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#41

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] The Scot...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 17, 2025, 06:32 PM

The Scottish Parliament is getting its dog/children priorities wrong

I mentioned before that Common Weal does a daily briefing on Scottish politics and that I’d post one here from time to time. I’m particularly perturbed by Jenny Gilruth’s determination to take zero responsibility for the impact of mobile phones on the mental health of children. This is the subject of today’s briefing. You can sign up for them via the Subscribe button at the bottom of the site.

There is an interesting contrast in two decisions made by politicians in Scotland over the last two days. In one instance the Parliament decided to go out of its way and pass a law specifically making dog theft a crime. In the other, the Scottish Government couldn’t be bothered to make a decision on whether mobile phones should be banned in schools.

These seems like a odd priorities. It is already illegal to steal a dog based on theft laws. If the Parliament in its considered wisdom thinks a specific law is necessary then there is no question it has acted swiftly and decisively, though it is rather hard to see what has really changed in effect here.

On the other hand, the evidence on the negative impact of mobile phone and social media on the wellbeing and safety of children is already substantial and growing all the time (68 per cent of children say they feel worse about themselves after being online). This has been an unregulated free-for-all in which parents have been left on their own to somehow assess what is best for their children.

Official guidance has been weak or no-existent. Legal regulatory frameworks have been weak in general and, in relation to children, often simply missing. Support for frontline professionals has been scant. The entire question has been defined by the utter lack of action which has been taken.

Scottish Labour was therefore to be commended for bringing forward the direct proposal that mobile phones should be banned in Scotland as a matter of consistent policy. Common Weal does not believe that this is anything like a sufficient move because the problem stretches well beyond the classroom. Parents need much more support than this.

But it is an absolutely necessary move. The drift into the normalisation of mobile phones in classrooms has been unhealthy and unhelpful. Classrooms should be places of learning, not distraction, and the claims that mobile phones are helpful learning aids is unpersuasive.

So what happened when Labour brought the proposal? It was voted down by the Scottish Government. The reason it gave was entirely spurious; that it was a decision for head teachers. This is non-sensical – if this logic were to be extended then we would remove legal limits on everything that could take place in a classroom and leave it to head teachers.

There is perhaps no more stark demonstration of what is wrong with Scottish Democracy than a parliament which has time to make things illegal which were already illegal but can’t find the time to do anything to protect children from predatory corporations

What is really so overwhelmingly objectionable about this is that head teachers and teachers generally have enough on their plate as it stands. Few in Scotland now need to be told again about the litany of difficulties the teaching profession is facing.

Asking each school to individually and on its own look at scientific evidence and decide for itself what regulatory decisions it has to make is impossible to justify in any context, but in this context in particular if feels disgraceful. This is the Scottish Government chickening out.

The reality is that this is nothing more than cowardice, and it follows an ongoing pattern of cowardice in the education portfolio recently. The Education Department of the Scottish Government is now more notable for the number of big issues on which it has abdicated responsibility than for anything it has actually done.

It is worth being clear about why the Parliament has the time and the courage to protect dogs but not children; dogs and their infrastructure are not supplied by immensely powerful US corporations which the Scottish Government is currently in negotiation to effectively hand over Scotland’s data in a move which risks being the de facto privatisation of the running of public services.

There will be no lobbying pushback from lobbyists representing dog thieves so passing the law is painless and requires no thinking. Taking action against US tech interests will trigger a furious response. This is what it looks like when the First Minister prioritises placating an unhinged US President on behalf of foreign-owned whisky-owning corporations.

When big business interests are in play, our children are on their own. Or rather, they are reliant on having a head teacher with more courage and foresight than our Cabinet Secretary for Education. We are sacrificing children’s interests for Silicon Valley share prices.

There is perhaps no more stark demonstration of what is wrong with Scottish Democracy than a parliament which has time to make things illegal which were already illegal but can’t find the time to do anything to protect children from predatory corporations.

For the last four months, a team of student volunteers have been working with Common Weal to look at the evidence and formulate a credible and comprehensive package of measures which put children first in education and support parents in supporting their children’s wellbeing and mental health.

We have not approached this work in fear and we will not pull our punches in our conclusions because of lobbyists. We will publish these proposals as soon as we can.

Source: The Scottish Parliament is getting its dog/children priorities wrong

#42

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] A place ...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 17, 2025, 06:00 PM

A place no longer in need of approval or validation

Artists – what are they like? Their own worst enemies. They just don’t get it. Audience want musical numbers they can sign along to on a girls night out on the town, or whatever. And what do the artists do?

It’s nutso. They put together a play about the rise of fascism in 1930s Scotland. No, not Scotland, one obscure little region of Scotland. No, not even that, just part of a region, a local area. And they create it in broad Scots, dense, no-holds-barred Scots. Not content they don’t even go to an art house theatre. Nope, they tour it round a bunch of little village halls.

It’s got feminism, and class politics and everything – and then they don’t even charge. You sign up, turn up and pay what you think it was worth on the way out the door. And from that and some limited grant funding they intend to pay everyone involved a proper wage. I mean what did they think was going to happen?

Shall I tell you? They sold out every single performance within two weeks. That’s 800 tickets. There were 200 people who didn’t get tickets and asked to be put on a waiting list. Somehow they were just about all accomodated.

That’s a thousand people saw this show, their fourth in three years (if you include their utterly wonderful reading of A Christmas Carol in Scots last year, easily the most enjoyable time I’ve spent watching people dressed in their civis sitting in a semicircle reading from bits of paper). And you know what, people are very generous. Everyone has been paid full rates.

I’ll own up that for a whole host of reasons I’ve hit a hard spot of despondency this week. I don’t even need to list the reasons any more. And I’m struggling to find something positive anywhere. I am trying really hard to resist the retreat into the purely personal. I could just sit around the house watching films with the kids and pretend the world wasn’t happening.

