broken? Because it has become a home for weak yet strangely self-entitled men and women who have never put the effort into finding a mission in life but have never let that get in the way of their self-importance. They claim they are experts at running government but appear to have little understanding of what governing actually means.


They pose as one thing but the gap between that and the thing they actually are is vast. And so, unable to piece this all together in a way that makes them capable of doing their job, instead they find themselves drawn back to authoritarianism, cheating, lying, corruption and scandal, because if they can’t fix society, they’ll sure as hell try and stop the rest of us from knowing it.


This media pen in the Scottish Parliament turns my stomach. Greer gloating over it disqualifies him to my mind. Starmer crying tears for himself when he has been a full-throated supporter of a genocide is too much to bear. ‘Honest’ John Swinney telling us he’s held an inquiry into the Murrell scandal already (which is a lie) and debating whether to implement the law or not is a disgrace.


The fundamental things that are killing politics is the fact that none of them have any understanding of what is broken, any clue where they are going, any willingness to learn or any vision for what a good society should look like now. But fuck, do they love themselves anyway. Servants of the people? If that was true we’d have fired them long ago, but we can’t even seem to do that any more.










Source: Starmer, Swinney and the rest are as bad as the public thinks they are
#8
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] King of the S...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Jun 30, 2026, 06:15 AM
King of the South: Andy Burnham will make rule from Manchester as detested in Scotland as rule from London has always been


Source: King of the South: Andy Burnham will make rule from Manchester as detested in Scotland as rule from London has always been
#9
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] You can’...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Jun 30, 2026, 05:37 AM
You can't reform oligarchs – we have to walk away













First published by Common Weal





Speculative investment plus rising stock market = enormous profits. Speculative investment plus falling stock market = contagion, liquidation of assets, liquidity crisis, solvency crisis and deleveraging. Both will do us great harm and we can’t stop them, but we could avoid them. And now I’m going to have to explain all of that…


This is just more of my deep, deep concern that we’re not taking the threat of oligarchs seriously enough yet. I am convinced that you’re all seeing ‘trillionaire Elon’ as mainly a sign of moral decay and greed and not as an existential threat to western civilisation. He’s the latter.


To understand all this you need to get to grips with the difference between productive investment and speculative investment and how we shifted from one to the other. Productive investment generally increases fixed capital, which just means that you spend it on real things which create other real things. To make money you improved the machines in your factory so they could make things better or faster.


The financial revolution of the 1980s undermined this and the globalisation of the 1990s ripped it apart. Now you got someone else to own all that pesky fixed capital (basically China) because it was a cost-heavy burden. What you did was gamble on the value of the logo that you got them to put on the thing they make.


That just means you are speculating that a certain business will increase in value. Let’s be clear here; not in profit, not in real asset value, not even necessarily in intellectual property value, only in market capitalisation (share value). Elon Musk is a trillionaire without really making any profit at all because he can attract speculative capital because he has a mad fan base.


This all went ballistic in 2007. The rich had been speculating on dafter and dafter things, including ‘financial instruments’ that turned out to be junk, made up of portfolios of subprime mortgages. It all went wrong and they tanked the economy. They couldn’t make profit because they had created a recession, so they robbed us instead.


We printed money, they used it to buy their own assets, those assets then rose in value by more than they paid for them and they got stratospherically rich – and then having learned this new trick they kept inflating the assets so their wealth kept rising. Meanwhile someone had to pay for all this or the economy would overheat – so the rest of us did.


(It is the great scandal of modern politics that most people don’t understand that when the rich crashed the economy, every single one of the rest of us was forced to compensate them and more, all out of our own pockets.)


Now this is the thing; in this new (corrupt) system, as long as the market keeps going up, speculative investment keeps working. And in the US that’s all there is now – they literally believe a rich person who owns productive fixed capital or spends on research and development is a fool. So every rich person in the US needs the stock market to keep rising and rising.


And since policy-makers make policy for the rich, the whole of the US economic strategy for 30 years now has been to forget profits and forget productivity and forget innovation, and run from manufacturing, just keep that stock market rising. The latest wheeze is data centres. They may look like a pivot back to fixed capital but if you look at the financing you'll see they're just a gamble, but as long as everyone keeps putting their money on the table, the gamble keeps working.





I’m begging you to take this seriously because our politicians aren’t





But what happens if the stock market doesn’t rise? Then you get the five horsemen of the economic apocalypse. First comes contagion – everything is so financially interconnected that when one thing goes down it brings the other things down too. A collapse in say AI or an implosion in the shadow banking market spreads very quickly across the economy.


Then you get liquidation of assets. If all your wealth is in assets and they’re cratering, you need to get out earlier rather than later. This is now a doom loop. But that creates a new problem – everything is propped up on these share values and that is where the wealth is held, but there are still liabilities. You still owe people money.


