- Welcome to ALBA - Unofficial Forum.
Recent posts
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Fighting...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 14, 2026, 04:45 PMScotland’s ruling classes have fucked up. I mean really fucked up. After two decades of their unchallenged tyranny the outcome is collapsing universities, collapsing arts infrastructure, collapsing public services, a housing crisis, a domestic economy ownership crisis…
And what do ruling classes do when they fail? They crack down on those who seek to expose them. We, the ruled, can only defeat them by standing in solidarity, and a key moment with a chance to show some solidarity will happen next week. It also marks a legal milestone.
It is the latest show trial of Glasgow Councillor Fiona Higgins who, as a super-fast summary, has been persecuted for a year and a half for correctly identifying that a senior officer was hiding crucial information that should never have been hid and which his own colleagues said he shouldn’t have hid.
(I have been following this case closely because Fiona is proving to be a case study in the dogged determination not to be terrorised and silenced by the ruling classes. If you need a full catch-up, the basics of the case are explained here and then the developments that take us to next week are explained here.)
The only-slightly-longer summary is that Glasgow City Council’s Director of Finance removed from a draft budget document clear statements that the budget about to be approved required a reduction in teacher numbers, did so against the strong explicit objection of the Director of Education and by doing so left councillors passing a budget which was against their own policy because they were prevented from knowing they’d just voted to cut teacher numbers.
Fiona gets curious about this and asks for information. They refuse to give her the information so she uses the Freedom of Information Act to force the information out of them which reveals all of the above and the fact that his own colleagues objected to what he was doing. She pursued that internally, but no-one would take any action.
And this is what you really need to know – if a council official does this, the rules are that no action can be taken against them by any elected figure, but if the elected figure tells anyone what they’ve found, the unelected council official can take action against them.
If you’re new to this, I need to repeat it. If you vote for someone to represent you on a council and that person discovers an official is lying, the only thing they are allowed to do is to report it to the official’s boss. If the boss decides to do nothing, that is the end of it. If the councillor then tells anyone about this, the councillor is disciplined.
Why? Because the rules forbid elected representatives from criticising unelected officials in any way or form in public. Officials can lie without consequence but you can’t expose them without being open to being suspended. Oh, and that might make sense if the elected officials can sanction or remove the unelected official, but that’s banned too.
These officials who have no legitimacy whatsoever other than their role as servants to democratically-elected bodies have built themselves a system in which they can terrorise anyone who attempts to hold them to account
Another thing you should know; at about the same time as this, the official concerned and the boss who is the only person anywhere that can hold him to account were having private meetings to arrange lucrative ‘golden goodbye’ payments for each other that they were not entitled to, which were not approved through the required official channels and which led to Audit Scotland ruling that the officials “fell short of the behaviour and standards expected of public servants”.
So you as a member of public can only find out about dishonest practice if the person’s boss, who is in a co-dependent grift relationship with the person responsible for the dishonesty, agrees to do something about it (which in this case she did not).
Hence the ongoing pursuit of Fiona in a form of extended punishment. So, you might think, over to the public. I mean, the council can’t actually discipline the public, can they? Well it turns out they can if the lawyer the public picks screws up. You may have separately heard that the council are trying to bankrupt a group of mothers who challenged them in court.
Because it’s exactly the same case. After Fiona revealed what was happening, they took court action because they thought this was malfeasance. I won’t go into this but the case fell apart not because of the case itself but because of procedural error which was nothing to do with the plaintiffs. Yet as soon as the case fell apart, the council started its pursuit of the mothers involved. At one point the group of Glasgow mums involved turned up at a meeting to be faced with seven council lawyers, all paid for by Glasgow residents, not the officials.
Hence Leanne McGuire is being hounded by Glasgow City Council for legal costs of £43,000. Please do not mistake what is actually happening here. Scotland’s ruling classes are riven with corruption. I really mean that. They run a system where all-but set their own pay, invent bonuses for themselves, and give contracts to companies and then get even more lucrative employment with those companies.
Our media generally doesn’t catch them, simply because our media is so emaciated that the journalists who used to cover institutions like local authorities or the quango agencies no longer exist. Every so often someone else blows the whistle (like the instance with the Water Industry Commission Scotland) and this all comes to light. But it is rare.
And it is made rarer because of this reign of terror. That is the only word for it. These officials who have no legitimacy whatsoever other than their role as servants to democratically-elected bodies have built themselves a system in which they can terrorise anyone who attempts to hold them to account.
