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Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] The Scot Goes...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Today at 01:08 AMSo I just thought I'd put this post up to try to give another little boost to the ongoing Scot Goes Pop fundraiser, and I'll probably keep it pinned second from top on the blog over the coming few weeks. As you may remember me mentioning early during the Holyrood campaign, I'm due to receive some substantial funds at some point during May or June, and after that I should be OK for a decent period, but I've absolutely no idea exactly when those funds will come in, and until then I'm just trying to keep the show on the road.
Just to make you aware, I haven't been manually adjusting the target figure on the GoFundMe page - they've introduced a new system of dynamically changing the target as donations come in, because apparently that produces better results. So there's no magic number on this occasion - I'm just trying to raise as much as possible, although I could certainly do with raising another few hundred pounds at least.
So if you'd like to donate and help Scot Goes Pop keep going with its political, polling and election analysis, there are three main options:
For card donations, the GoFundMe crowdfunder is HERE.
Or you can make a direct PayPal donation to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
Or you can make a donation by bank transfer - for the necessary details, please drop me a line at my contact email address, which is: icehouse.250@gmail.com
A million thanks to everyone who has already donated - it's very much appreciated.
Source: The Scot Goes Pop fundraiser: time to aim for a rocket boost
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] Post-election...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - May 12, 2026, 06:55 PM* * *
a) you can donate by card HERE
b) you can make a direct PayPal donation to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
c) you can make a donation by bank transfer - for the necessary details, please drop me a line at my contact email address, which is: icehouse.250@gmail.com
Source: Post-election GB-wide poll shows Labour slumping to joint third place with the Greens - SNP surge to massive 22-point lead in Scottish subsample, with Labour on course for TOTAL WIPEOUT in Scotland
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] And then...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - May 12, 2026, 10:24 AMOne of the most common things I have found myself saying to people who are trying to develop their own political strategy is ‘and then?‘. People who don’t do it for a living are always placing the end point of their strategy at the moment when they make their final move.
But then if you control when the credits roll you can turn Bambi, Dumbo and Finding Nemo into terrifying meditations on trauma and loss and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre into a short film about a pleasant teenage road trip.
Right at the end of your strategy is always… the need for more strategy. So as the politicians slump into their post-election exhaustion, let me ask the question ‘and then?‘.
This is easiest to do for Reform. It’s voters aren’t looking for a credible political party with coherent policies. Reform has one simple task – the more time it can make Holyrood spend talking about the kind of issues Reform likes and the others parties don’t, the more it’s winning. It is a really simple task – though not turning out to be total bams would help.
By contrast, the hardest ‘and then?‘ is for Scottish Labour. Let’s be realistic – there is a good chance that Anas Sarwar would be about to become First Minister if it wasn’t for his national party and in particular that Universal Buzz Kill Keir Starmer. Unless Scottish Labour decides to split from the UK party (which it won’t), it doesn’t really have an ‘an then?‘. It is just waiting for Starmer.
His universe is a really weird one. The timeline he seems to think he is on is like the one in Everything Everywhere All At Once where they’ve all got hotdog fingers, the one furthest from our own reality. I am utterly fascinated to know how he thinks this ends for him.
What movie does he think he’s in? As perhaps the most toxic political leader in modern British political history, what is his model for being hated at the end of act two but being a reviled and respected leader by the end of act three? It took Darth Vader a full three feature films to complete that redemption arc.
Does he genuinely think he can turn this round in 18 months by ‘delivering’, despite the fact that none of us can remember what he’s meant to be delivering anymore? Is it washing machines? Carrots? Knock-off perfumes? What’s the cargo Keir? No-one can remember what you’re for. Did someone convince you taking your tie off was a step forward?
Seriously, I genuinely don’t see how there is an ‘and then?‘ for Starmer at all. So does he enjoy being hated? His people keep briefing that he can’t step down because that would create ‘chaos’ across Britain. But would it really? Would law and order break down and the streets become no-go areas for right-minded people if Keir Starmer resigns? Perhaps briefly during the celebrations.
Labour is a party rigged totally in favour of a faction which has nothing whatsoever left to offer Britain but which is high on its own entitlement and refuses to believe that governing is not its birthright. So the best I can tell, Keir Starmer will stay on just in case someone who isn’t Keir Starmer takes power. I think that’s the strategy. Good luck guys.
Do the Scottish Greens have a strategy for pivoting back from ‘carnival of norm-defying diversity’ into ‘serious negotiating partner’?
The Lib Dems in Scotland have a much easier time of it. They are in the strongest position they’ve been in since they were in power along with Labour. They can offer Swinney a fully-fledged majority without having to rely on the Greens (whom I’m told Swinney is fundamentally suspicious of) so their whole strategy is about what concessions they can bleed from the government in return.
Another easy strategic task ought to have been the Scottish Greens. Two things guys – you have to take the step-up to looking like a serious, credible party on the verge of power. That’s how you get there, the transition from outsider or protest party to serious player. Above all they must not start to look like a clown show. Once credibility is achieved, the goal should be to pick a small number of issues where they can really have an impact. Be seen winning in parliament.
Well so far they have gone the other way with this one. The point about radical parties trying to look credible is that you are trying to answer the question ‘who do you serve now?’ without the answer being ‘ourselves’. Instead they have started out on a path which looks like their mission is to redefine what credible looks like. In this they will undoubtedly fail.
They can explain to their base why they got someone elected who is here on a student visa all they want and they can get a historic breakthrough and then spent the 72 hours afterwards talking to their base about trans issues – but then what? Have you a strategy for pivoting back from ‘carnival of norm-defying diversity’ into ‘serious negotiating partner’?
I’m interested because they’ll be the first people to find it. You make choices – you’re the avant garde breaking convention and your audience is limited, or you’re seeking to go mainstream so you reign in your instincts for anarchy. Getting back from the choice you make is really hard.