But on Saturday, at a performance of Braw Clan’s The Needle Room, I had the best, most uplifting time. It was great in so many ways and there is so much that it has prompted in my head. You see, the obscure little part of a region that the play was about is my obscure little part of a region. It’s where I grew up.

Actually the play is set in Lanark, but when one of the three protaganists is introduced as ‘the White Craw’, I instantly said to myself ‘oh, she’s from Carnwath’. The White Craws is the nickname for people from Carnwath – one of my closest friends was from there. I was only one of a couple of people at my performance who knew this and it was strangely affirming that my little patch could be worth telling a story about.

I want to believe that we are a rich and diverse Scotland and that we are worth something, not only when we assemble as one behind which ever public sector leader has called us to Glasgow or Edinburgh

And this was what has been on my mind and is the reason I’m writing this (not just to cheer myself up). In fact it was my question at the Q&A afterwards (Braw Clan is big on audience engagement and constantly tell us that we too are part of the ‘Clan’).

What do we do with this? Regional theatre can clearly work. In fact it can clearly work brilliantly. It can engage people with strong, literary tales of where they come from, in the language of the place they come from. It can be as thrilling as I found this, and as almost everyone I’ve ever spoken to who has been at one of their performances was as thrilled as me.

So what do we do? Do we take these works and share them with a wider audience, or do we replicate this everywhere? To put it another way, do we nationalise regional theatre or do we regionalise national theatre?

The answer from the Braw Clan team was unequivocal – they want more people in Scotland to see this work, but they want it to be here. They want people to come here, to Clydesdale, and hear stories about here. It is a wildly admirable sentiment and not as out-there as it seems.

Because from this I started to drift off into a vision of what this would look like. Imagine 20 theatre companies like this all over Scotland, researching and writing stories about what happened here. The Needle Room is part of a trilogy of plays Braw Clan has done which might be loosely considered a ‘women emancipate themselves from the stupidity of small-minded men – and tradition-bound women’.

But they are very specific – one is based on a real visit to Leadhills by Wordsworth and his party. One is based on a true story of a local woman who escaped to the US and made a minor career as a singer and movie star. This one is heavily based around the real history of nascent fascism in this area.

All three were a joy because they were stories about what I consider home, but all three told me loads and loads of things about my home I didn’t know. They use local dialect. As usual, they are universal themes but they are incredibly rooted in place.

And that’s what I’ve been thinking about since. I want to go to Newton Stewart, or Arbroath, or Bowmore, and I want to hear stories from there. I want to believe that we are a rich and diverse Scotland and that we are worth something, not only when we assemble as one behind which ever public sector leader has called us to Glasgow or Edinburgh.

But here’s the truth; I enjoy theatre but I don’t go often. Money, kids, time, competing priorities. It is not generic theatre that I am enjoying, it is specific theatre, local theatre. It feels almost subversive, almost like a rebellion to say ‘this is for us – please come and share it with us, but we’re not coming to you this time’.

We need to escape our mindset that there is a group of gatekeepers in our two big cities whom we must pay homage to before anything of value can be said to exist

And that’s where the shame comes in, because after dwelling on it I realised where my question came from. Despite me being on this website all the time trying to persuade you that Scotland is overly-centralised and turning into a corporate, urban-imagine version of a uni-Scotland which is really only one part of Scotland.

Despite me being convinced that this centralisation is strangling the life out of the country. Despite me having statistics that prove it categorically. Despite all this, still I have been trained to see validation only in Glasgow or Edinburgh. Even I was caught thinking ‘does this count if its only for us?’

This is the truth that is not spoken enough in the Scottish arts scene – it has largely been overtaken by a middle-class ethos of identity. Arts seem now only to explore the ‘journey’ (which is depressingly often ‘spiritual’) of an individual through the lens of some personal identity which, perfunctorily at the end, we are told is actually universal.

I think that there is most certainly a place in the arts for personal exploration, but after a point it turns into utter solipsism. The collective experience is absent. The locally specific feels absent too. We have created a kind of high-brow slop, a repetitive series of moves which sound awfully similar, each about an individual trying to bring you into their personal world.

That’s not what this felt like. It was no less driven by social mission – moreso if anything. When our lead character (spoiler alert) grabs an open razor she is being threatened with and, bleeding, launches into a monologue about how a girl from her social class knows more pain than the well-to-do assailant can imagine, there is a thrill whirls round the theatre. Feminism and class politics as catharsis.

And yet it is not a story of one person we are all expected to internalise as somehow our storie, it feels more like a collective tale we always all belonged to.

Yet this entire article isn’t really about theatre and it isn’t really about Scots language and it isn’t really about then predilections of the governing classes when it comes to art. Really, it is about how much we need to escape our mindset that there is a group of gatekeepers in our two big cities whom we must pay homage to before anything of value can be said to exist.

As the above thoughts clicked into place in my head, I imagine a Scotland entirely without those gatekeepers; local, regional, human, diverse and free. It was an intoxicating image – and I want more of it.

Source: A place no longer in need of approval or validation

#43

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Schrödin...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 17, 2025, 05:27 PM

Schrödinger's lobbyist

I 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

#44

Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] I've been ele...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 17, 2025, 03:58 PM

I've been elected to the SNP's Policy Development Committee

As I posted three times last week to plug my candidacy in the SNP's internal elections, here's a quick video update on how I fared in the results.

Source: I've been elected to the SNP's Policy Development Committee

#45

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] What abo...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 17, 2025, 03:44 PM

What about some peace through hope?

First published by Common Weal

Everything 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?

#46

Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] The Scot...

Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 17, 2025, 02:56 PM