Look at what is happening in the universities. The unelected executive of Edinburgh University has just told the Senate that it is effectively unilaterally suspending the constitution of the university and is going to directly appoint people to roles who should constitutionally be selected by the Senate (which in turn is elected from the academic body).
Those hand-picked officials are to be put in place to force through a massive cuts process which is being run by the executive on its own without consultation because the executive left the university in a financially perilous condition.
Let me spell that out – the Standards Commission is arguing that it can run unjust kangaroo courts using public money and it can do so in any way it wants
They are utterly out of control. It is quite scary. If this was being done by a politician like Victor Orban you’d call it what it is – dangerous authoritarianism. He too put pliant figures in posts that others should have been filling and used those people to bypass law and the constitution. He too used judicial intimidation of the public. He too put critics on show trials.
Make no mistake, Fiona has financial and legal backing now and is taking the Standards Commission to court whether they like it or not (they definitely don’t like it). Which brings us up to speed. Next Tuesday sees Fiona’s judicial review (10AM, Court of Session) of the attempt by the Standards Commission to ‘sentence’ her while refusing to accept any of her evidence.
The Standards Commission’s defence is that it is allowed to run its own affairs however it wants and that does not need to mean fair or just treatment of the people it pursues. It is arguing that it is not obliged to operate by the standard rules of natural justice because there is an opportunity for appeal.
Let me spell that out – the Standards Commission is arguing that it can run unjust kangaroo courts using public money and it can do so in any way it wants because once it has completed the person suspended can use part of their £26k salary to hire a lawyer and appeal the decision in the Sheriff Court.
Legal figures are calling this a landmark case because if Fiona wins it will set the precedent that no, Scotland’s ruling classes cannot do whatever the fuck they want whenever they want all the time and that basic rules of natural justice apply. If it surprises you that this precedent has to be set in Scotland in 2026 then you are not alone.
The ruling class can lie but elected politicians can’t expose them. If the elected politician does expose them they can be sent to a ‘court’ which does not recognise the principle of natural justice. It can then suspend you and all you can do is try and find the money to get lawyers to go through the slow process of appeal.
Meanwhile the ruling class can also use unlimited public money – your money – to try and destroy the lives of the people they serve if those people try and hold the ruling class to account for the same malfeasance.
I want to make this as clear as I can – Fiona is making big sacrifices to stand up to the injustice of Scotland’s ruling elite and they are determined to defeat her. She is not standing up for herself, she is standing up for your right to live in a country that vaguely sounds like a democracy. I urge you to show her your support.
Source: Fighting back against the ruling class's reign of terror
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] An elegy...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 14, 2026, 04:15 PMCan you remember what Scotland was like? It takes a bit of effort now. I started high school in 1984. That was when the ‘Glasgow Smiles Better’ campaign was just launched, a couple of years before the Garden Festival with all that infrastructure development in Glasgow and a couple more before the Year of Culture. Hell, there were even adverts for Cumbernauld on the TV (what’s it called?). Something was happening.
We were still in the depths of Thatcherism but the fight-back had galvanised Scotland. The Year of Culture was a big deal for me, coming as it did just when I was discovering the arts as a young adult. A couple of years later the Third Eye Centre turned into the Centre for Contemporary Arts; you know, just up past McLellan Galleries.
It was the year of what felt like the groundbreaking Glasgow Girls exhibition at Kelvingrove, which itself was part of a rediscovery of a number of Scotland’s art movements, and obviously not least the work of Charles Rennie Macintosh. Yes, the ‘Mockintosh’ phenomenon became tedious but it felt to me like we were an important player in the world’s culture.
The Glasgow United rally in George Square after the 1992 election may well have been a false start, but it was part of the momentum that was driving us inexorably towards a new parliament, and you could feel it in the air. The launch of the final report of the Constitutional Convention, the sense of a Glasgow that was flourishing, a Scotland that was changing – it was everywhere.
Then there was the 1997 referendum and we knew something was going to happen. In a funny way, having priced in that devolution was coming, the thing that really made me feel like we were on the cusp of something was in 1999 with the launch of the Sunday Herald. It was exciting, vibrant, youthful, new. A proper Scottish newspaper for a new era.
There was even an early flurry of purposefulness from the Scottish Parliament, mostly because of Henry McLeish’s short reign. Edinburgh was kicking off now that it was a seat of power, and at that early stage it was almost exciting that the Royal Bank of Scotland was starting to look like a serious player. The new Museum of Scotland extension had arrived in 1998. The Scotsman was building a new purpose-built centre at the new Holyrood.