The real losers in this election are the Scottish Tories. Personally I think they only have one ‘and then?‘ which is to break away from the UK party and rebrand as a Scottish centre-right unionist political party. Neither being the Scottish arm of Badenochism nor trying to ape Reform is going to help. This patient needs major surgery.
For the indy true believers I have the same question; you’ve called us doubters names, you’ve shared every SNP meme on social media, you voted Two Votes SNP. Then what? Same again in five years? Do you have a new script to explain why those of us who are now sceptics are wrong to believe what we see with our eyes?
Apparently this week the Hail Mary is ‘but Wales’. But Wales fuck all – Plaid Cymru is not talking in terms of a push for independence but a credible step forward by showing they can run Wales effectively while using the mandate to secure some new powers for the Senedd. That is a serious and credible ‘and then?‘ – but it doesn’t nothing for Scotland.
I think the SNP is in trouble if it doesn’t change course but I’ve never seen a late-term administration actually change course successfully
So on the ‘and then?‘ front, Reform and the Lib Dems have it easy, the Scottish Greens should have had a fairly straightforward task but have run in the opposite direction, the indy loyalists will either have to reconsider or contort themselves into ever-weirder positions, Labour is in a coma that is taking place in Keir Starmer’s head and the Tories should cry ‘freedom!’ or start shopping for coffins(metaphorically speaking).
Which leaves the SNP. It really didn’t do very well in this election but is left in charge anyway, a rather toxic situation to be in. It’s boosters continue to pretend that setting a condition of a personal overall mandate was about independence rather cynical self-serving, but that sorry road comes to a final end really soon.
When it does, does John Swinney really have a Plan B? I very much doubt it in the terms you are thinking of. I don’t think he has a plan for delivering independence in the next five years. But perhaps he does have a plan for stretching this pantomime out further. Perhaps his troops will go along with it (for a while). Perhaps.
But reality will come calling and we won’t get independence and very soon he has to start relying wholly on domestic performance – and that would have been hard enough if the public finances weren’t just about to get worse. It is a pretty grim picture and needs some serious heft to tackle what is ahead.
Is it there? Let me put that back to you as a question – does the SNP have a compelling Finance Minister, Economy and Business Minister or Health Secretary? No-one in government now is known for their financial acumen (or arithmetic skills for that matter). Of the intake, Flynn, Smith, Gethins and Thewlis will all want a big job, but none are finance minister raw material.
And no-one sane will want it anyway, whereas at least the economy brief offers some positive opportunities. But with Ivan McKee rather stuck cutting the public sector workforce and Kate Forbes gone, I amn’t sure they’ve got a trusted, business-experienced candidate. I guess Alyn Smith would fancy it, but I think you’ll find out he’s another Angus Robertson – much more surface than substance.
So I can’t see a route to where next for the SNP that can be mapped out with personnel changes, which means more of the same or finding some kind of big change internally. Except I’m assuming that they didn’t become the government with the lowest satisfaction ratings in the history of devolution because they chose to be mediocre-to-bad at government.
Can they choose not to be bad at government? This is the thing – a big John Swinney pivot? At this stage in his career? A sudden surge of new thinking – coming from where? I think the SNP is in trouble if it doesn’t change course but I’ve never seen a late-term administration actually change course successfully. What dynamic sets them off in this new direction exactly?
I’ve outlined in this short article (and this longer one) the basics of what they need to do, but I suspect if you asked them they’d claim that’s what they were doing already. Can you change when you believe you’re already the thing you need to change into?
My conclusion from all of this is that Scotland’s politicians are not choosing, shaping or making Scotland’s immediate future, they’re just going to stumble into it and improvise from there. I doubt that will go brilliantly. Which begs a question.
What then?
Source: And then?
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Post Ele...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - May 12, 2026, 08:39 AMOn the face of it this was moderately good election for independence supporters – and yet it fills me with worry. To explain why there are things that need to be said out loud.
Including all the smaller parties, about 43 per cent of votes cast were for pro-indy parties, down from 49 at the last election. The SNP went backwards and its list vote is has only been lower once during devolution (the 2003 election). I can’t see any evidence of real forward momentum being generated by its leadership and I don’t know where it’s going to come from.
The next five years in government is likely to be really difficult and I am not sure the team the SNP has in Holyrood is strong enough to manage it effectively.
At the end of this is the 2031 election and if the SNP continues through the next five years of bruising government on the same course it has set itself, there is a serious risk it could lose that election. The team that will fight that election is already in parliament and I’m not sure it will have become a compelling prospect by 2031.
The decision to make a personal overall majority a condition for further progress on independence looks like hubris this morning. It feels like a trap we’ve created for ourselves that we will be unable to get out of. Any parliamentary route to independence now looks closed for five years.
This isn’t about being ‘anti-SNP’, this is about where we are and where we’re going. The cause of independence is at severe risk of spending the next decade in the wilderness if something doesn’t change. We’ve thrown away ten good year and ten tough years await.
So what can the SNP do? The key is government. The Scottish Government has been twiddling the same risk-free policy levers to limited and declining results. Framework legislation, working groups, three-year-long consultations, another grant fund to bid into – these don’t get things done.
The government must create clear objectives and deliver them quickly and efficiently. Need more affordable houses? Don’t muck about with help to buy schemes, build houses. This is a very big shift in mindset for the government but it needs to have impact and it can’t keep going as it is.
The other thing it needs to do is get a better grip on the machinery of government. The civil service is running ministers, not the other way round. To be brutal, the party needs much more experienced advisers in parliament who can tame the machinery. The government mission has allies in civic Scotland; government needs to be less insular and actually listen to them.
Then again, none of this will work if the SNP pretends it can be everything to everyone. You can pretend to be on the side of both landlords and tenants, but you can’t. At some point you need to decide what is wrong in your society and take a side. It is time for the SNP to stop listening to lobbyists and start worrying about the lives of people who didn’t vote for them.
As for independence; it was the SNP’s choice to cut off any parliamentary route forward. We now have no option but to get independence back out of the parliament and into communities and workplaces. If we don’t form an effective, coordinated civic campaign with a strong central strategy, the next ten years could be very difficult indeed.