Except now more money is owed than there is free cash to pay it (i.e. a liquidity crisis). Lots of entities therefore go insolvent, either because they can’t pay debts or can’t get paid by creditors, increasing the doom loop. And then everything deleverages – basically no-one wants to lend any more and so the thing which drives western economies (borrowing) also dries up.


And we’re well and truly stuck.


Now I want to take some care here. That’s what would happen if a crash comes. The question is how stable is this system really? Without going into this too much, it’s not a simple picture. There is much less debt in financial America than there was in 2007 so the insolvency effects will be lessened.


On the other, the economy is much, much less diversified – wholly a third of the US economy (by market capitalisation) is directly tied up in AI-dependent corporations. If that goes, there is less elsewhere to prop it up. And – very especially – the usual source of ‘propping up’ has been killed in pursuit of the golden egg.


Because usually you hope consumers are going to kickstart a recovery, but only rich people shop in the US these days because they took all the money. Then again, a lot of the statistics are misleading right now. The UK has just seen lower than expected inflation. Good news, right? Not really. It seems a large part of it is businesses just can’t pass on costs because most people just can’t afford another penny. So losses are being hidden. For now.


So as I argued a couple of weeks ago, I’m definitely not predicting a crash, but almost everyone is predicting some kind of ‘market correction’ at some point. And in any case, what I’m trying to persuade you here is that both versions of this are an absolute nightmare for most of us.


Basically either this lot pull it off, the AI investment works and they take all our jobs and wealth and take complete control of us, or it doesn’t, and they crash the economy destroying our jobs and wealth. In the former we are vassals, in the latter we are destitute. In no scenario are we in any way in charge.


But this system has got so far out of control that it has not only got rid of the regulations it ought to face, it has found ways to make it impossible to regulate it. This is either through coercion or by creating supra-national rules to supercede domestic regulation, or through extremely powerful lobbying or (increasingly and particularly) they have just made economies totally reliant on them.


The US could sort this but won’t. The EU could ameliorate a lot of this but are doing something a bit closer to what I’m suggesting here. Britain could take a shot, but we’d be seriously bullied and would bottle it. And Scotland? Independent or not we are not powerful enough to regulate them. Full stop.


But we can replace them. This is where I’m at now. We can’t tame their stupid game, but we can walk off the pitch and play a different game. I’m begging you to take this seriously because our politicians aren’t. And if you want to know what seriously looks like, look at why the Iran War didn’t crash the economy.


Why? Because we instituted global state socialism in oil. After the 1972 oil crisis we decided we could no longer rely on free markets. Governments spent vast sums building enormous oil storage capacity and created a global agency (the IEA) to manage the system outside the free market to make sure a crash didn’t happen.





Don't let them tell you this is all OK. We're in trouble and we should act





We have comparative price stability and avoided a great depression because state planning created an economy-saving buffer. Which is to say it opted out of a free market-only approach. And that is what we have to learn. We need to opt out of money as we see it now. We need to opt out of consumption as it is happening.


We need to opt out of energy as they have built it. We need to opt out of the food system we have. We need to opt out of foreign-owned IT systems. And we need to opt right out of equity caplitalism.


What am I talking about? I’m talking about Common Weal policy. I will return to all this again and again because all of this is genuinely keeping me up at night. We can’t use their money system. It is broken. We need a domestic mutual bank, a replacement for foreign equity (a proper national investment bank) and we need a system that directs pension money into supporting productive domestic industry.


We need to finance government without bond markets by creating a different relationship with the central bank. We desperately need to create an open source system of software and a ‘public AI’ model. We need to have the server infrastructure to replace our total reliance on Amazon.


Then we need to tell Amazon they have to unoinise. So they’ll leave. And then we should just take their infrastructure and build a public product distribution system. We should nationalise supermarkets and build up serious long-term food buffers in the same way we did with oil (China maintains enormous state-managed frozen pork reserves for exactly this reason). It not only prevents shortages but stabilises prices.


We should build a leasing model to replace consumption and we should then build large-scale manufacturing to build the things we lease here. There is no economic reason to prevent that so long as it is a leasing model where costs are spread across the lifetime of a product.


We need to look at core computer manufacturing and see where we can be less reliant. I really think we should look into sovereign chip capacity too. We need rapid energy transition and a zero-petrochemicals strategy. I’d start by buying 20,000 electric cars from China on a cut-price bulk order and create a cheap public car leasing service to accelerate electrification.


We need to replace gas heating with mass district heating. I’d get our land workign for us, making us as close as possible to self-sufficient in construction materials, fabrics, bioplastics. You probably know that I want avacado orchards and coffee plantations in Scotland grown in warehouses under light.