And not a fucking single bit of any of this exists any more. Well, Kelvingrove will always be a beacon of light in Scotland for me, the museum is still there and Cumbernauld is just about getting by (though who needs a theatre, right?). But the rest is gone, and I’m damned if I can put my hand on my heart and say that it has been replaced with anything of equal stature and ambition.
This is why the burnt-out husk of the Glasgow School of Art Macintosh Building is such an on-the-nose metaphor for everything that has gone wrong. It is a case study – an unelected ruling class removed proper democracy in the higher education sector, so the unelected ruling class expands, creeps outwards, colonises, takes over the Glasgow School of Art.
I kept thinking that the shame those involved must feel might push them to pull out the stops and fix their horrendous mistakes, but that was just silly of me
Which means three things for certain. First, every hope and objective for the institution will sound like an extended advertisement for ‘inwards investment’, a consultant-speak hodgepodge of neoliberal economics and sprawling adjectives that normal people don’t say, all measured by performance indicators.
Second, nothing will now happen under any circumstances unless first it generates a complex web of contracts and consultants and financiers and corporations. This is what the ruling class do – they distribute contracts to private sector bodies they hope will one day offer them a lucrative Board position.
Third, you will be allowed to know nothing about this. Every effort will be made at every stage to ensure that the ruling class is not exposed to proper scrutiny, that you will not have the full information, that things will suddenly be pronounced ‘unknowable’, and if something really bad has happened, they will delay the release of information until everyone responsible can get a new gig outside the blast radius of the eventual catastrophe.
Looking back, after the second fire, I guess I knew the Macintosh Building was over, destroyed, done for. I kept thinking that the shame those involved must feel might push them to pull out the stops and fix their horrendous mistakes, but that was just silly of me. When we heard last week that it is basically over, I should have realised that this was just the end of the seven years during which they were all digging escape tunnels. Good luck guys!
And to this day I don’t understand any of it, partly because of all that secrecy. There is much made of the fact that the sprinkler system hadn’t been installed. But is this not a massive misdirection (oh how the ruling classes love a misdirection…)? The sprinklers that everyone keeps telling you were not yet installed were the final installed fire suppression system that was going into the final building.
Was there no fire suppression system on the building site? Should a historic building of this nature which had burnt down once and which was being rebuilt in wood not have risk assessed a second blaze? I’ve read what I can on this but I cannot understand how everyone has shrugged and walked off the field. This fire was not just one of those things.
If you have a historic building that you’re trying to save and there are workers and construction tools everywhere, how do you not have enough insurance properly to ensure a full reinstatement in event of disaster? And since we know Keir Construction has a track record that contains shockingly poor work, how are they not being pursued relentlessly here? Are they blameless?
Scotland’s bean counting ruling classes have torn the heart out of Scotland again and again, always at the behest of one of the four big consulting firms, always in a way that benefits the Edinburgh financial managers and corporate lawyers. They destroy something with one tool (let’s call it ‘consultantism’) and then reach for the same tool to repair their grievous error.
No-one must be able to say lessons will be learned for the future; we must see some fucking lessons being learned in real time, right now
Look around you Scotland. The ruling class are gutting our arts infrastructure. They are destroying our universities. They’ve spent £45 million trying to keep one single road open and they can’t do it. Norway can build you five miles of first-rate undersea road tunnel for that. They can’t create a Deposit Return Scheme, can’t build a ferry – they can’t even give away our renewable energy to foreign investors efficiently.
They are the Kings of Devolution and what they have presided over is a dismantling of Scotland’s sense of self confidence. I am trying to think of what we have build of scale since devolution that isn’t a road or a (badly-designed) hospital. I can only come up with the V&A in Dundee and the Riverside Museum. In quarter of a century.
The politicians aren’t even part of this any more. They’re not the ruling class, they’re sitting in one of those clown cars you find outside supermarkets which desperate parents feed with coins to stop their toddlers rebelling while they do the shopping. ‘Great driving John!’ say the ruling classes, stuffing another 50p in the slot, ‘you’ll end child poverty and achieve independence any minute now’.
(Neil presses the horn. It doesn’t work. They look blankly at each other. Shirley-Anne makes a kind of horn noise. John gives the her the thumbs up and turns the wheel to the right. Nearly there.)