Source: Post Election initial comment
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Governme...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - May 12, 2026, 08:07 AMIf I had a single piece of advice for an incoming government in Scotland it would be as follows: stop obsessing about policy and focus on theory for a change. And instantly I realise that this is going to take some explaining…
As someone who set up a policy think tank to influence an institution that operates on the basis of devising and implementing policy, it will seem strange advice. Policy is crucial, but the SNP (who will almost certainly be the next government) has policy coming out of its ears. It’s manifesto reads like they decided to have a policy for everything.
That’s the problem – they’ve been having policies for everything for a long time now, and they seem to keep mixing up the difference between ‘policy’ and ‘announcement’. That’s why there is so much failure to implement policy and so much policy which fails. Press releases don’t solve problems.
So why theory? Because it’s not navel-gazing – physics is a theory and when your bridge doesn’t stand up you don’t develop a new policy, you look at the physics. It’s the same in government. There have been millennia of thinkers analysing how government and governance is done and many, many suggested ways to do it best. What we do is only one of many options.
But do politicians understand this? Not in Europe, as best as I can tell. They have a fish/water relationship with what you might call the Standard European Government Model; it is so ingrained in political consciousness that at times they seem to forget there was ever a before.
So what is the Standard European Government Model? Basically, the role of government is to facilitate markets by manipulating macro policy levers. Everything from electricity to housing to wage policy to environmental protection are functions of the market and understanding how to incentivise those markets is the primary role of government.
But part of the ideology of managing markets is that when a market doesn’t want to do something that needs to be done, the state has to take that burden from them – unless the market wants to do part of a role which is profitable but not another which isn’t. Hence we deregulated postal services, letting private interests run the bits with big profits leaving us to cover the costs of the expensive public service bit.
This is the lesson – markets are so far away from pursuing the public good that it is bizarre that we think they do. The natural behaviour of markets is to reduce pay and supplier costs, take out as much profit as possible for owners while investing as little as possible back in, creating monopolies to prevent unhappy customers from going elsewhere and using this dominant position to shape politics.
The whole point is that government is supposed to stop this happening because none of it is in the public interest. Far from encouraging this state of affairs, government is meant to regulate it – anti-monopoly enforcement, strict regulation on banking and finance, clear and realistic ways of representing the interests of labour (trade unions), stronger worker protection, tax disincentives to taking profit out rather than investing it back in…
We basically play a sport where the government referees a game where one team get to make (and change) the rules and send the other team to hospital where the government pays for their care while the winning team takes all their money.
Let me give you some quick numbers (the article they are taken from is very much worth reading). First, since the financial crisis of 2007, French and German wages have risen by ten per cent, UK wages have risen by zero. Second, since the banking reforms of the late 1980s, the drop in total private investment in Britain is an eye-watering 76 per cent while the share of profits directed into finance more than doubled and from there into the bank accounts of the wealthy as share dividend payout ratios rose from 30 to 40 per cent in the 1970s to 60 to 70 per cent by the 2000s.
And yet the entire set-up of politics in Britain actually rewards facilitating this outcome. This great analysis explains how there are two kinds of politicians – ‘grown-ups’ who keep this failing system going and ‘not fit to governs’ who suggest we need to change it. Keir Starmer is therefore either the greatest success or greatest failure in modern political history, depending on how you look at it.
This is the European malaise – it keeps pushing at levers that are made of string and don’t move the thing on the other side in the direction they intend
The second theoretical problem that makes the Scottish Government so bad is its rigorous belief in macro measures. This is the belief that government should do no more than create the conditions that incentivise behaviour and then others will 'just' do the thing the government wants done – and that is rubbish.
Let me put this really simply; create an incentive and I will certainly exploit it but not necessarily in the way you want. Increase landfill tax to reduce waste and I could recycle more or I could fly-tip. Make it easier for me to build houses anywhere through planning change and I might build fewer houses but in areas where I can sell them at high prices where I couldn’t previously build.
This is the European malaise – it keeps pushing at levers that are made of string and don’t move the thing on the other side in the direction they intend. The Scottish Government has taken this stupidity to a new level. It’s favourite way of making social outcomes happen is to say ‘here’s ten million quid – we’ll give it to anyone who can make social outcomes happen’. Let’s just say that this doesn’t work and leave it at that.
There is a final theoretical issue; if markets are the ultimate goal, everything should run like a market. Hence the marketisation of public services (internally and externally). This should be patently the stupidest application of this idea of all. Markets do one thing efficiently – they let people make money by guessing correctly what will make them money.
You are aware that lots of them don’t guess right and go bankrupt? A properly market-run NHS would let anyone carry out heart surgery, qualified or not, so long as they produce accurate data on how many people they kill. The consumer can then choose the best surgeons. Problem solved by the market.
Except you really can’t kill any of them, so market is meaningless. Grab the frayed end of this silly argument and keep pulling and before you know it you’re saying ‘wait, what is this internal market for again?’.
OK, now let’s reverse these theories. That is what the Scottish Government ought to learn if it wants to turn around its poor performance. The first lesson is that markets do not produce public good on their own. The job of government is not to facilitate markets but to balance them. This is not a radical idea by any stretch of the imagination – it is the basis of good-old Keynesian economics. Government controls and corrects markets for the public good.
Housing is a prime example. The problem is that the market does not build affordable housing fast enough. Of course it doesn’t – where is the stupendous corporate profit in that? The Scottish Government basically tries to build houses through absolutely any means whatsoever other than building houses.
Planning reform? Tick. Subsidies? Tick. Suppress building standards? Tick. Give them lots of public land cheap? Tick. It doesn’t work (I’m describing 1995), so let’s do more of it (2005), and then more of it (2015) and then more of it (2025). Yet frustratingly it still doesn’t work. They won’t build the houses because it reduces their profits.
