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Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Labour’s...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 21, 2025, 05:18 AMYou know that old joke about the hunter hunting for a bear which outfoxes him, sneaks up behind and sexually abuses him? The one where the hunter keeps coming back for revenge and the bear keeps outfoxing him, sneaking up and sexually abusing him, until on the fourth time round the bear whispers in his ear ‘you’re not really here for the hunting, are you?’.
Well Labour isn’t really here for the socialism, is it? Racism isn’t a reluctant tactic necessary to give it the chance to implement socialist policies, is it? I can show you quite simply that that doesn’t tally with any of the facts. Racism is the point, is it not? To my amazement and despite its many remaining anti-racist members, Labour is now a racist party for racists, right?
Let me show you what real racism looks like. You’re a Zionist Supremacist. You have a well-established hierarchy of racism in which racism for you is really a tool to suppress Muslims in favour of Jews. You know, like the independent Barrister who was invited to look at antisemitism in the Labour Party concluded (the Forde Report).
You have gone way past dog-whistling racist sentiment and you’re now making speeches about ‘islands of strangers‘ and your staff are referring to Muslims as ‘the fleas‘ without consequence. Inspired by Trump, you video yourself on immigration raids and watch on delighted as desperate young men are cuffed on camera to titillate the anti-immigration brigade.
And your immigration policy is now one lengthy One Minute Hate process in which your goal is to humiliate people with brown skin while your Scottish representative (Joani Reid) is decrying the idea that Glasgow should be a sanctuary for asylum seekers (away and check ‘sanctuary’ and ‘asylum’ in the dictionary will you Ms Reid).
Given all that, what would you imagine happens when the whole sordid, racist lot of them hear that a team from their beloved Israel is being prevented from bringing fans to Birmingham for a match based on warnings of danger from the police? What do you imagine Team Starmer does?
Just for context, they got vague, unspecified advice from security services and moved with alacrity to ban a non-violence pro-Palestine protest group. So they’re going to take the police advice, right? Nope. Before even talking to the police – or anyone – they’re on the warpath to overturn a decision they didn’t understand.
Real, ideological racism isn’t so much about what you say but about how you see
To get why this happened, you need to understand racism. When you hear a young man saying some lazy racist statement, you would do well not to assume that he’s definitely a racist, just that he said something racist. We all work from what are known as ‘social cues’, things we think we’re meant to say, things we think we’re not meant to say.
There is a difference between holding an ideologically racist world view and saying racist things. The latter may be the result of permissive social cues pushing the idea that what you are saying isn’t racist at all. It may not mean you hate people of a different skin colour.
Real, ideological racism isn’t so much about what you say but about how you see. It is an ideology. It defines how you categorise the world, how you actually think human relations should work. A true racist may not say racist things that much, they just act consistently as if people with darker skin are of less value.
It is about what you see when you see a picture. If you see someone with blood on their face and there is a crowd and there is one black person in the photo – if you find yourself assuming that it must have been the black person who is responsible for the assault, you are trapped in a racist frame. You didn’t calculate your racism, you just saw the world that way.
So when Starmer said ‘this is outrageous antisemitism and we’re going to prevent this happening’, what we know is that he couldn’t see any alternative configuration of the facts. He saw this plainly and clearly as an issue of needing to protect Jews from Muslim hate. There was no other possible configuration of the facts that could be taken into consideration.
There is a very clear alternative configuration of the facts that could have been considered. It could be that this advice wasn’t about protecting Jews from Muslims but protecting Muslims from Jews. Birmingham has Britain’s largest Muslim population. It is a very Muslim city by British standards. Those are Keir Starmer’s constituents, not Israelis. I need actually to explain that here, which tells you a lot.
The Jews in question are not here representing Judaism (they’re not some sort of faith group or church group or something), they are football fans with a long track record of violence at home and away. It just so happens their team is in a Jewish country. And there is copious evidence of extreme racist behaviour and violence.
No-one but no-one is disputing that this is a group of people who have walked through heavily Muslim areas chanting ‘Death to Arabs’ en masse. That is only one of 77 racist chants the team’s supporters are recorded as having engaged in last year, all anti-Muslim.
And yet it gets worse; there is a track record of violent attacks on Muslims and Muslim-owned businesses across Europe. Amsterdam, Athens, Cyprus – assaults (some really brutal) on Muslims are common when they travel abroad. They were fined by Uefa for anti-Muslim racism in 2013. (All info in links above.)
Starmer doesn’t take ten seconds to even ask Muslim community groups whether they feel fear about aggressive, violent anti-Muslims coming to their community – because they don’t count
Right, so let’s loop back – knowing this, there is a pretty good chance that the police have a pretty solid reason not to enable these fans to come to the city with Britain’s largest Muslim population. This is routine behaviour – violent football fans are regularly banned from places they might be predicted to incite violence.
Now I do not have access to the police intelligence, so perhaps the evidential basis for this ban is weak (though, really?). My point is that if you are a concerned politician you’d ask, and if the evidence is not solid then you might challenge. But if you are a racist then it will never have occurred to you that it was Muslims who were being protected in the first place.
Because if you’re a racist then you probably buy into the idea that Muslims are violent and not properly civilised whereas Israeli Jews are. And so you wouldn’t pause to look at the picture and not assume that the antagonists are the ones with the dark skin. You would certainly do so without speaking first to local community groups representing the British people concerned.
Reverse this; the supporters of a football team have been chanting ‘Death to Jews’ and attacking Jewish people and property wherever they go. The police call them to be banned from a heavily Jewish area of London. What does Starmer do? Give me an answer to that question which does not lead inexorably to the only possible interpretation that Starmer is an out and out racist.
For him, if a Jewish community group expresses ‘fear’ then he thinks that domestic anti-war protestors should be banned. But he doesn’t take ten seconds to even ask Muslim community groups whether they feel fear about aggressive, violent anti-Muslims coming to their community. Because They Don’t Count. They aren’t Proper People.
Anyway, as our bear ravishes our hunter for the fourth time, how can he not at that point conclude that the hunter is doing this for reasons other than that he thinks he’s actually going to win this time. The evidence says otherwise.
Likewise, the more racist Starmer becomes, the deeper he falls into the category of ‘least popular Prime Minister in recorded history‘. I could link you to mountains of evidence that shows socialist parties which tack right to triangulate racists get eviscerated at the polls. If you know anything (I read about political strategy every day of the week) you know the evidence on that has been conclusive for some time.
But you don’t need to believe me. At the moment the Labour Party will cease to exist as a significant parliamentary force in the next three or four years unless something changes. Starmer is killing Labour dead. It is over. He’s finished them. Don’t bother remembering their names because in a couple of years you will never have to. Joani Reid? Was she something to do with Enoch Powell?
That’s what I spent my Friday thinking. I nearly thought ‘the bastards, they’re back at their racism again’. And then I thought ‘hold on Robin, this is fucking magic – they lost another five per cent of their vote again today and will never be elected in Birmingham again’.
Whatever it is Starmer, McSweeny, Mahmoud and the rest of the race hate team are up to, it ain’t the hunting. The outcome for them will be similar (metaphorically) to that of our poor, bedraggled hunter. I can’t wait.
Source: Labour's overt racism is working perfectly
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Don’t be...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 21, 2025, 04:36 AMI got some follow-up questions from readers after last week’s column argued for a different approach to bond markets. ‘Won’t we be punished for not playing by the rules?’ I was asked. Let me try and explain.
What I was asked was whether a lack of confidence in any non-standard money system by money markets could lead to problems in exchange rates? Won’t international currency markets devalue a Scottish Pound in retaliation for not submitting to their will? To understand the answer you need to understand that there is money, and then there is money…
You will probably assume, not unreasonably, that there is one kind of money and it is all worth the same. This isn’t really true. In fact not only is there more than one kind of money, there is more than one way to count how many different kinds of money there are.