That period where something was happening in Scotland, the Scotland of my youth and early adulthood, was sometimes known as the Scottish Renaissance. If so, this is the Dark Age, an era devoid of hope, ambition or competence. Europe’s least-competent ruling class have created Europe’s most centralised democracy, one in which almost everything except one vote every five years has been de-democratised altogether.
When Edinburgh University’s staff opt to exercise their constitutional right to select people for roles in the university that are theirs to choose, the ruling class tells them they aren’t allowed. When a Councillor discovers senior officials are hiding information they are duty bound to reveal, she is suspended (more on that later in the week).
I don’t really know where to start with this now. It isn’t a renaissance we need any more, it’s a rebellion. Someone is going to have to take power from these people by force because no matter how poor their performance, power certainly can’t be shamed out of their hands.
And since we’re dealing in metaphors, let’s extend our core metaphor further. The destruction of the Macintosh Building is the emblem of the ruling class’s failure, so let its reinstatement be the start of their punishment. Let the Scottish Parliament compel them to entirely reinstate the building within a decade or ban every single person involved from public life.
Yes, I know the arguments against faithful reinstatement, and I usually have sympathy with them. I do not like a Disney reconstruction of a historic building, but a crafted one is different, and there are bigger reasons why this must be saved. Pat Kane asks here what Charles himself would do about his building if he was alive just now. I think that’s the wrong question.
I think the question is what would Macintosh have done if the Acropolis had been knocked over during his life? Would he have advocated its reinstatement or would he have called for the site to be replaced with a "creative and performance supercluster" with the "convening power" to drive forward a "designated innovation district"? I really hope not.
This building is capable of being reinstated in a faithful manner and anyone who refuses to do so should be removed from post. There should be an endless, relentless daily focus on them until they repair what has been done. No-one must be able to say lessons will be learned for the future; we must see some fucking lessons being learned in real time, right now.
I’m sorry if I sound angry but I am. This is my nation, my home, the place where I will die and be buried. This is the point at which I can no longer sit still while our ruling elite tell us what we can have, because it will be data centres.
The Scotland of my youth is gone. The hope, briefly rekindled during the indyref, is gone. Our cultural and social infrastructure is gone, being replaced with the ‘business incubator’ of a consultant’s dreams and the student flats of equity property investor’s fantasies. Our towns already died and our cities are chasing them to the grave.
So this is my elegy, my slow, painful song about what we have lost. My fury follows close behind. My determination to do something about this grows monstrous inside me. We cannot go on like this Scotland.
Source: An elegy for Scotland's Dark Age
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] Analysis of t...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 14, 2026, 02:43 PMSource: Analysis of the very strange Clacton by-election result
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] The Scottish ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 14, 2026, 01:29 AMSource: The Scottish REVOLUTION! Almost half of Scottish voters demand U.D.I. in history-making poll
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] Analysis of t...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 13, 2026, 12:44 PMSource: Analysis of the first full-scale poll of Scottish voting intentions for Westminster of the Burnham era
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Paths to...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 13, 2026, 01:40 AMScotland is not just one giant stuttering failure, filled with malfeasance and conspiracy and corruption. The vast majority of people working in the public sphere work hard every day trying to make things better. Nor do I expect errors not to happen. Nor do I think running complex services is easy.
What I do expect is that when errors occur they should be addressed honestly and transparently and if there is any reason to believe that the outcome is a result of anything other than honest error, that there is accountability. It’s not about punishment, it’s about moral hazard, the danger in believing you don’t need to be honest.
What I have been trying to show recently is that is not what happens in Scotland, and since you all keep sending me examples, let me give you a few more. We don’t have systems that hold powerful people to account.
First, how does a trial against presumably wealthy landlords collapse because the prosecution service botches a video? We’re quarter of the way through the twenty first century – that breaches basic competence at the very least.
You can get the full details of this case on Ruth Tingay’s excellent Raptor Persecution blog, but this is the basics. A red kite disappears over a shooting estate, presumed dead, probably shot. These cases generally go nowhere because it is so hard to find evidence that proves the bird was shot and who shot it.
So to have video footage from a neighbouring land owner who was monitoring wildlife and caught two figures with guns carrying a dead red kite was rare and welcome. Multiple people then correctly identified the two people in the video when it was played to them in the police station.
The long and short of it is that by the time the prosecution service brought the video to trial it had somehow been edited in a way that had sharply reduced the resolution. It was so bad that the witnesses in court were unable to identify anyone from the garbled remains of what had been crisp as a bell in the police station.