So build the houses yourself. In Keynesian economics this is known as counter-cyclical or demand-driven investment. Either you take direct action which is the opposite of what the market is doing in a down-cycle (which solves the problem and accelerates an exit from the down-cycle) or you address demand directly where the market doesn’t.
The second corollary of the analysis above is that twiddling around with macro conditions will only take you so far. The Scottish Government still seems to think that you can create a high-pay economy by raising minimum wage. You can’t, because if all other things are equal, businesses will just do the same things they were doing before and pass the additional cost on to consumers.
A high-pay economy needs high-pay jobs and they will not create themselves. If the market isn’t doing it then you need to intervene in the market – which in this instance is known as an industrial strategy. If you want a proper bioplastic industry, use public contracts to make all your disposable cups bioplastic, get Scottish Enterprise to find companies that might diversify and then get the National Investment Bank to offer them loans to achieve that diversification.
We need much more focus on these kinds of micro action, getting something done by doing it. Because doing something is always going to be your best chance of getting it done…
Doing something is always going to be your best chance of getting it done…
Finally, ask yourself over and over what market discipline is actually contributing and therefore why you assume it’s a better way to run complex systems. The NHS is the case study of how imposing artificial fake markets for purely ideological reasons is the opposite of efficient.
Theories of government don’t get more long-lasting than Plato’s and he was very clear on this; if you let the interests of wealth and the power of government merge, the rest of society will suffer. That is what has happened here. This Standard European Government Model is an almost literal merger of commercial and state interests and it has done exactly what Plato said it would.
We have a system of government which only works in one direction – everything but everything it does must increase the wealth of the wealthy and if it tries to do something which is against the interests of the wealthy, the system strikes back. The fact that government can’t get anything done is somewhere between a side effect and the whole point of the system.
This is the lesson for the government; stop worrying about housing policy and just get on with building high-quality public rental housing. Stop trying to bypass UK minimum wage legislation and work on an interventionist industrial policy. Stop treating the NHS like a spreadsheet to be managed from the top and start trusting staff to manage it outside of market doctrine.
Don’t see private care homes as the solution to care because they are ‘the market’ but a primary problem to be removed. Big business is not a ‘partner’ for government any more than a leach is a partner for your bum. The whole theory of government is wrong.
Stop announcing things. Stop pulling levers you know don’t work. Stop believing markets always give you good outcomes despite all the evidence. Stop being so pleased with yourself for conforming to a failing system and being called ‘the adult in the room’.
In other words, my strong advice for an incoming Scottish Government is that you should try to govern this time, not hold the jackets for big business and pretend that is the same thing. You have tried this ‘easy route’ where you take no risks and outsource your hopes for the nation to foreign corporations. It is failing woefully.
It is time to engage with the real, hard work of running a country. It is time to get your hands dirty.
Source: Government must get its hands dirty
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Not a pa...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - May 12, 2026, 06:18 AMI think there was only one time I was in a real, literal eye of a storm. It was in Mexico and I remember how unnerving it was – massive winds suddenly subsided into a relative calmness. To all the world it was over, but you sensed it wasn’t, that it was swirling everywhere around you.
It’s a human failure, our inability to properly appreciate systems that are bigger than us. To us, that storm was two different storms with a brief gap in the middle, but that isn’t what it was at all. It was all one system. The calm was part of the fury, the fury part of the calm. And so it is with the Scottish Election, the British Labour Party, the Iran War, the crisis in Europe…
I feel it myself. I have been telling myself ‘just wait until this election is over’, like there is a before and an after rather than just an ongoing now. I’ve been telling myself ‘don’t pay too much attention to Keir Starmer, he’ll be gone soon’. And even though I’m definitely not someone who is waiting for war to end so we can get back to ‘normal’, I am waiting patiently for the aftershocks to arrive properly.
So I’m waiting in a calm-seeming lull in a raging storm – and it is all total nonsense and I need to give myself a shake because this isn’t calm, it is numbness, and this isn’t a natural phenomenon but a human one and so one we can refuse to accept in its current form.
Let’s take a wander through this unnerving calm just to show you what I mean. First, Scotland. Someone catches me in the street and says that of her seven work mates, she is the only one who is going to vote tomorrow. I’m used to low interest in this election but the person concerned works in a sector you’d expect to be right up at the top in terms of civic engagement so it startles even me.
The media have struggled to pretend this is an election about something in the same way that the politicians have. I ask someone else what their experience has been and he tells me it’s just parties telling him not to vote for someone else, that his job is to ‘prevent’ some other party taking power.
That at least is an accurate assessment of the situation. This isn’t an election with people who stand for a mission fighting to see that mission realised, it’s a bunch of people who want a job and don’t want you to give it to someone else. That seems to me to be the long and short of the election.
Politics isn’t going to change itself and there isn’t a normal any more, unless we are trying to call decline normal
During this palid time I’ve been doing something a bit different. I’ve been trying to work out who will be running the country for the next five years and how they’re going to go about doing it. I am finding it very difficult because of one piece of information that keeps coming back to me from multiple sources – senior politicians feel stuck because the civil service won’t ‘let’ them do things.
I hear this so much now. I know this is partly self-serving blame-passing from underpowered politicians, but I’ve heard this from so many other sources – that the civil service does whatever it wants and the politicians just read out the press releases. There is no ‘once we get started again’, Peter Mandelson’s right-hand-man is still in charge of our economy and he’s still selling Scotland to anyone who has a few bob.
Politics isn’t going to change itself and there isn’t a normal any more, unless we are trying to call decline normal. So let’s not wait for a year for the new lot to ‘bed in’, the only chance we as a nation have got is to turn on them and force them to act. And if it is the civil service which is really the block then the politicians can tell us or pay the price. We just can’t wait any more.
Likewise the UK. We’ve gone into one of those phases where I chuckle more at The Guardian than I do at the Beano. How many ‘Starmer is safe and you should all back off’ articles do they really have in them? They are reluctantly forced to admit that no-one wants Starmer to lead Labour into the next election, but can’t we enjoy this period of calm and stability for a bit?