(To aid clarity here I’m going to be pretty loose with some definitions. Just please note that some of what follows isn’t really how this all works exactly but is close enough for you to get the idea.)
Sometimes money is described in four forms, sometimes two. Both are relevant here. The four kinds of money are fiat money, commodity money, fiduciary money and commercial bank money. The approach that sees two kinds divides it as base money and bank money. So what does all this mean? It’s actually easier than you might think.
Fiat money just means money backed by government guarantee. It is the fiat powers of governments to issue money that gives money its value in the first place. Basically you can consider money that isn’t based on debt and which circulates in the domestic economy as fiat money.
Commodity money is when a commodity is traded as having an agreed intrinsic value which makes it behave like money and this basically refers to precious metal and particularly gold. Commodity money may not have the same effective value as fiat money because the commodity price is set internationally so your exchange rate will decide how much of it ‘one pound’ can buy; one day it will be more, another less.
Fiduciary money is important. If fiat money has value because a government (through a central bank) guarantees it, fiduciary money is basically an IOU and has value based on how much the two parties trust each other. Think of a cheque – the government doesn’t guarantee a cheque, the issuing bank does. It has value only if you trust the bank.
But because of the way modern banking works, if everyone cashed their cheques at ones, the bank would struggle to pay from its reserves so you could lose all your money. It’s value is only based on trust. You wouldn’t accept a cheque from an insolvent bank as payment; it would have no value.
Commercial bank money is also crucial. This is what I described last week as the creation and destruction of money which is largely notional. When you take a loan, the bank magics money out of thin air and puts it in your account, and then as you repay the loan it destroys the money again and keeps the interest. Like fiduciary money, no-one is guaranteeing this money other than the bank.
And the point here is that bank money is worth less than fiat money. If you take out a bank loan you pay interest and so you have less spending power for the same amount of pounds. Each pound is effectively worth less.
The money system isn’t a single game you play by one set of rules but a number of different games you play, each with its own rules
The other way to look at this is to say there are two kinds of money – that which is created by a central bank and is guaranteed by government, and that which is created by commercial banks and it is the bank which is guaranteeing the money.
The first is known as base money and is made up of printed currency (banknotes and coins), central bank reserves and money government spends (public sector pay is base money because it is created by the central bank and that created money is then destroyed again via tax). Most of the rest of the money in the economy is bank money.
OK, the reason this gross simplification is helpful is that it shows that inside our economy there are different kinds of money with different effective values and different sets of factors driving that value. In other words, the money system isn’t a single game you play by one set of rules but a number of different games you play, each with its own rules.
For example, you can definitely lose all your bank money (as per Lehman Brothers and Northern Rock) because your only guarantee is the bank and if it goes down, your money is gone. But you can’t lose fiat money so long as a government and a central bank still exist. They can always create more. So now let’s look at the difference between bond markets and exchange rates.
Bond markets are fiduciary money. The sole factor in bond markets ought to be the market’s confidence that a government can repay the bond. That is why borrowing rates are higher for governments whose fiscal situation is weaker – lenders are less sure they’ll get their money back.
But that has nothing to do with exchange rates. Think of those as a way (in theory) to balance international money flows. This is more like commodity money than fiduciary money. To understand this, imagine that an entire nation has a single bank account. Let’s say we’ve got one and Norway has got one and there is only one product we each want to trade. We want their fish, they want our whisky.
When they buy our whisky they send us Krone. When we buy their fish we given them pounds. The thing is, unless we exchange it, the only place we can then spend our Krone is in Norway and the only place they can spend our pounds is with us.
Now, imagine every year they buy more whisky than we buy fish. We’re getting more and more Krone, it is piling up and we have nothing to do with it. We don’t want any more, so the Norwegian Krone becomes worth less for us. But imagine we’re buying more fish than they’re buying whisky. Now they have pounds piling up but we don’t have enough Krone, which means we want more Krone. It makes Krone more valuable to us.
Of course, if the Krone becomes more valuable to us, the exchange rate changes and now imports from Norway have become more expensive for us. We shop elsewhere for fish and so the arithmetic changes again. Alternatively, they have too many pounds so the exchange rate moves in the other way. This means our whisky just got cheaper for them so they can buy more of it.
Now imagine that there are only two bank accounts in the world – yours and the bank account of everyone else. In theory, either trade is in perfect balance, you have more of their currencies than they have of yours or the other way round. If trade is in balance then that suggests the two values (of pounds and of all other currencies) are about right.
But if we are importing too much and exporting too little, then our currency needs to come down in value to put that in balance. And if we’re exporting too much and importing too little, our currency will increase in value and imports will be cheaper but our exports will suffer. That is the classical way of looking at exchange rates.
None of this is an invitation to go wild and be irresponsible because the consequences will be real and immediate
The point is that there are a number of factors which can change the exchange rate. If unemployment rises, it suggests that soon fewer people will be buying things so our import demand would be likely to decrease. Same if interest rates go up – people have less money, are buying less and so our balance of trade changes. But it has nothing to do with whether government is borrowing a lot or a little. This is the exchange of commodity value, not a fiduciary IOU.
With government borrowing costs the game is to be a reliable debtor. With exchange rates the game is about producing stuff the rest of the world wants. Both are games with reasonably hard rules, but they’re quite different games with quite different rules.
What I’ve been trying to emphasise in both these articles is that there is no free lunch. When it comes to money and money supply there isn’t really a way to ‘beat the house’. Borrow too much and inflation will spike, no matter where you borrow from. Have an economic slump and the value of your currency will drop whether you want it to or not.
It means that none of this is an invitation to go wild and be irresponsible because the consequences will be real and immediate. But that does not mean that, within the rules, there is only one game that can be played. And it most certainly does not mean that there is only one set of rules governing a number of different games, because there isn’t.
Government borrowing must always keep a keen eye on economic performance, interest rates, inflation and unemployment. That’s the rules. But it doesn’t dictate where you have to borrow from, just how much of it you can do without consequence. Likewise, exchange rates are about your balance of trade and the extent to which you are a selling nation with a dynamic economy or a buying nation with a consumer culture. Those are the rules – but it has nothing to do with government bond yields.
I hope this makes sense. What I am trying hard to get across is that we’ve spent nearly 20 years now framing money as if it is all banknotes, there’s a limited number of them and the ‘financial markets’ are the police. This just isn’t true. There are lots of ways to do things differently.
But that does not mean there are no rules and it most certainly doesn’t mean there are no consequences. It’s just important that you understand the different games and the different rules so people don’t go scaring you with stories that aren’t true.
Source: Don't be scared of the game – learn the rules
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] When did...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 21, 2025, 03:31 AMMy colleague Megan Davidson wrote this and I found it pretty deeply affecting and I think you should read it. It is reposted here. Remember you can sign up for our weekly newsletter and our daily briefing emails from the Subscribe link at the bottom of the Common Weal website – www.commonweal.scot.
They were born here. Raised here. They go to private school, speak with an accent, and wave the flag when Scotland plays. They are, by every metric this country sets, 'ours.' And still, they get slurs thrown at them on the street. Children who are as Scottish as anyone else, but treated as visitors in their own country because they are Black.
It’s the kind of story that you wish were shocking, but it isn't anymore. The surprise isn't that it happened – it's that no one seems surprised.
C. G. Jung once wrote, "Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses." He was talking about individuals, but it fits nations too. Condemnation has become our national ritual – the moral theatre we perform so that nothing has to change. We condemn racism the way we light candles after a tragedy: as an act of self-absolution. It keeps our hands clean while the rot spreads.
Condemnation is easy. It's applause for our own awareness, a standing ovation for still knowing – somewhere deep down – that racism is bad. But applause is not courage. And courage is what's gone missing.
Because the truth is this: we don't live in an age of hatred. We live in an age of permission. Hatred is old. Permission is new.