There were other aspects to this case, but this failure to identify in court was crucial in the eventual dismissal of the two men. And I cannot believe this is justice served. If the prosecution has butchered the key evidence, the trial must surely be adjourned until the problem is resolved. The public interest demands it.
My kids can copy video without accidentally reducing the resolution to the ‘court acquittal’ setting
In medieval Scotland landowners had different legal rights than everyone else. That’s not still the case is it? Because four years ago it also became law that landowners must register their ownership in Scotland but some are simply not doing it and despite Andy Wightman and Alan Brown pursuing them, the Crown Office refuses to take any action. Why?
As I keep pointing out, there are potentially legitimate reasons for some things that look open and shut to not be as certain as they appear. The law can be perverse sometimes, and sadly there is rather a lot of non-compliance that isn’t pursued. But the land registry was crucial national policy trumpeted by the Scottish Government.
And my kids can copy video without accidentally reducing the resolution to the ‘court acquittal’ setting. I just don’t think this should be happening, but will we ever find out what the hell is going on?
Meanwhile another really sad case. A child born with multiple disabilities is taken into care because his mother isn’t capable of looking after him. Relations between the mother and the social workers break down and she is basically prevented from seeing her son. His foster placements break down and ends up in residential care.
From there he had an illness and was put on palliative care and died. His mother only got ten minutes with him. This is all deeply sad and always more complex than it looks. Social work is under-resourced, fragmented and under pressure to take a punitive attitude, this is a case with terrible options. None of this is easy.
But mistakes were made. Procedurally it is non-negotiable that families are included in end-of-life decisions and that did not happen here. And it is hard to feel that there was a lot of humanity towards either the child or his mother that he was left to die over a period with no familiar faces for most of it.
What is wrong isn’t that people are meant to get things right in every way, every time with difficult situations, it’s that you absolutely must be transparent and learn from it afterwards. And that is where ‘bureaucratic Scotland’ kicked in. The council concerned (Renfrewshire Council) opted not to have a significant case review.
Instead what it did was the more minimal ‘regulation six’ report in which it runs over the bones of the case and any learning from it. But that is the authority which failed to follow procedures writing an assessment of its own failures. This went to the Care Inspectorate which (if we’re being generous) is overwhelmed and (if less so) has a track record of being rather soft on the institutions it inspects.
It nods the council report through and there it would have come to an end – but the mum is heartbroken and is pushing it. It’s just that there is no real route of appeal in any of this for someone like her. This is an instance in which I do understand the position of everyone involved, but it just points to the same thing.
The care system is broken (this isn’t hyperbole, literally anyone near care services will tell you this) and so rather than shine more light on where and how it is broken it is just too tempting to not ask the question. But that’s not good enough.
I believe strongly that when there is failure there must be transparency because failure which is not respected and learned from is a moral hazard in the future
Another instance; a different elected member in a different local authority made a complaint about the CEO. Basically someone who should have been a neutral senior council official answering directly to the CEO was caught on microphone badmouthing the councillor concerned in a manner he considered defamatory.
The problem now is that I have been through all the correspondence on this and it just goes round and round with all the familiar features – misdirection, claims of remedial actions which don’t take place, refusal to hand over relevant information, threatening the councillor with the Standards Commission, the usual.
It really is quite Kafka. When I look at it with my ‘what would I do?’ head on it really does feel like the only backstop to bureaucratic power in Scotland is often a Judicial Review. I just can’t see how justice can be pursued using the processes established internally.
I’m going to have to stop there. I keep getting this stuff from people now (one person contacted me telling me that an official they had complained about had accessed information about their children, but I don’t have all the details).
I don’t want to spend all my time writing about this but since nothing is happening in government in Scotland, I thought I’d offer some colour pieces to flesh out the size and scope of what feels like a real problem.
Again, I don’t know in the end what the truth is in many matters I hear about – that is why they’re called ‘disputes’. What I do know is that when I look at these disputes, the rules for dealing with them seem almost custom designed to make sure that only one side has any chance of winning and that rules have been put in place that make it very hard even to disclose relevant information.
But this may not last forever. We’re still awaiting the ruling after Fiona Higgins’ Judicial Review of the Standards Commission, but in some ways it really did feel a little bit of a landmark day. Let me tell you three things the judge said – with a little translation.
"…how can you possibly conduct a proportionality exercise [on right to free speech] when you’re closing your eyes to a good chunk of the facts?". Or “[there’s] something awkward in any judicial or quasi-judicial context about making your mind up in advance as to what you may or may not have an outcome on the hearing".