Let’s start of with ‘away and fuck yerself because your arguments are so clearly punk’. Apparnetly the British public will ‘not forgive’ Labour if it goes into a self-serving, inward-looking coup process – says the people who did not wait for even a year after Corbyn was elected to mount their first electoral challenge.
Then they absolutely had to act because Corbyn was destroying the party. Well it’s in a very much worse state now so how is that an argument to hold on a bit? In any case, in the real world it is keeping the least popular Prime Minster ever on purely because of factional corruption in the Laboru Party which is the thing I suspect the public will not forgive them for.
But on they wait, a lull in the storm until Wes can get out from under Peter, or Angela can wriggle out past HMRC, or Andy can find a sacrificial lamb whose job to take. A little longer, a little longer. Starmer’s people ask us all to wait until he ‘delivers’, like we don’t know that that is never going to happen.
This isn’t a pause, it’s the sound of paralysis
So we wait, and we wait, pretty certain that Westminster won’t sort itself out but not even nearly responding to this by making the argument for independence more compelling. Nope; something will come along, if you’re patient enough.
And the world is in denial over Iran. Or at least the Western World is. I’m writing this as Donald Trump has tried his latest version of ‘I surrender, but you go first, and then we’ll be friends, or I’ll kill you all, one or the other, but a deal is close, unless it isn’t’. And the oil markets go ‘phew, I really want to believe this is true so I just will even though I know it’s not’.
I can’t get into the AI bubble here because it is too complex (and frankly too depressing) but the smart money is still that it will bring the economy down, and that was before Iran. But on we wait, Europe wondering if there is an ‘after Trump’, America believing whatever it wants to believe, Britain paralysed and broken and lost and clueless, sailing its aircraft carrier to Cyprus and back because we have nothing else to do with it.
The point is that the world is about to go through another convulsion. We know what it will roughly look like if not the details. We know already what the massive failures of our economic model are doing to people and we know why they are failing. So what on earth do we gain from waiting?
We could take action now in Scotland. In fact there is a possibility that we could actually take advantage of a crisis for once by getting in front of it, understanding it and grabbing the opportunities it throws out. That isn’t something that is happening in Scotland, and I doubt it will.
So yes, I keep saying things like ‘once this election is out the way’ or ‘perhaps a change in Labour might…’, but I know it’s just me expressing my own disillusionment with politics. The only feeling I can drag up just now is dread that I’m going to have to sit through another five years of inadequate-but-all-powerful governmet at Holyrood.
But as I await what feels more like a nasty dental appointment than my once-in-five-years chance to shape the government of Scotland, there is something that is gnawing at me. Gramsci is a genius but he’s wrong. The old is dead but the new will never be born. It is made, created, designed. It is our decisions which will make it.
So not, in the famous quote about morbid symptoms being what lies between, perhaps we need to understand that we are the morbid symptoms, a generation of people more disengaged with our own decline than makes any sense.
This isn’t a pause, it’s the sound of paralysis. It is part of a giant system we’re caught in. Somehow we have to get ourselves out of this, because the storm will be back before we know it. And we’re not even nearly ready.
Source: Not a pause, a paralysis
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] This is ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - May 12, 2026, 05:12 AMI THINK we can generally agree that this hasn't been a classic election, but there is at least one group who will be happy with how it has gone – the commercial lobbyists. That isn't healthy for democracy and it makes me very nervous.
Government is a process of managing vested interests. It's inevitable. Senior politicians exist in the orbit of lobbyists much more than of communities. Ministers have power and commerce always wants to influence it.
That is why election campaigns are usually so important. Imperfect as they are, those are the moments when politicians traditionally shift their focus almost wholly towards the interests of citizens. This is the moment when we get away from what government does and spend time asking what government is for.
I don't think that has happened this time and there are great dangers that come with it. The key issues for the public based on what they themselves are talking about are affordability and the cost of living for everyone, housing for the young and social care for the old – and, of course, public services generally.
This is not an election which has been marked by serious engagement with these issues. The party manifestos contained next to nothing about social care and for all the rhetoric, identifying what they are actually proposing to do about affordability is pretty difficult. I'll come back to housing in a minute.
What have we been talking about instead? This is what concerns me. We've spent an enormous amount of time talking about nuclear energy, tax cuts for oil corporations, AI, planning and supermarket economics.
No-one is going to pretend that this is what citizens are talking about themselves. These are all issues which are of interest primarily to big financial concerns and it makes this election look semi-divorced from ordinary people.
Why is this happening? You can't even begin to make a coherent case for why Scotland should build nuclear power stations but then you can do a web search for "former Labour politicians who are now lobbyists for or advisers to the nuclear industry" and it starts to make more sense.
If the public feel like politics is something that happens without reference to them or their lives, dangerous things happen
Likewise, as far as people are talking about AI, it certainly isn't in terms of "more data centres please" – yet Labour are heavily influenced by the Tony Blair Institute and that is in the pocket of big tech.
Why are the SNP still (utterly inexplicably) calling for tax cuts on the big oil companies who are raking in phenomenal windfall profits right now? Certainly not on behalf of the many households in this country struggling to pay their energy bills. We know who this benefits and it isn't even the oil workers in the North East.
What about housing? It all started so well. The SNP announced a National Housing Company to create a much-needed disruption in the housing market. Then, suddenly, that's not what it sounded like at all. Very quickly it just started to sound like the shopping list of the big housing corporations who made housing unaffordable in the first place.
And while I am unconvinced by either the effectiveness or the legality of John Swinney's supermarket price caps, they were at least a bold attempt to set out a stall on cost of living. That it took less than 48 hours of pressure from supermarkets to produce a U-turn is a worrying sign about who really has the power.