Racism didn't creep back out of the shadows – it was invited. It's been given a new language, new manners, new justifications. It no longer needs to hide under hoods or behind dog whistles. It wears the face of 'free speech,' of 'saying the unsayable,' of 'telling it like it is.'
You hear it in pubs, at sports matches, and around dinner tables – the weary sigh of someone about to be brave enough to say something cruel. "I'm not racist, but…" They're always "just being honest." Honesty has become the polite face of hate.
This is the new racism – not ignorance, but indulgence. It doesn't shout, it shrugs. It doesn't justify itself through ideology, but through boredom. The old taboos have expired, and cruelty is back in fashion.
We used to think racism was a failure of education, of exposure, or of empathy. But what if it's a failure of shame? What if the real question isn't when did we become hateful again, but when did we stop being embarrassed to be?
Hannah Arendt once wrote about the 'banality of evil' – how horror is often committed not by monsters, but by ordinary people who've stopped thinking for themselves. That idea still applies, but today it's not bureaucrats committing genocide – it's voters, viewers, posters, tweeters.
The new evil isn't radical, it's routine. It's the man who won't hire a Muslim because "the clients might not like it". It's the journalist who calls migrants a "wave" or a "flood". It's the politician who nods along, knowing better, but scared to lose votes. And sometimes, and unfortunately more so, it's the idiot patriot saying it to someone in the street. None of them thinks they're doing harm. They're just following the current, and the current runs on cowardice.
Arendt wrote about superfluous people – those society decides don't matter. We've built our own version of that: the dispensable neighbour, the conditional citizen. You belong here until you don't. You're welcome, but not too welcome. You're tolerated, but not trusted.
Every "of course" is an act of moral surrender
Racism doesn't begin with hatred – it begins with the quiet belief that some people's dignity is negotiable. Once you've decided that, the rest follows easily.
Jung's warning echoes here, too. Condemnation can become another way of creating distance – a hierarchy of virtue. We condemn to separate ourselves from the condemned, not to stand beside those harmed. We mistake scolding for solidarity.
We used to police racism with shame. Now we outsource it with statements. When there's a racist attack, an organisation somewhere drafts a tweet: "We condemn this behaviour." Condemnation has become a corporate reflex, a PR shield against consequence.
But racism doesn't thrive because people fail to condemn it. It thrives because too many people think condemning it is the same as confronting it. The moral work ends where the statement begins.
We've created a moral economy where decency is performative and cruelty is efficient. Politicians can cut welfare, privatise housing, and deport children – then remind us that "hate has no place here." Hate doesn't need a place; it's already home.
And that's the real banality of evil now: the quiet coexistence of moral outrage and moral apathy.
Gramsci wrote that power doesn't rule through force – it rules through common sense. The ruling ideas of an age don't feel imposed; they feel natural. And in Britain today, cruelty feels natural. It's been normalised as honesty, repackaged as realism.
"Of course we can't take everyone in."
"Of course some people just don't integrate."
"Of course you have to prioritise your own."
Every "of course" is an act of moral surrender. And every surrender makes the next act of cruelty easier.
The right understood this years ago. They turned prejudice into pragmatism, xenophobia into policy, racism into 'border control.' They made cruelty sound responsible – and the left, fearful of sounding naïve, stopped challenging the premise.
The result? A political culture where dehumanisation is bureaucratic, where cruelty feels inevitable, where shame has been rebranded as weakness.
We don't live in an age of hatred, we live in an age of permission
Racism, at its core, has always been about hierarchy – deciding who counts. But the modern version is subtler: it's not about exclusion, it's about conditional inclusion. The 'acceptable immigrant,' the 'model minority,' the 'good one.'
We praise diversity, but only when it looks like assimilation. We celebrate difference, but only when it doesn't challenge power. Even anti-racism has been domesticated – something you can put in a brand campaign or an HR workshop.
These children – polite, middle-class, privately educated – are exactly what Britain claims to reward. And yet even they were made foreign again in an instant. Because racism doesn't care about respectability. It isn't waiting for better manners. It's waiting for permission.
And permission has been granted.
You can trace it easily. A decade of austerity. Austerity breeds scarcity. Scarcity breeds resentment. Resentment breeds blame. The government fans the blame to keep itself warm.
When people can't afford homes or get a GP appointment, it's convenient to tell them it's because of the boats. When wages stagnate, it's easier to point at migrants than billionaires. When the NHS collapses, you blame the 'culture' instead of capitalism. And how do you differentiate between who's a migrant and who's not? Skin colour. Racism becomes the emotional infrastructure of neoliberalism – the story that explains why misery feels personal rather than political.
That's why condemnation alone never works: racism isn't an aberration; it's a management tool. It disciplines the poor while distracting them. It's not a bug in the system; it's one of the system's more elegant features.
So, no, we don't need more condemnation. We need reconstruction – moral as well as material.
Because the opposite of racism isn't diversity training. It's solidarity. It's building a society where people have enough not to see one another as competition. Where decency isn't an act of charity but a condition of citizenship.
Racism doesn't survive where empathy feels affordable. But we've built a society where everyone's told they're one crisis away from falling through the cracks. In that world, cruelty feels like self-defence.
The answer isn't to shame people for falling for the story. It's to write a better one – one that makes belonging a collective project, not a prize.
We should be embarrassed – not just by the racism itself, but by how unsurprising it has become. That's the rot. Not just the hate, but numbness. The shrug, the scroll, the sense that this is just what Britain is now.
But it doesn't have to be. The same capacity that normalises cruelty can normalise care. The same culture that teaches permission can teach protection. The same media that sells division can sell decency – if we demand it loud enough.
So yes, condemn the racism. But then ask what comes next. What do we build in its place? How do we make cruelty costly again?
Until we do, the story will repeat.
Children will grow up fluent in a country that still calls them foreign. Politicians will keep selling shame as strength. And we'll keep confusing condemnation for courage.
We don't need more condemnation. We need reconstruction – of empathy, of courage, of the idea that belonging isn't something anyone gets to revoke because of the colour of your skin.
Because when a nation stops being embarrassed by its cruelty, it stops being a nation at all.
Source: When did cruelty stop being embarrassing?
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] When str...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 21, 2025, 02:42 AMWell I’ll tell you what, you can’t accuse John Swinney of failing to play the long game. That’s him 30 years in Scottish politics and all this time, the whole time, he had a secret plan for independence that he was holding back for just the perfect moment. You know, like when you’re at a recent historic low in the polls and need to feed the troops some pish or other.
Last week in a comment to The National I said that I could write an essay on why John Swinney’s indy plan can’t and won’t work. To do so feels futile. I mean, in the most literal sense possible, I don’t think there is anyone in Scottish politics who is taking it seriously. Not a soul thinks this is actually going to happen.
But just because I want doggedly to try and inject some intellectual rigour into debate in Scotland where I can, let me have a brief go at explaining why this is a wrong-headed waste of everyone’s time.
To begin, let me try to outline what the key elements of the Swinney strategy are – I don’t mean what was in his motion, I mean how the moving parts are supposed to work. There are currently four basic component parts of the narrative, and problem one is that they aren’t consistent with each other.
First, there is boosterism. The vast bulk of the independence papers publish by government are surface level slogans about how brilliant Scotland is and how well lots of other countries are doing. Second, there is civic emergency. Reform is coming – we need to get out as fast as we can.
Then there is a third element which is transactional – you’ll all be £10k better of it Scotland becomes independent. And then there is a question of democratic principle, or Scotland’s right to decide.
When constructing a narrative the one thing about all you’re looking for is logical consistency. I don’t mean that in a philosophy department kind of way, I mean that people operate on some kind of basis of consistent logic and they struggle with ideas that don’t follow that logic. ‘I’m so short I keep banging my head on the door frame’ screams out inconsistency to us and causes us to doubt at least some part of the statement.
And these all point in different directions. One wants you to be scared, one wants you to stare into fluffy white clouds in a clear blue sky, one wants your civic rationality to kick in, one is a pure, venal bribe. Even if each of these worked in their own right, they clash.