Or my favourite; "What’s wrong with looking at half a dozen pages of text that provide background and colour?”. Because what indeed? I think we can translate this as ‘people have free speech whether you like it or not, kangaroo courts are generally frowned on and surely you’re not really allowed to make rules which are patently unreasonable?’.
I absolutely do not believe that every failure is the result of ‘conspiracy’. I believe that we hold people to account not to punish but to learn. But I believe strongly that when there is failure there must be transparency because failure which is not respected and learned from is a moral hazard in the future.
And whatever is going on in Scotland, there is far too much failure and far too little accountability.
Source: Paths to justice are closed and it is a moral hazard
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Indy mov...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 13, 2026, 12:48 AMIt hadn’t intend to write a three-part series on independence strategy but someone’s off sick so…
Last time I argued that we need to persuade the ten per cent of Scots who take us from round-about 50 per cent support to round-about 60 per cent. While it is an imprecise judgement, 60 per cent is what I think is the minimum threshold that persuades even critics that independence is the settled will of the Scottish people – but I left open how we actually do this.
Mostly until now people have pushed for the referendum route (or some proxy for it) for a specific reason, and that reason is entirely legitimate. If you want someone to change their mind about an issue the first priority is getting them to think about it at all.
Most of us most of the time don’t expend energy thinking about things that are not directly relevant to us or which we do not find intrinsically interesting or entertaining or enjoyable. We make the decisions we have to then pursue the things we enjoy.
In technical terms this is known as ‘issue salience’ – how important is it that I make this decision now and so how important is it that I absorb enough information to make that decision? If I don’t need to make the decision, the issue has low salience so there is little point in me expending effort to gather information.
A referendum creates a decision-point granting the issue high salience, and so people respond differently. That is why we had that remarkably high turnout on referendum day; people thought it was important and so expended surprising amounts of energy engaging with the debate.
Post-referendum there has been no decision-point on independence, making it generally low salience, and we’ve struggled to break that barrier. For the most part we have failed to get our target audience to engage with the information we need them to see if they are to change their minds – so we want another referendum to create a high-salience dynamic.
That is absolutely legitimate and it would definitely work; given another referendum, people would definitely engage. There are just two problems; first, this is precisely the reason no-one is going to give us a referendum if they can possibly avoid it, and second, even if people do see an issue as high valiance it does not mean they will necessarily change their mind.
Referendums have been lost twice in a row; double failure is not impossible. No matter what we do we have to persuade more people and while increasing the issue salience will grab their attention, it does not necessarily mean they will change their position.
It is not enough to claim you’re solving problems, your target audience has to believe it
This is point number one; issue salience has a powerful effect but it is not sufficient in itself so other factors matter. But this also means that there must be other factors which effect attention and decision-making – and there are. That is the second point.
You can get people to pay attention through issue salience, but you can also get people to pay attention through information availability. Adverts on TV are not there to make you think laundry detergent is important but to put a particular brand of detergent in your mind for when you do buy.
Are we putting sharp, memorable messages about independence to an audience in their own environment regularly so it is absorbed and established as an idea? A referendum makes people think about an issue they might not otherwise, but so does message availability. They can’t un-see it.
Another crucial factor is issue relevance. This sounds facile but it is not – we engage with the information we think is most relevant to us. I absorbed zero information about drain augers until I got a blocked drain and suddenly this thing I’d never thought about before was solving a significant problem I had.
We may not be able to force a decision-point on independence, but there are lots of decision-points people will face anyway. These are the endless little problems of life, and when we reach those points we start paying attention to information related to that problem.
In other words, we need to make independence a meaningful solution to the problems people face every day. Every spike in support we’ve had in the last ten years was when the public thought independence was solving something – Brexit or Boris or Covid incompetence.
This does not mean spraying aspirational statements around. We have a tendency to make independence a ‘macro’ issue – ‘it will create ten thousand jobs’. We need to make it a targetted, micro issue.
It has to be about our audience, and they don’t want ten thousand jobs, they want one good job. They want a nicer home, more affordable bills, good public services, better customer service, more parking or better public transport.
How are we solving these problems? What does independence mean for the individual? That leads to another crucial factor – information credibility. It is not enough to claim you’re solving problems, your target audience has to believe it.