It is perfectly easy to put together a reasonable defence of some of this. Holyrood doesn't have the powers to be able to do anything desperately meaningful about affordability and, in the end, the job of a politician in an election is to get elected. If they can do that while keeping their heads down, perhaps we shouldn't blame them
But hearing these justifications is like hearing Labour insiders at Westminster talking like they've pulled off a major win by saving Keir Starmer's job. Well, perhaps on your own terms that is a success, but for the public it looks more like contempt. He isn't getting more popular…
If the public feel like politics is something that happens without reference to them or their lives, dangerous things happen. It is almost impossible to miss the antipathy towards this election – I haven't heard a single person say a single positive word about it in any conversation since it started.
Meanwhile, politicians will not be experiencing a lot of enthusiasm on the doorsteps and you can forgive them for hoping this will all be over soon so they can get back to the relative safety of Holyrood.
Unless we can make politics a conversation with and about citizens and unless we can stop big financial interests kicking our politics around, politics will continue to sound distant from and irrelevant to ordinary people
That's the worry. If our politics stays bunkered up in a parliament that many people feel is remote from them and then, the one time every five years they really turn their attention to citizens and communities, they do so in a half-hearted way, high-tailing it back to their bunker as soon as possible, no good will come from it.
It is hard to argue that politics is making itself relevant to ordinary people just now and in large part it is because democracy has become a conversation between political power and market power and the rest of us are just spectators.
Unless politicians are brave enough to recognise this and do something about it, the obvious direction of travel will be greater disillusion about democracy and rising public anger.
The alternative is to do some bold things. First, much more should be done to constrain the power of lobbyists. Far, far too much is done in secret. If what these firms are lobbying for is in the public interest, why can't they do it on camera in a committee room? If it's not in the public interest, why are they allowed to do it in secret?
Freedom of information should cover all public funding including that which goes to commercial interests. It is still public money and how it is used should never be opaque. There is a revolving door between government and big business – the civil servant in charge of Scotland's economy spent the past 10 years as Peter Mandelson's right-hand-man at his lobbying company. That revolving door should be welded shut.
The second thing we need to do is let citizens influence politics in between elections much more than they can now. That not only means decentralising this horrendously centralised country so power moves closer to communities (Scotland has the most centralised democracy in the developed world) but using participatory democracy much more effectively to help citizens better shape policy.
Unless we can make politics a conversation with and about citizens and unless we can stop big financial interests kicking our politics around, politics will continue to sound distant from and irrelevant to ordinary people. It is difficult to overstate how alarming it would be if that happens.
Frankly, this isn't good enough and �everyone knows it. I hope this is a turning point.
Source: This is a great election if you're a lobbyist — here's what we change
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] As Keir Starm...
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Source: As Keir Starmer nears his exit, who should the independence movement want to replace him?
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] What fre...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - May 12, 2026, 02:07 AMEx hoc, omnia alia sequuntur. From this thing, all other things follow. This concept is at the heart of the stupid, reductive political ideology that overwhelms our politics to the extent that it has actually become true. Or nearly.
Neoliberal capitalism was invented in America and has a really crushingly simple internal logic – if you secure three fundamental things, all other things sort themselves out. Those things are freedom, profit and self-interest. And it has become true; so religiously have we followed these rules that most of what we see around us is indeed a direct consequence.
That means things like climate collapse, poverty, suicide, drug deaths and alcoholism. Plus bad jeans, chatbots, saturation advertising, wall-to-wall pornography, gambling addiction and a list so long it would take up the whole article.
So what if fixing some of these things means actually giving up on the assumption that progress can only flow from our Neoliberal Trinity? What if there are things that can’t be fixed with more freedom, more profit and more self-interest? Because there really are. Like drug deaths. That’s what I want to show in this article – our politics can’t solve drug deaths because they cause them.
It was me who did our Daily Briefing on drug deaths this week and it upset me. Politicians talk about ‘deaths of despair’ but never the causes of despair. They want to solve suicide, alcoholism and drug addiction without talking about pain and fear. For all their practiced empathy they can’t see this as anything other than bad personal choice made via a ‘freedom’ frame.
That is the trap built into neoliberalism. The right to do anything you want has totally different outcome for someone who is rich than for someone in poverty who has faced abuse. The first one can choose anything, the second one has a disastrously short range of options – like suicide. That’s a free choice, isn’t it?
The key issue here is our veneration of ‘freedom’. At university I did one of my dissertations on utopias, and there was a fascinating finding; that in most utopias there is a trade-off between freedom and happiness. While oppression clearly doesn’t make us happy, in itself, freedom doesn’t either.
This is then borne out in real world data. The happiest profession of all is the clergy and monks and nuns. After that comes things like firefighters, gardeners and psychologists. Are they the freest people in society? Definitely not – but they have other things in common. Above all, these professions all have a moral purpose.
The firefighter risks their live to save others. The clergy dedicate their life to a greater cause. The gardener is in a deep, lifelong symbiotic relationship with nature. Psychologists help people who need it most. Purpose will make you happier than freedom every day of the week.
But joiners are quite happy too, as are artists and authors and software engineers. Why? Because, more than freedom, they have control. They get to shape their day to day lives them. And why are gardeners so high? Similar reason as clergy – nice work environment. One works in nature which we know is good for wellbeing, the other exists in a respectful, like-minded community.
And why are so many creatives in the list? A gardener is creative, so is a joiner and a software engineer as well as a painter and a novelist. Because there are real, visible, meaningful outputs. You not only achieved something, you can see the thing you achieved and it has value.
The solution to the problem is to offer people the opportunity to sacrifice some of their own freedom in return for structure, safety, calm and simplicity
Happy countries? It’s the Nordics with a number of Latin American countries on the rise. The Nordics are wealthy, but a much better predictor among these countries is philosophical and about relationships. The Nordics all have their version of ‘moderation’ as a virtue – something like the opposite of freedom. In a Nordic country you are free to take all the tapas for yourself at dinner – but you are judged negatively for it.
The other thing that makes Nordics happy is tax, sacrifice for the collective good which creates strong social services and good infrastructure. And outside Europe the big happiness winner is Costa Rica, a country which has become the fourth happiest in the world through a consistent philosophy of ‘Pura Vida’. This is a mindset which prioritises simplicity, appreciation of nature and social connection over material wealth.