Four weak arguments are actually weaker than one weak argument because it tells the listener you know your argument is weak
Think of it like this: "I’ve got a lovely luxury lifeboat. You should try it some time. Its got a minibar and a TV and velvet and a karaoke function for long trips. Which is just as well because the ship has just hit an iceberg and it’s sinking and we’re all going to die.
"But if that doesn’t convince you, let’s contemplate the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea which mandates the need for lifeboats and let’s reflect on the long and involved process of writing those guidelines. Still not sure? I’ll give you a tenner if you get in the boat."
You see how none of that tracks. It’s all pointing in a different direction. It’s like someone has come up with four arguments, doesn’t have confidence in any of them so just decide to dump them all on us. Four weak arguments are actually weaker than one weak argument because it tells the listener you know your argument is weak.
So they don’t work together, but they don’t work apart either. People thinking Scotland has potential isn’t the problem. Put simply, if you look at attitude research work, people who don’t think it are simply not in the indy category. The target audience for independence is people who already believe Scotland has potential but are unconvinced the forces of independence know how to unlock it.
So it is selling a target audience something they already have. There is more mileage in the ‘fear of Farage’, but not this far out, and not just because John Swinney says it. It is definitely the case that worry about the drift of England is a strong motivator, but confidence in Scottish politicians to counter that or stand against it isn’t high.
We went through this with Brexit. Underneath, the Brexit-driven indy advocates (who thought we’d be propelled to independence by the Brexit vote) were half right. There were indeed big doubts about the UK at that point, but we didn’t channel the doubts into a path that led to us.
Think of it like this; you got in a car and the driver suddenly seems like a bit of a psycho. You get out – but is your response just to jump in the next car you see? Getting someone to leave a boring party is easier than persuading them to travel across town to your party.
The most risible of all of this is the cash bribe. Think of your football team, or your favourite friends, or the band you have loved since your 20s. How much would I need to pay you to stop liking those things? Stepping over that, let’s say it’s not your favourite thing. Let’s say you have a tatty old jacket on and someone says ‘if you take it off you’ll get a better one’.
But it’s cold and wet. I can tell you this; I’m not taking anything off until I have something to put on. I’ve heard all the Death of a Salesman pitches before. If it is something I might get mibby at an unpredictable point in the future and you’re definitely not promising me it, I’m placing low weight on it.
The conflict-averse team around Swinney dreams of a high-minded civic campaign where no-one has to get their hands dirty because an easy consensus gets civic Scotland to do the heavy lifting for you
Bribes don’t change behaviour like people think they do, and it doesn’t change behaviour until the money is in your hand. There is no such thing as an ‘IOU bribe’, and when you’re already in possession of IOUs from the same crowd, you’re just going to file it with ‘National Energy Company’.
If you really want to get into that business you need to explain how this money is being generated, where it is coming from and why you’re the people to unlock the magic to put it in my pocket. And even then I’m taking it with a pinch of salt.
So we get finally to my personal bete noir – the statement everyone agrees with being mistaken for the statement that motivates everyopne. Everyone agrees on a citizen’s right to decide the form of government they are governed by. No-one wants it done to them without their say. That doesn’t mean I necessarily want you to be that person who governs me. I can believe in the right to choose my form of government and want Westminster.
There is an assumption that high levels of agreement with a statement make that statement powerful, but let me try that out on you. Everyone agrees that sleeping outside overnight in the rain in November without cover and wearing only your pyjamas is a bad idea. Great – so buy my house.
No-one was planning to sleep in the rain in their pyjamas and so they’ll readily agree it would be a bad idea. It doesn’t mean they’re going to follow that logic to a very specific end point that I want them to arrive at. Things that everyone agrees with often hold less power, not more, because the ease of agreeing with it is its very weakness.
The conflict-averse team around Swinney dreams of a high-minded civic campaign where no-one has to get their hands dirty because an easy consensus gets civic Scotland to do the heavy lifting for you, everyone is happy and everything happens as it should. It is a fantasy. It is not how politics works.
This is all fairly basic stuff. Message consistency, absence of magical thinking (always A to B to C, never A to C), understanding psychological decision-making theory, basic understanding of the difference between commonality (believing the same thing) and motivation (doing the same thing as a consequence) – the list of misunderstandings of how strategy works is lengthy.
And that’s before we get to the ‘it’s all predicated on a majority no-one believes will happen based on a minority of votes which won’t represent a mandate anyway’. None of this is an indy strategy, it is a hodge podge of bad ideas designed to pacify the troops and hopefully drive some of the core vote to the poll. That’s all this is. It is cynical.
Of course, that’s proved more than enough for the SNP’s nodding heads. They all totally believe in Swinney’s secret plan. Like they believed in Sturgeon’s secret plan and like they’ll believe whatever the next secret plan is.
I guess if your audience’s threshold of credulity is that low, your strategy doesn’t need to work. But you leave yourself in a tricky position if over and over again you say things no-one believes, and they don’t even believe you believe.
Source: When strategy isn't strategy at all
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Land is ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 21, 2025, 01:23 AMLand is power. There is no more consistent reality in history. Those who own the land control the future. On this basis the people of Scotland are some of the least powerful people in the world.
It’s not just that we are the most centralised country in the developed world, with the weakest local democracy. It’s not just that we are now governed by a barely accountable sprawl of public agency empires over which we have little influence. And it’s not just that our economy is now largely owned by overseas investors. It's the fact that we don’t own our own land.
We have to beg landowners to let us build houses. We have to beg them not to strangle our rural communities. We beg them to change their practices to restore our wildlife. If we want to start a land-based business we beg them (usually unsuccessfully) for some land to base it on.
No citizens anywhere else in the world own so little of their own country. Scotland is a nation which has turned its own people into tenants.
Why don’t we fight back? Because land is power. Every single piece of credible research says that Scots overwhelmingly do want to fight back. Land reform is wildly popular, supported by overwhelming majorities. Yet still it doesn’t happen. Why?
The public identifies the SNP as ‘the party of land reform‘ but has very low confidence that the SNP is actually going to do anything – and the public is right. Seeing Scotland’s unequal land ownership as unjust and in need of change was fundamental to the creation of the SNP.
Yet the party has had power now for almost an entire generation. Over that period land ownership has become even more concentrated, into even fewer hands, than it was at the start of the SNP era.
In fact, some of the concentration of ownership is directly the result of actions the Scottish Government has taken. Inexplicably, the Scottish National Investment Bank used Scottish taxpayer money to give a £50 million to a London-based company that gives advice to wealthy investors on how best to profit from Scotland’s land.
That company, Gresham House, has – in four years and with active government support – become Scotland's’ second largest landowner. This fact alone should be considered scandalous. How on earth is this even within sniffing distance of being in the public interest?
But that's not all. The Scottish Government devised a scheme to help the very rich cream off public subsidies for tree planting. Buy land and then the Scottish Government will help you make a fortune from it by planting trees – any trees, anywhere. That is government for the rich, not for the public good.
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To distract you from this the Scottish Government uses land reform legislation like a magician waving his left hand about. We’re on our second government Bill in ten years. Its predecessor was a toothless joke and this Bill is the same. The Scottish Government is going out of its way to avoid 'real' land reform while constantly trying to persuade its members it's tackling land reform issues.
And why? Because land is power. On the one hand making land ownership fairer is hugely popular, but on the other, the existing landowners are very well organised and have enormous influence, exerting great pressure to keep things as they are.
After all, they do well out of this. They are subsidised from public funding in lots of ways. But that is not the fundamental reason why large landowners want to keep hold of their land. If it was economic return that was the primary driver, they certainly wouldn’t manage the land as they do.
At the Common Weal think tank we have assessed the economic return on a hectare of land from a wide range of possible economic activities – from bioplastic crops to ecotourism to energy generation to housing. We compared this to the land’s existing use, largely for grouse shooting.