I would literally walk away from the shitshow wherever I could. I am no fantacist. I know we can’t become a full autarky. But that doesn’t mean there is no alternative to globalised free trade to sort everything. Just in the way we decided to do with oil.


I’ve thought a lot of this stuff for a while now. The red lights have been flashing for years. But saying the above out loud would have sounded made ten years ago, and probably even five. Yet much of this is already happening in more enlightened countries.


Seriously bad shit is happening. We do something or we sink. Those are the real options. Crossing our fingers is reckless. Don’t let them tell you this is all OK. We’re in trouble and we should act. This is what I’d do. If you’ve got a better idea, email me…










Source: You can't reform oligarchs – we have to walk away
#10
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] The univ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Jun 30, 2026, 04:40 AM
The university crisis is very real; the story you are hearing may not be













First published by Common Weal





Another Common Weal Daily Briefing I’m posting here because I’m getting increasingly frustrated that there isn’t a much more substantial media backlash against universities leaders who have bankrupted the sector, force blameless staff to pay the price for it and now seem to be covering their tracks to make sure they are not held accountable. This is a scandal that is not being reported as one. As always, you can sign up to the briefings here


Common Weal is developing a project on the future of universities in Scotland, an ‘Alternative University Commission’. In working through the structure of that project, we have been in touch with a number of university staff groups fighting the cuts at various universities. The picture is deeply concerning, and the government’s response looks more like back-covering than anything.


We hear the news today that Dundee University will be insolvent in two years if there are no more widespread redundancies. This news is being promoted by the institutional leaders, but that only means it needs to be read in two different ways. On the one hand, it shows that the financial prospects of the university do indeed look troubling.


But it also means that the university is running a PR campaign to justify more cuts. What is happening in the university sector at the moment is that the space for actions that would actually save our university sector lies between these two ways of reading the news.


On the one hand, there is the status quo, running the university sector the way its current managers have been running the university sector. That is deemed no longer sustainable. The other is to run the university sector in the same way its current managers have been running the university, but with fewer staff to pay.


What is not being considered by current university leadership or by the Scottish Government is that universities might be run in any way other than the current model. That model is a model where Scotland’s establishment class runs universities in their own image, with high salaries, centralised control, constantly-proliferating management-driven bureaucracy and monitoring, deskilling of staff, and undermining of terms and conditions, all connected to property speculation.





It is hard to feel that Scotland's universities are safe in their current hands





So what does ‘Scotland’s establishment’ look like? It looks like the membership of the Commission that has been set up by the Scottish Government to ‘save’ Scotland’s universities. That consists of five current university managers, three senior civil servants, two commercial lobbyists (for financial services and private energy interests), one private sector consultant, and one economic think tank head.


Of the 12, only one representative of academic staff, one representative of non-academic staff, and one representative of the student body are included. There is no representation from the arts or culture sector, from the medical sector, from the humanities or sciences, or from any other purpose universities serve other than for lobbyists.


More to the point, there is no role represented in this list which is not one which has been deeply involved in the running of universities over the last 20 years. This is the people who drove the universities into this position, marking their own homework.


It looks like little more than an attempt to make sure no awkward questions are asked. Those who might ask why the Scottish Government has effectively cut teaching funding every year for 15 years (it has been frozen in cash terms since 2010). Why did the university sector accept this? One quarter of this commission is there to make sure that question isn’t asked.


How did university management manage to bankrupt universities that have been financially sustainable since the 16th century? Is the largess in spending on new buildings culpable? Is it a poor management practice more generally? Is it a reckless gamble on overseas students that eventually failed? Nearly half of the members of the Commission are there to make sure no one asks.


And what of the actual nature and purpose of universities? What are they for, what should they be, what is their relationship to Scottish society? Inexplicably, the only ‘civic’ organisations there will make sure the only answers to that are extreme neoliberalism linked to financial market ideology.


Is Dundee in such dire financial peril? Most certainly. Does that mean we should take university management at its word? No, it most certainly does not. The reality is that university management has failed in quite unprecedented ways across multiple universities for the same reasons and at the same time, and every effort is being made to cover their tracks (at times through outrageous secrecy).


The Scottish Government is also culpable and is covering its tracks. This looks like the response to the 2008 financial crisis, where those responsible for the crisis were bailed out and their positions saved – and the cost of doing so was transferred directly to people who bore no culpability at all.


It is hard to feel that Scotland's universities are safe in their current hands. There is certainly no effort to ask any difficult questions, which would produce answers that would embarrass the management classes or the government.


Which means Common Weal will be left to ask those questions ourselves.










Source: The university crisis is very real; the story you are hearing may not be
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