We’re bad on this; we make fairly bold statements that aren’t evidenced or explained. We say ‘your electricity will be cheaper’ but we don’t explain how we’ll set up an energy market, how a regulator will keep bills low, we don’t have a credible ‘grid budget’ that explains costs in a way people can examine.
We want too much to be taken on trust and that’s not good enough. And it raises another crucial factor – the messenger effect. This is a term for the differential way people receive information depending on who is giving them the information.
None of this is glamorous, but it works
Think ‘like, respect, know, believe’ – each of these makes us more likely to absorb information from a given source. We need to think in terms of two things here. First, the original source of the material must be from someone authoritative that the target audience believes.
But second, it works best if this is delivered by people the target audience knows or likes or thinks is ‘like them’. This last point is again crucial – we have an enormously powerful resource in the people who support us but aren’t activists.
Getting them involved in message-passing to their peers is (if done well), incredibly effective – particularly where the original source of the information is also trusted.
What I’m saying here is that you most certainly do not need a referendum to get people to engage with information, but that makes it a different game with different rules – and we’re not playing it.
There is something else that is at the heart of this – see every method that I suggest above? They work, but you need to know your audience. You need to know who they are, where they are, where they live, what their problems are (never assume), what their barriers are (why aren’t they supporting us?), what information they need to hear and who they trust to tell them it.
Again, no-one apart from us refuses to do market research. We’ve been so focussed on trying to come up with a scheme so the powerful can cut a deal between themselves to give us a referendum that we’ve lost sight of our audience altogether.
Let me ask you this; all the evidence I have seen suggests that there are undoubtedly ten per cent of the population who can change their minds – but how many of them voted in the Holyrood election? What social class are they? Is there a gender skew? Where are they located? And what is currently stopping them supporting us?
Do we know any of this stuff? I’ve been involved in the limited amount of work which has actually been done on this and I can only answer probably one of those questions with confidence (the last one). That isn’t good enough.
None of this is glamorous, but it works. That is why everything I’ve mentioned above is core practice in the multi-trillion dollar global influencing industries. When I say we need to stop thinking magically and instead think scientifically, this is what I mean.
Use the most effective tools based on the best possible data and use your creativity to make great, compelling messages that really speak to our target audience based on solid product development (independence is our ‘product’ and the current available specifications of our product are rubbish, filled with vague promises and requests to just take our word for it…).
Get that core work done, learn about your audience, create a strong messaging strategy with constant effective feedback, get support over a ‘settled will’ threshold and then press your advantage politically.
It took only a few hours for five per cent of the Scottish public to change their minds on independence when they saw it as a credible solution to Brexit. Why on earth do we think we can’t do twice as well as this within a couple of years with some professionalism, wit and hard work?
Source: Indy movement, there's more than one way to connect
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Drawing ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 13, 2026, 12:14 AMThere is a metric that video game developers use to measure the likelihood that a particular environmental change will lead to behavioural changes. It is known as TTP, and before I spell it out I need to tell you it is a serious concept and that it has very high significance for fighting the rise of the far right and the general breakdown of society.
TTP stands for ‘Time To Penis‘. This is not a childish tech bros joke, it is an actual descriptor of the issue. When developers build a game environment they include varying degrees of ability to change that environment – even in a simple driving game you can knock traffic cones out the way, or you can knock walls down in Mario.
But once you get into large, interactive open-world games, you start to be able to manipulate a lot – for example, dig holes, drag things through sand or build buildings. And it turns out that humans (OK, mostly boys) when given a blank sheet of paper draw a penis. I think of it as one of our most endearing traits; I saw a penis drawn on a stone age cave and felt a deep connection to the (presumably sniggering) artist, separated as we were by millennia.
But I digress. Time to Penis doesn’t measure ‘how long before things get out of hand?’, it is a much cleverer and more sophisticated measure. The question is ‘how long do we go and how much latitude do we give before someone gives up on the main game quest we set and start doing their own thing?’.
To be clear, a lot of game developers actively want you to change the environment and start drifting off the narrative path. They view it as a success, because what they are really measuring is how you are engaging with an information ecosystem. These are all just zeros and ones in code presented to you in a visual fashion. The developers are just making you reorder the ones and the zeros.
Fine, so given sufficient space, people will do something other than you want them to do. What has this got to do with society? Well, this is my response to Megan’s article last week in which she argued that fixing information systems isn’t enough; we need to educate people on how to assess and deal with information.
I don’t disagree, but we don’t have time. Great, let’s start teaching a new generation how to think critically and assess information right now, but the far right isn’t waiting for us to produce a new generation. We have to deal with the shitshow of an information system we currently have, and surrender isn’t an option.