Suffice to say it is very easy to find economic activity which creates much more return on land but very difficult to find anything which creates less return.
Large landowners in Scotland hold land for one of three reasons. First, as a hobby or lifestyle issue. Some very rich people just want a country estate or want to dabble in rewilding.
Second, as an investment. This is what is driving the current concentration of ownership. It is not the value of what is done on or with the land that matters, it is simply the appreciation of the asset value of the land itself, as a speculative investment. Tree planting increases the value of the asset, tenants or businesses based on the land actually reduce the value.
And third, because land is power. Scotland’s aristocratic families do not cling to their massive estates only because of income but because of the influence if confers – to them, and their children, and their children’s children. It is about controlling Scotland’s future in the way they control so much of its present.
Scotland is truly the most generous of nations. We let our local democracy be taken away from us. We let government shrug off accountability. We let overseas investors buy all our domestic economic assets, then extract and export the wealth. We let a tiny number of people own all our land and we do nothing about it.
No, actually, that’s not true. We do do something. We say thank you. We call it efficiency or foreign direct investment or ‘looking after the land for us’. We celebrate being tenants in our own nation and we let the powerful run our lives for their benefit.
Land is power and in Scotland we are complicit in our own powerlessness because we let all of this happen and then make excuses for the politicians who do it to us. If this country can’t grow a spine, take back its own assets and use them for the benefit of its own people, then our future looks bleak.
Source: Land is power—and Scotland's people have none
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Escaping...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 21, 2025, 12:42 AMSometimes something happens in politics and everyone goes ‘yeah, you see!’ and I look at it and I say ‘yeah, I see!’ – and we’re meaning completely different things. That is what happened when Andy Burnham said that democracies shouldn’t be kicked around by bond markets and the bond markets increased the borrowing costs for Britain.
The Starmerites were utterly besides themselves – see! see! they shouted. And I’m thinking ‘yes, yes I do’. Because surely it proves Burnham was right. Surely it proves that unaccountable foreign financial markets shouldn’t be deciding what we can and can’t do in a democracy?
Here is the question though; even if he is right, what can anyone do about it? If the bond markets have all the money and government needs money, doesn’t that mean that it is natural for bond markets to set the terms? Well, it depends what you mean by ‘money’…
There is a simple way out of this. It isn’t complicated, it isn’t abnormal and it isn’t really radical. Yet it isn’t discussed – only borrow domestically. In this piece I’ll explain what that means, how it would work and how we could do it in an independent Scotland.
(First, a very quick note: I used to advocate a fairly orthodox approach to monetary policy if Scotland was independent partly because playing the game would help stabilise things in the early years. That ship has sailed; there is no stability in global finance now.)
So what does the alternative look like? To get to this, a very quick primer on how money actually works in the real economy (many of you will know this). The It’s a Wonderful Life version of money is nonsense. Money isn’t a finite resource where you have to find it and put it together in a big lump if you want to lend it to someone (as per Bedford Falls…).
That world ended a good while ago. Now money is just a complex system of IOUs underpinned by a central bank which is able to print money. When someone gets a bank loan, the money that appears in their account literally comes from nowhere. It is not money someone else already had which they are giving to you, it is completely new money.
But how can all the banks create new money all the time without hyper inflation? Because the money is destroyed again. As the person who took out the loan repays it, the bank doesn’t keep the money, it just reduces that notional IOU which was created in the first place. The bank only keeps the interest.
And only a fraction of the money which is lent out is kept as emergency reserves in case anything goes wrong. That is what is known as fractional reserve banking – banks only keep a fraction of the reserves needed to actually bail out loans.
Money isn’t a thing that circulates. It’s much more accurate to think of it as something which is created and destroyed, and that it is created and destroyed in a balance which keeps the money system stable, liquidity solid but not too high (enough money to go round, but not too much) and inflation under control.
These are literally people who are using the buying and selling of bonds to punish governments for not doing what the rich person (or institution) wants
Get the idea? Great. So how do bond markets work? It is not at all dissimilar. An investor buys a bond from the government. This is basically an IOU. That is known as ‘the principal’. Generally, no-one is actually going to spend the principal because you have to give that all back in one go at the end of the agreement period (or ‘when the bond matures’).
So what you do is stick it in your foreign currency reserves where you keep it as an asset. This is ideally left alone for the whole time it is there but can be used in all the normal ways a foreign currency reserve can be used if need be. It just sits there.
But where is the money to pay the bills the government borrowed the money to pay? If it’s stuck in the foreign currency reserve, who is paying nurses’ wages? The answer is the central bank. It creates money equal to the sum borrowed and as the principal sits in the currency reserve doing nothing it is the created money that actually circulates in the system.
And if money is created it must be destroyed again, and it is. Interest payments and tax are both ways to destroy money. That’s what happens. The new money created disappears over time and by the time the principal is returned to the bond market it has all gone again. The loan is repaid, the cash injection it represented has disappeared.
All that happened is that future wealth was pulled forward in time by borrowing it before it was earned. The system stayed in equilibrium over the course of the agreement. That’s how government can borrow money and not set inflation racing.
OK, as long as you accept that that is all greatly simplified, let me ask you a question – what is the point of the principal? It never at any point goes anywhere near the actual domestic economy and it doesn’t really go anywhere else either. It literally just sits there. It’s not even really insurance because you’ve sort of duplicated the money and that is already circulating.
Think for a second; what if you did all of that but without the bond sale? What would be different? If government had just borrowed the money directly from the central bank, the bank had created the money and then over the course of the loan the money was destroyed again, what would actually be any different?
Technically nothing. The argument is that the bond markets bring discipline, prevent governments from irresponsible borrowing they can’t afford by assessing the trustworthiness of the nation at that particularly moment and setting borrowing rates accordingly. But that’s notional. As we saw with the Andy Burnham instance, bond markets can charge you higher interest at a whim.
What they are doing is not disciplining you but looking after their own interests. That is what is meant by ‘bond vigilante’. These are literally people who are using the buying and selling of bonds to punish governments for not doing what the rich person (or institution) wants.
The UK’s debt didn’t get bigger when Burnham spoke, and our economy didn’t change. The bond markets just wanted him to shut up and not blow the whistle on this whole scam so they could keep controlling democracies around the world.
The world is being turned into a billionaire-run hell-hole and we need to be able to escape them
So this is my fairly simple proposal; an independent Scotland should create a constitutional bar on bond issue to overseas investors. There is no need. The rule should simply be that on an annual basis, government borrows directly from the central bank. The bank does exactly what it currently does but without the principal being involved.
The argument against this is ‘market discipline’ and moral hazard. This is what is going on with Trump and the Federal Reserve (the US central bank). He wants them to goose the economy by cutting interests rates and he’s not really bothered that inflation is climbing in the US and this will come to harm consumers as much as help them. But he doesn’t care. He is a short-term kind of guy.
So how do you stop governments from being irresponsible? The answer is central bank independence. This is a thorny subject. I’ve been tending towards not having central bank independence of late precisely because independent central banks are unfortunately too much like bond markets – they discipline government all right but they do it in the interests of money, not citizens.
However, you can’t let politicians set their own interest rates. Well, actually, I favour returning interest rate setting to government, but most certainly not their own interest rate, the rate at which they borrow. So I’d have an independent panel at Scotland’s central bank which set the rate at which government could borrow.
That would create the discipline. There is so much that tumbles out from this. For example, if market conditions are right, it is perfectly possible to destroy debt too. You can destroy money through tax and interest, but you can destroy debt by writing it off (which is a little bit like a cash injection into the economy).
It stimulates the economy by decreasing debt, not increasing it. That’s better for the nation because its debts fall. And if you haven’t registered, all those interest payments become public money. Rather than bond investors making all the profit, citizens do. You don’t want that money going straight to government (or it’s not interest…), but it can be used for other purposes.