I can do this for hours and hours, going back to Aristotle who clocked this two and a half millennia ago when he argued that hedonic pleasure (immediate gratification) makes us miserable in the end where as eudaimonic (meaning, purpose, self-realisation, love) is what really makes us happy.
So lets get back to drug deaths. They are by definition the result of a failure in happiness but clearly not of freedom. More freedom, more profit, more self-interest wouldn’t resolve the difficulties addicts face. But all of the above shows us what could – structure, moderation, community, stability, achievement, purpose.
Over and over again what drug addicts report (along with many caught up in the criminal justice system) is chaos, lack of structure, isolation, fear. It is why a depressingly large number of them actually see prison as a comparatively positive destination precisely because it provides consistency and structure, some kind of community and a degree of safety, of protection.
In Islamic scholarship this is captured in the phrase "Better one hundred years of the Sultan’s tyranny than one year of people’s tyranny over each other". At least you can get a sleep in prison without the neighbour playing loud dance music at three in the morning.
The problem is that our dreadfully limited politicians don’t learn knowledge like this but do learn that freedom comes first, because it has been drilled into them. It shows in the SNP and Labour responses to this – basically the SNP position is cynical (as long as they don’t die they’re not in the statistics, hence risk management) whereas Labour is sanctimonious (help them be abstemious and then thrown them back to the wolves of poverty).
The solution to the problem is to offer people the opportunity to sacrifice some of their own freedom in return for structure, safety, calm and simplicity. ‘Would you like to live a life of peace, security, safety and happiness – but there are some rules?’. Many would say ‘yes’.
We could solve our deepest problems like deaths of despair by offering peace, structure, security, sufficiency, meaning, purpose, community and achievement
This is why from time to time we at Common Weal bring up therapeutic communities, a personal obsession of mine and one I hope to do some proper policy work on when we have a gap in the schedule.
A therapeutic community is a residential facility that operates like a little village but with some structure and rules and a lot of support. The first role of these communities is to get people who have lost control of their lives out of chaotic systems and into stability. That alone achieves a lot.
Next comes security – you get somewhere to live and you get fed. There is no daily panic working out how you’ll eat or where you’ll sleep. Then comes safety – there are rules about behaviour such as a total prohibition of violence and a requirement to contribute. You get fed, but you also learn how to cook so you go on the rota for preparing the food for everyone.
And then you embed the hard stuff – addiction counselling, withdrawal support, psychological services. And then gently you start offering paths forward – skills training, helping people get qualifications, apprenticeships, and a load of life skills not limited to cooking.
Nor is this just for addicts. This is a model I would offer to anyone in a chaotic lifestyle, whether that is someone who is subject to domestic abuse, a petty criminal who is in and out of prison, someone whose mental health has broken down, even someone with eating disorders.
The overwhelming message you will hear from them all is they want an exit, and escape from a life they can’t cope with because often it is simply too much for anyone to cope with. If there is no exit there is always the option to destroy yourself with drink, drugs or self-harm. So let’s offer an exit.
I’d compulsorily purchase a grouse moor. If there is some mature forestry, so much the better. I’d build some pleasant cabins for people to live in and communal space like a canteen and a social centre. I’d then start with my first cohort. Along with all the support they would do a few hours of contribution a day – learning woodland management and harvesting, how to process logs, how to build a cabin, how to grow food, how to cook, how to rewild, how to support others.
These communities can then become self-sustaining, each generation building more accommodation for the next. It is important they are villages not towns because community is key, but there are so many variations in need that I imagine dozens of little villages, each specialising in different kinds of care.
This would be so much cheaper than the costs we currently bear. With a little subsidy these communities could become virtually self-sustaining barring the social services. They would transform the land around them into a living environment, a purpose, a tangible outcome, a meaning.
Where I differ a little from the usual model is that personally I see no reason why anyone should have to leave one of these communities if they don’t want to. The ideal outcome is someone stabilises their life and gets a trade or qualifications for college or university and returns to mainstream life in a positive way.
But I imagine that you could have levels of these villages and eventually, if you didn’t need the therapeutic support any more but you felt a peace you’d never felt before and felt fear at the thought of losing it, I would create permanent living communities among these villages where people could go. By that point there is actually all kinds of positive economic activity that you could build in.
I don’t see this as a failure but a perfect realisation of Costa Rica’s Pura Vida, a simply life of community and connection to nature. Honestly, I could move there myself very happily indeed.
If only we could drop our knee-jerk recitation of US political philosophy and listen instead to countries which are happy. It would help us to solve our deepest problems like deaths of despair, by offering peace, structure, security, sufficiency, meaning, purpose, community and achievement.
And then, Ex hoc, omnia alia sequuntur. From these things, all other things follow.
Source: What freedom can't fix, hope can
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Serious ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - May 11, 2026, 10:14 PMAs I often point out, the mechanics of politics and the mechanics of a con trick operate similarly. Politics and governance is so complex and diverse that it is very difficult to know what you’re ‘buying’. You can’t ‘know’ politician X or Y will fix the NHS; you can only have varying degrees of confidence that they can.
Con tricks work by projecting the confidence that you will deliver on a promise, false or otherwise. We hear the promise but we follow the confidence, and it’s the same in politics. More than that, this continues through into government. Can you get civil servants to follow you, can you wrestle others into submission during negotiations, can you get the public to believe what you tell them is happening?
It is therefore very risky and generally damaging in the long term if you take actions which undermine an audience’s reasons to have confidence in you. My concern is that that is what has just happened in the case of Scottish independence.
John Swinney has just done a 180 on the trigger mechanism for progressing talks on independence. It is only a few weeks since everyone was clearly whipped to say that the pre-existing strategy (that the only legitimate trigger was giving the SNP an overall majority in its own right) was the right and proper one and the only one that would work.