Perhaps it could be part of a Citizens' Income. It could be used to purchase foreign currency and build up the currency reserves. It could be given to the Scottish National Investment Bank as reserve capital. In fact, I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I can see no reason on earth why the Investment Bank shouldn’t capitalise in the same way as government – borrow from the central bank.
The assumption is that if SNIB was a proper bank it would issue bonds and use the capital as reserves to underpin its loans. But for exactly the same reason as above, that is an optional process. If it was borrowed from the central bank the result would be more or less identical.
Those two steps – secure, domestic government borrowing at interests rates that suit the Scottish economy, not the global financiers, and a capitalised major investment bank to ensure that the business sector can always access capital – can be added to a national, mutual banking network that is pure savings and loan and has no speculative wing.
That would create a Scottish monetary system which did everything the existing monetary system does and would do it in more or less the same way, but using sovereign debt and domestic markets instead of foreign capital and privatised banks operating in global markets. It would make Scotland secure.
We need to opt out of a lot of the post-1990 architecture of global finance, capital and digital infrastructure. That is my dominant thinking at the moment. The world is being turned into a billionaire-run hell-hole and we need to be able to escape them. There is no normal any more. It’s becoming a fight for survival.
It is no longer possible to beat them at their own game. We need a new game. Thankfully, when it comes to financing government, the solution isn't really tricky at all.
Source: Escaping the bonds of bonds
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] This won...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 21, 2025, 12:05 AMThere are usually three party conferences going on at once – in the same venue. There is a conference which is about telling the public a story. In the same place and quite separately there is a conference which is about trying to control your party membership. And then there is a conference for the courtiers of the media.
The first conference is about soundbites, the leaders’ speech and ‘vibes’. The second conference is about suppressing debate and trying to buy off the grass roots – quietly. The third conference is about trying to persuade the hack pack that you are in control and everything that happened was what you wanted to happen.
Strangely, it seems that the SNP’s weekend bash is going to be a unified affair, a single conference with a single purpose. The only purpose of the conference is a wrestle between making it go wrong and making it not go wrong. Everything is geared up to that end.
I don’t think John Swinney has a message he wants the public to hear which he can deliver at this conference. He wants to say ‘stop Reform’, but he (probably) knows that this will set his members on edge. They’re tired of the party campaigning against things simply to secure power and riches.
And there really isn’t any difference between trying to control the members and what he wants the journalists to take away from this conference. He is throwing his very inconsiderable all at this single task.
Pretend you like me. Pretend we’re unified. That’s it.
It is very perilous for Swinney this conference. He’s going to get away with it for the single reason that there is an approaching election and my guess is that the conference delegates will be just about compliant enough for the sole reason of not wanting to harm the party’s electoral prospects.
But they really, really aren’t happy. This unhappiness is both tangible and intangible. It has a focal point in the independence strategy and a number of ancillary real issues the membership isn’t chuffed at (no-one is impressed with Swinney’s domestic policy agenda – or rather his lack of one).
The party membership really hasn’t warmed to Swinney as a leader. They like him as a man but he was genuinely unpopular as leader last time and no-one wanted him back as one this time. There was a bit of hush when he undertook his power grab because people were so, so unsettled by Humza Yousaf’s relentless chaos.
The SNP’s voters are not going anywhere else, but that includes the polling station and it is that which has been losing Swinney significant electoral position
But that hush has drifted into ever-present mumbling and grumbling. That is really all driven by what everyone now calls ‘vibes’. You can come up with all the rationalisations you like for what the party isn’t happy with and why they’re not happy, but in truth it is mainly about the feeling that this is a weak, characterless, uninspiring administration of technocrats.
Literally no-one in the SNP was saying ‘I wish we were more boring, more predictable, utterly dull and completely centrist’, yet such is party centralisation that that is what they got. There isn’t and never has been anything you’d call a ‘Swinney faction’ in the SNP. Honestly, in as far as he has such a thing it consists of Stephen Noon, Colin McAllister and Stephen Gethins.
I don’t want to be gratuitously unkind but that is like an insomnia cure. Think of the concept of ‘inspiring, uplifting and motivating’ and now think of exactly the opposite and you’re in the right territory.
SNP members see themselves as an insurgency, not a church fete, not a provincial accountancy firm, not a lunchtime nap after Bargain Hunt. The membership wants passion and what it’s being offered is perfunctory missionary position in the dark listening to Kenny G on an old CD player.
The problem they have is that ‘sorting your vibes’ is all good and well if you’re talking about sprucing up your wardrobe or adding a pop of colour to your living room. Sorting the vibes of a political party is a tricky business. You can’t turn the same people into different people and no-one at the top of the SNP is what you’d call ‘vibe heavy’.
So they’re unhappy, but Swinney will get away with it because of the upcoming election. And once he gets this conference out of the way it’ll be onto what he’s really trying to do here. Forget the polls for a second which everyone who knows much about it warn me are misleading. Whether Swinney can govern or not is not a done deal.
The idea he’s going to get an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament is a bit silly but he’ll undoubtedly lead the biggest party. The question is, between these limits, whether he can govern, and that basically means can he get within one other political party’s worth of votes for a majority. If you can form a majority with a single party then it is perfectly easy to govern (which has been happening since devolution).
But if you need two other parties to form a majority? That is a very tall ask. It is not an easy thing to do at all. Swinney (by all accounts I’ve heard) wants to do a deal with the Lib Dems because he himself is a conservative who isn’t going to be happy compromising to Ross Greer. So he has to get close enough that the number of seats he falls short is less than the total of seats held by the Lib Dems.
I amn’t going to go into this here but the more pertinent factor in deciding whether that is the case is not polling but motivation. If Swinney’s voters all turn out, he will be OK. But that is not what has been happening since he took power. The SNP has really struggled to get its voters out because they’re tired of the party and largely disappointed by it.
They’re not going anywhere else, but that includes the polling station and it is that which has been losing Swinney significant electoral position. The best bet is that this will happen again, so it is a question of to what extent it happens.
The party is angry and disillusioned, but it is not suicidal and it will pull its punches this year
And that is the reason the SNP has started talking about independence at all. It could probably have skipped an independence debate at this party conference if they hadn’t put it on the agenda. But the leadership is in a desperate ‘core voter’ race and so they will say independence again and again and again and hope its ambient power gets people off their sofa.
Of course, I’ll bet you money that the election campaign turns out to be a ‘stop Reform’ campaign, but they need to goose their core vote first. Hence all the indy stuff. And yes, it has slightly backfired because what Swinney/Noon mean by independence and a strategy for getting it and what the membership mean is miles apart.
Which means that Swinney’s core vote strategy turned into a ‘conference from hell’ strategy. You won’t go far without hearing one of Swinney’s team telling anyone who will listen that this is a pre-election conference and unity is essential.
My feeling is that this will indeed work. The party is angry and disillusioned, but it is not suicidal and it will pull its punches this year. It won’t be plain sailing and I’m rather guessing they’ll lose on the indy debate, but discontent will be quarantined into that debate and won’t spill over into the wider conference.
Here is my guess though; the price of it will be a horror show next year. I don’t think the SNP are going to do as well in the election as the most positive polls suggest. This looks to me more like 2017 than 2019. The SNP will comfortably be the bigger party but I don’t think it is going to find governing all that easy.
And I suspect it will create some kind of alliance with the Lib Dems and I think that is going to provoke conference even further. I’d put money on it that you will barely hear the words ‘independence’ slip from the First Minster’s mouth from June next year onwards.
Which means that the party is most likely to explode not this year but next. And that is just fine for Team Swinney. It is driven by one thing; Swinney’s desperate desire to rewrite the history book. He was going to go down as a failure, a nice man out of his depth who was given a shot at leadership and blew it. He wants to erase that history and will do anything in pursuit of that end.
So yes, I think this will be a single-purpose conference and it’s purpose will be to control the membership and be seen to control the membership. By Monday I expect the journalists will be writing that it went pretty well for him and everyone will sail on quite pleased with themselves.
But it will solve nothing and it will do not more than delay the reckoning. Either way, you can’t be that bad and that dull and not face a reckoning. It is coming.
Source: This won't be the SNP's shitshow conference
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Schrödin...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 20, 2025, 11:12 PMI can be very critical of John Swinney, but in my very angriest moments I couldn’t possible come up with any case whatsoever that John Swinney is a threat to Scottish Jews. In fact, as a deeply religious man with strong ecumenical views, I can’t think of a First Minister less threatening to the Jewish community.
So booing him after a friendly speech? There is no justification at all based on anything he has done or not done for Scottish Jews. If this had been the Orange Order they’d have had a point, but not Scotland’s Jewish churches. There is no credible case to be made against the First Minister.
I mean, one could construct some loose argument that his criticism of Israel’s military assault on Gaza or referring to it as a genocide is harmful to the interests of a nation state with which many Jews feel an affinity, but that would be expressly and directly antisemitic, no?
The International Holocaust Remembrance Committee’s (highly controversial) definition of antisemitism is clear on this. It places "Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel" high up on its list of the more direct, less tangential forms of linguistic antisemitism.
So it should be. It is clearly utterly wrong to hold someone accountable for someone else’s actions simply because they share the same religion. It is patently wrong, clearly unfair, explicitly a hostile act of bullying. That’s why I opposed it when most of Britain’s politicians were calling on Muslim leaders in Britain to decry the actions of ISIS.
But it has to work both ways round, right? It can’t be offensive if you behave as if every Jew must answer for Israel, so Israel and Jews are separate issues. That is clean and honest and fair. So there is absolutely no read-back from criticism of Israel in relation to Jewish communities. There is no link. We have just established that point.
Jewish people must be free from our censorious tendencies to want ‘someone’ to answer for what Israel has done. In turn, we must be free from any bad faith suggestions that criticising or taking diplomatic action against a foreign nation state has something or other to do with their safety. It does not.
And of course I twiddled with that sentence a bit to find a non-clumsy way to say ‘some Jews’ before deciding not to bother because when they refer to the ‘Jewish community’ or ‘Scottish Jews’ they never specify ‘some’. Many, many British Jews are highly critical of Israel.
They have every right to be and a genocide is a genocide whether you have ‘an affinity’ with the nation carrying out the genocide or not. If you see calling a genocide a genocide as a threat to you, that speaks only of you, not of those making the allegation.
If you see calling a genocide a genocide as a threat to you, that speaks only of you, not of the allegation
Some of what has happened in recent days is not only clearly wrong, it is pretty clearly racist. The increasingly abhorrent Shabana Mahmood telling us what is and isn’t British is far right stuff. Do we really want to get into government ministers deciding what is and isn’t British? Good luck with that.
But setting aside her Tommy Robinson impression, Starmer is little better. Let me think…. When did Keir Starmer ask a Jewish or Israeli group at any point ever to "respect the grief" of Palestinians? His relationship with pro-genocide lobbyists has only grown stronger. His every word drips clear Islamophobia (somehow I don’t think the ‘strangers’ in his ‘nation of strangers’ speech were Jewish).
His team openly brief journalists that getting rid of some Muslim Labour councillors was ‘shaking of the fleas‘. Jeremy Corbyn would have been jailed for referring to Jews leaving Labour as ‘shaking of the fleas’. Starmer clearly does not value the lives of Palestinians and is clearly contemptuous towards Muslims. We’ve seen it again and again. But this isn’t mentioned.
So little is really mentioned. The main establishment Jewish religious organisations (with which many if not most British Jews do not align with) are part religion, part lobbyist for a foreign power. They use their privileged position as a church, a position which enjoys many more protections than a general non-governmental body, to advocate for a foreign nation state and they do it fairly openly.
I can’t think of another church which spends anything like as much time trying to dictate this nation’s foreign policy, or one where it would be tolerated. Yet, like Schrödinger’s moggy, they can switch roles at will. ‘You can’t touch me, I’m a church’ is interspersed with ‘you must do as I say because I’m not really a church but the unified representation of an entire race’.
Personally I think anyone extensively and regularly lobbying for any foreign entity should register. I’m pretty sure no-one would tolerate Britain’s Russian Orthodox Church intervening on sanctions on Russia in the same way.
Clearly, of course people should be free to campaign for the interests of any entity they wish, but those on the other side must surely be granted the opportunity to highlight the fact it is happening. It cannot be right to say ‘I’ll lobby for Israel but if you accuse me of it you will be deemed antisemitic’.
What is most ludicrous in all of this is the claim that ‘antisemitism has been allowed to fester’. This seems to be to be one of the most surreal statements I can think of. Comfortably the most extensive political discourse on religious or racial discrimination has been related to antisemitism. The most incredibly restrictive code of practice on antisemitism (the IHRC one) has been widely implemented.
No other group has anything like the extent and detail of codified protection, certainly not that I can think of. The Community Security Trust is something like a private police force which provides additional protection at Jewish places of worship and similar. It is funded to the tune of £18 million by the public purse. To suggest this is ‘allowing’ antisemitism is unsustainable. No-one is ‘allowing’ antisemitic behaviours or attacks in any way whatsoever.
Yet it is this ‘private police force’ which is given the power to create its own evidence. It is hardly a neutral body in collecting statistics. You would never know that in the last two years attacks on Jewish property have fallen 19 per cent or that assaults have decreased by 26 per cent.
Last year there were 201 incidents classified as assault, but only one that was ‘serious’. There were 157 attacks on property. There were 250 threats, a decrease of 20 per cent. Mass produced antisemitic literature (don’t know what they include in this category) occurred 27 times.
Jewish people must be able to live in Britain free from threat, free from harm, free from prejudice, free from discriminatory behaviour.
Add all that up (allowing for double counting) and it doesn’t account for much of the 3,528 incidents of antisemitism reported by the CST. On the other hand, this ‘surge’ in antisemitism included 1,844 incidents classified as ‘antisemitic’ which were specifically about comments over Isreal’s actions in Gaza. Another 1,533 were use of the word ‘Zionism’.
These may be uncomfortable for British Jews but it does not imperil their safety and since even the CST accepts that these are explicitly interpretative, it is perfectly reason that there could be alternative interpretations. And (yet again), 2024 is the last year with complete figures and it is a sharp 18 per cent decrease since 2023 (although that year was a high).
I can only write any of this because I have been relentlessly anti-violence. There is no instance anyone will ever find of me accepting or condoning any kind of violence. I fundamentally oppose violence as a tool. I have also, throughout my life, consistently stood up for any persecuted minority and I always will.
Last year there were six criminal cases with convictions for actions related to antisemitism. In the majority it was far right ideology which was the source and only one was islamic related. There was one violent act and those were teenagers. There were two acts of violence against property. All are to be condemned. All are wrong. And all were successfully policed and prosecuted.
I have challenged people before when they have used antisemitic language or framing around me. For what it’s worth, I am not aware that I actually know an ‘antisemite’ if that means a consistently held discriminatory ideological view, but I’ve known people to stray into antisemitic language when making an argument or through lazy cultural association. We must never, ever turn our eyes away from prejudice. Any prejudice.
Jewish people must be able to live in Britain free from threat, free from harm, free from prejudice, free from discriminatory behaviour. But free from fear? I know people whose skin is not white who were utterly, utterly petrified by the Unite the Kingdom rally. Should it have been banned based on their fear?
I wish I could reply ‘yes’, but I can’t, because no law was broken in the organisation of that march and we must protect our freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of protest with all the vigour we have. That will mean annoying, offending, and even scaring other people. And that is the price of liberty.
The rhetoric from the UK Government is pretty shocking, but we’ve grown used to it ever since the party was captured by a right-wing faction. If anything has surprised you since Starmer’s ‘fine to starve Palestinian babies‘ comments then you have more benefit of the doubt to bestow than me. But John Swinney? Really?