Now it looks like that wasn’t the only option after all. It seems now that he will seek progress based on a majority of pro-independence parties of any stripe in the Scottish Parliament. Under usual circumstances that would be considered a jarring, major U-turn, particularly this close to an election. This election is so insipid that people seem generally to shrug at everything.
So it probably won’t make any difference to the result – but that doesn’t mean it won’t make any difference. And (you’re going to have to bear with me for a minute), it’s going to make a difference despite making no difference whatsoever.
I’m clearly going to have to unpack that. Let’s start with ‘it won’t make any difference’. It won’t. Whether the request came from an SNP that had a majority in its own right or whether it is a request that comes from the SNP that has a pro-indy majority by including Green MSPs, the answer was going to be ‘no’ anyway.
Flipping on policy like this from one extreme to another makes us look unserious
We can look at why in two different ways and it won’t make any difference. If we look at a ‘how strong is the mandate’ question, we find that the answer is ‘not very’. I’ve just had a double check on this and the highest combined Green/SNP vote in polling for the election so far is about 40 per cent of votes cast.
It’s a little complicated because the Greens aren’t standing in many constituencies, but if you take the first vote then the best is about SNP 35, Green five and if you take the second then it is 29 and 12. (I know there are some outlier polls but this is taken from a raw summary of all the polls – look for yourself here).
If the SNP crawled its way to 30 on the list and the Greens bounced up to 20, it’s still barely a majority of votes cast. Remember, at the last election the SNP got 48 and the Greens got eight and a 56 per cent majority[* see note] wasn’t enough, so I don’t believe 40 is a crushing mandate that can’t be ignored, which (in politics) means it will be ignored.
The other reason is simply that Westminster is in chaos and even a legitimate mandate would probably be likely to receive short shrift in the immediate term. There is very likely to be some kind of leadership challenge within the UK Government and until it settles down, no-one is going to do anything even remotely like giving Scotland a referendum.
That’s what I mean by not making a difference, at least in the short to medium term. It wouldn’t have worked anyway and 40 per cent isn’t a mandate. But in the longer term it does have consequences, even if they’re only perceptional.
Let me put this as simply as I can – flipping on policy like this from one extreme to another makes us look unserious. I thought the SNP’s original policy was stupid (at the time it looked almost impossible the SNP would achieve it, and it still probably won’t). Creating a condition you can’t meet is unwise if you want to keep the issue alive.
But having adopted it the party went to some lengths to project confidence in its policy. One review of its recent conference highlighted the number of delegates who were bullishly ready to say that Swinney had it spot on and it was the right policy. Like I say, in politics it’s good to be right but essential to look like you’re right.
Now it looks like people were bullshitting. It was exactly the right proposal until we decide it wasn’t so do keep up. You can frame this any way you want (they never really meant it, they’ll say anything, if they can flip on this…, it’s so cynical, Swinney Always Chickens Out, this lot lack credibility), all of it is bad.
Remember, Swinney has two audiences here if he’s serious, and this does harm with both. One audience is the other side in a negotiation, whether that is Westminster politicians in pursuit of a Section 30 Order or a negotiating team actually agreeing the technical terms of such an order. In both cases this makes the other side’s job easier.
If you tell people ‘this is the end of the road’ then you pull new road out your back pocket as soon as it is convenient for you, you do not look confident, you look like a chancer
Just to take the politicians as an example, if I was advising I’d give a simple instruction – just keep him talking about him things. If you can keep him talking about having flip-flopped and U-turned, you win. ‘Can I get a biscuit?’/’you said you’d tidy your room first’ is not going to turn out to be a conversation about biscuits.
Keeping Swinney on uncomfortable territory is now much easier. Say what you want, the other side may be anti-democratic (depending on your view) but they are at least clear and consistent. The SNP keeps saying opposing things. In the media, that’s a dark abyss which will suck you down.
The bigger problem though is with the other audience, the electorate. I know I’m like a stuck record on this but it’s because it’s true; the key voters we need to swing to independence are not unsympathetic to the idea of independence but repeatedly question whether we’re serious, whether we’re actually ready to deliver, whether we have a plan.
And this stuff, this saying one thing then saying the opposite according to what suits us any given day, is a big part of what they mean. If we were a serious liberation movement we wouldn’t be shifting our position every time the weather changes.
I totally get what has happened here and why. The original strategy was to goose the SNP vote in the election by trying very, very hard to give demotivated supporter a motivation, cynical and wrong but it makes sense. The second strategy is just ‘Save Swinney’ stuff. I’ve been pointing out for a while that the trade-off for Swinney is that unless he delivers a majority he has literally run out of road. There is no spinning this out further.
Well now there is, by just totally contradicting himself. As it stood, independence was probably going to be dead for five years after the election. That would have been very painful for Swinney internally. Now they think they’ve just opened up some additional tarmacadam about the right size to accommodate a kicked can. The problem is credibility.
If you tell people ‘this is the end of the road’ then you pull new road out your back pocket as soon as it is convenient for you, you do not look confident, you look like a chancer. Have you seen what it looks like when a mark loses confidence in a con artist? It’s brutal. It’s a sudden switch. There is no coming back.
That’s the risk here. I’m not sure anyone really believed the original Swinney pledge but I can’t see how they can believe in the new one at all. Perhaps this is better for Swinney than potential trench warfare with an unhappy party from day one of his new regime, but it is definitely not better for the long term interests of independence.
For 12 years now the only consistent feature of SNP strategy is that giving them and their friends jobs first is always the initial perquisite for any action on independence. But all con tricks hit the rails at some point (no-one is conned forever), like all political careers end in failure. In both cases the trick is to be far enough away with their money in your pocket when it does.
U-turning with a week to go to an election is not the way to do it. It seems foolish to imagine there won’t be consequences.
[*Serious people also correct themselves… I did exactly what I said I wasn’t going to do and combined constituency and list votes. The highest joint SNP-Green percentage of votes was 49 per cent in 2021.]
Source: Serious people are consistent