Antisemitism is real and awful and we must be vigilant. But if you are using unsupportable claims about antisemitism to reduce civil liberties and protect an abhorrent regime far away, it seems to me to be you who is harming your religion, not those calling for an end to a genocide.
Source: Schrödinger's lobbyist
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Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 20, 2025, 08:15 PMEverything is now precision air power. No, hold on, it’s all about tank battles. Wait a minute, where are the tanks? This is trench warfare. Oh no, drones can get over trenches – this is now drone warfare. We need a missile defence shield. Except that doesn’t work against drones. We’ll need to invent space lasers.
And that, dear reader, is precisely four years of western military debate. From the start of the Ukraine war until now, the military has basically had no idea what was going on, much in the same way it didn’t understand what was happening with militia-based gurrilla warfare in the Middle East during the war on terror.
It is time we stopped pretending otherwise; no-one wins an arms race. If one great power finds a new technology, the next will copy it. If one administration uses overwhelming violence, another group of insurgents will find a way round it.
We need a new theory of peace. We always see peace through the lens of the military and the bomb makers. Our collective model of peace isn’t really rules-based at all, it is deterrent-based. We still frame our future as a ‘balance of terror’ on the belief that if everyone is permanently held over a precipice of destruction, we’ll all behave sensibly.
If ever there was a theory that has failed, surely it is deterrence. It has stoped superpowers from facing off directly with each other, but it has done next to nothing to slow down the flood of global military violence. We can’t keep going like this if we need to survive. We need a new model of peace.
This is one aspect of what I’ve been writing about all year. We are locked into a series of narrow ideological assumptions about how things work and how you can use the tools that are there. This is mainly a western thing, and the West is in freefall.
Our economic model clearly doesn’t work now. Our welfare model is in jeopardy. Our democratic model seems under attack everywhere – it is easy to see this as ‘just Trump and Putin’, but we now seldom go a week without the Scottish Government or a public agency being pulled up for breaking transparency laws. Our trade model is a mess. And our model of peace and coexistence is now lying under rubble. None of this is working.
So on peace, if we can’t win through an arms race, how do we win? I mean all of us. The anwer has to begin with the times we achieved this before. It was all about negotiating between hostile partners. It worked. Both the fall of the oppressive Soviet Union and the period of comparative peace that resulted were the outcome of direct negotiations, not military build-up.
The problem is that things have got so bad the great powers can’t even talk to each other properly and those on each side are not really trying to achieve peace through talks but rather domination. Certainly Trump, Netenyahu and Putin have a vision which you wouldn’t call peace.
And ironically it is the authoritarian Chinese who are least in favour of an unstable militarised world but are being shut out by Europe and the US, sending them towards Russia. None of this really makes any sense until you remember who is leading the western world now.
If all you use is a stick and if you offer no carrot, people just get bruised and angry
So what on earth can we even negotiating over? It isn’t enough simply to seek to excise things we don’t like through negotiation, great as some weapons restraint from international diplomacy would be. Just like the backlash against net zero, if an agenda is only restrictive without any give-back, you can’t ask people to feel good about it.
Or, to put it another way, if all you use is a stick and if you offer no carrot, people just get bruised and angry. We need an awful lot more carrot in our international engagement now. The problem is that the mismatch between what we all think a carrot actually is at this point. The thing Europe wants and the thing Putin wants are currently in different dimensions.
Which is why I want to bring in one of my least favouite phrase concepts – prefiguration. Prefiguration is important. It simply means talking about the version of the future you actually want to see as a means of establishing its possibility in people’s minds.
Personally I hate the word. It is yet another centre-left pointy-headed jargon term it feels embarrasing to say out loud outside pointy-headed centre-left circles. But moreover, the centre left has constantly substituted action for loose vision. It prefigures a (slightly) better future in part because that reduces the pressure to actually do anything.
And yet that is what I have been writing about a lot recently. When I say ‘we need more utopian thinking‘ or ‘we need to stop assuming the current way of doing things makes sense‘, what I have really been saying is that we’re so lost up a blind alley that we need to imagine there is a different alley altogether before we have any chance of getting there.
As I have been pointing out, it is hard to do this because one of the precepts of contemporary politics is that utopia is for fools and that talking about it is embarrassing. This is part of the trap in which we find ourselves.
When it comes to global affairs though, our stupidity is multiplied. The liberal establishment find utopia silly but see dystopia in every foe. To imagine a foe as not a foe on any terms other than their surrender is anathema to a liberal tradition which has come to benefit from an external enemy every bit as much as domestic nationalism has.
This makes it feel strange to say, but the only meaningful future for Europe is an alliance with Russia. There is no version of our future which is pleasant for as long as half of our continent is pointing guns at the other half. This ought to be clear enough. We need an accord.
And yet the path from here to there is almost impossible to see. I doubt there is any negotiation with Putin which would make sense for either side right now. Putin is where he wants to be and the EU (with Britain) can’t commit to anything because we are still desperately trying to pacify an out-of-control United States.
If there is one thing that we know right now it’s that change can come disorientatingly quickly
So let’s take a step back for a second. Might we at least start to imagine a future without a specific timescale, a future without anyone’s surrender (those never work because the humiliated refuse to stay humiliated so it all kicks off again), a future we might actually want to live with? Let me take a shot.
We need to be on the same page on security on one continent. The only way we can do that is throuh a proper continent-wide coalition. It needs to include Russia. It may also need to include Turkey. It would take over European security assurance and eventually replace Nato as the means of collective defence for Europe.
But it can’t just be a guns and bombs treaty. We need to find a space where our nations can converge on some kind of agreed terms of behaviour and attitudes. We need to have some form of protected democracy. It doesn’t need to come at the expense of any nation, but it must mean something.
It needs to offer everyone some kind of economic gain, but it cannot be predatory. We cannot be eyeing each other trying to work out how to screw each other over. It has to be give and take. It needs to be an inspiring model.
We cannot have a continent that is wholly reliant on another. We need different social architecture for our different society. We need a European tech platform. Ideally it would be interoperable with other people’s tech platforms and we don’t end up in a post-Babel tech world. But it is mad for a continent like Europe not to be self-reliant on the fundamentals of our way of life.
This has great opportunities for all. We need to create a new kind of economy that works for everyone without climate change, but we need to get there without anyone being punished. It is possible. We want to trade as self-sufficiently across this continent as we can. We want to take a real, continent-wide approach to migration.
As people flee parts of the world which the climate is making uninhabitable, at the same time Siberia and the far north will become constantly more habitable. There are threats for all in this but also enormous opportunities. Resettling new territory – if we do it properly, together – could be by far our best hope to manage the accelerating flow of people.
And then we can embed this all in a global system that doesn’t need to pit one against the other. If we use resources better it doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game.
No, none of this is realistic just now. But we are perfectly capable of making it possible. The first step is to offer a vision and a pathway for reformers in Russia which offers the people of Russia a vision and a hope that can work. It is no justification of Putin to accept that we have continually taken a hostile stance towards the people of Russia.
So progress would be contingent on there being very real reform. But Putin isn’t going to be there forever and it would be really stupid to wait until he goes before thinking about this or to expect that the outcome will be Russia’s surrender to the EU.
To this very day all the liberal commentator class can do is out-compete each other in their reverse virtue-signalling over how much they hate Putin. But if your only tool is hate, every solution is violence. That is why all anyone is talking about is cutting welfare spending to buy more bombs.
Someone has to be wiser than this. There is a genuinely peaceful future there for the taking on this continent. We’re not close to it, but we must not assume we’re many decades away. If there is one thing that we know right now it’s that change can come disorientatingly quickly.
Peace through deterrance has failed abysmally. In that context, peace through hope and good will is nothing like as crazy as it sounds in 2025.
Source: What about some peace through hope?