The trick is to learn the lessons of TTP. If someone stars playing your game and they appear to have got bored and stopped engaging properly with it within minutes, your TTP is so fast people aren’t playing the game. If someone gets to the end of your game and hasn’t bothered to explore or do a single thing you haven’t directed them to, your TTP is infinite and the game feels hollow.
It is the same with information. An effective information environment not only enables people to engage with it in a positive way but encourages positive engagement. It’s about giving you what you know you need and making it fun and easy to find things you didn’t know you wanted – without accidentally becoming a fascist.
If you make finding the information someone wants too painful they will go somewhere else. If you prevent them finding information they’ll go somewhere else. If you patronise them or make the experience feel alienating, they’ll go somewhere else. You can’t easily force someone to engage with information.
(Well, you can if you’re an autocratic regime like China, but let it just be assumed that I don’t want us to be a surveillance autocracy…)
There is incredibly good reason to prevent knowledge being curated by the very rich, especially when they don’t care about knowledge
This absolutely does not make us powerless though – because of the principles of TTP. If engagement is poor because the game is too linear or poor because it is too directionless, then these form the ends of a spectrum and you can change parameters in between to get a balance right.
Now before any of the libertarians out there suggest that the idea of a government or any collective entity shaping the information system is somehow evil or wrong, they need to be challenged. Our entire information system has been very carefully engineered as it currently stands.
Worse, it has been engineered for a very particular purpose – to generate monopolies. I know that monopoly is only a step on the path to making money and that making money is the ultimate goal. But in the last 20 years our information system has been completely redesign by a cadre of people who have incredibly deeply-rooted ideological ideas.
They believe in disruption and power. They believe that if they can break something, it deserved to be broken. They genuinely believe that if they can come up with a way to hold you hostage, they should do it. They’re almost all male, they’re almost all white and they’re certainly all donating to Donald Trump’s ballroom.
These are not custodians of the public good and even far-end capitalist theory does not suggest that fundamental knowledge should be subject to market forces (‘belief in gravity fell six points on the FTSE this week while there has been a surge in purchases of flat earth stocks’).
There is incredibly good reason to prevent knowledge being curated by the very rich (though no-one told the Universities Defence Alliance that…), especially when they don’t care about knowledge.
So the question isn’t ‘should we leave knowledge alone?’ but ‘ how should we fight the good fight to save knowledge?’. And now that we’ve decided that it makes sense to have a public good-focussed information ecosystem and we’ve convinced ourselves that it is possible, it all becomes about those behavioural questions, the ‘TTP effect’.
Now I’m skirting round this a bit because we’re doing a big project in this area. In fact it’s why Megan did her piece last week – we want to explore what people think should be in a positive information ecosystem. We have ideas and plans and no space here to explain them.
But I can explain some principles which underpin them. It should be easier and more pleasant to find accurate information than false information. We need to think about how information is presented. The social media info-system is a dopamine system which makes you read information to get a small buzz of strong emotion, then again, then again.
In fact it is info-switching that is key – you probably don’t know you’re doing this but the purpose of social media isn’t the posts but the swipes. It is the swipe that gives you the real buzz, the belief that behind the next door may be something amazing. No? Oh well, let’s try the next door. Forever.
That is the reality and you can’t defeat it by saying ‘but Wikipedia…’. Much as I admire Wikipedia, it is hardly a fun presentation. So how do you make the accurate information nice to engage with? More than that, nicer than the alternative? Learn from social media – curate, but curate for purpose not addiction.
You need to create ways to shape the path people take through knowledge in the way we used to do with schools and libraries and newspapers"
What does that mean? Instead of ‘six times plastic surgery went wrong’ which takes a week to get through because of adverts and stuff, it is ‘six animals with amazing powers’ which is slick and easy. You need clever curation to create the right kind of environment.
You also need to get people who create information to be better at tailoring it to be useable. I keep my eye open for this all the time, not on social media but everywhere I see information. Sometimes I watch a documentary and think ‘oh, that was brilliantly explained – why?’. Sometimes I see science presented in a way that makes me want to dive in. What is so appealing?
In the end, there is a world of this evidence and research and it is 100 per cent possible to beat social media for experience and quality, you just have to want to and you just need to be able to spend the money to do it. Oh, and you need to be ready for the propaganda campaign calling this state censorship.
(On that point, when implementing you need to make sure that there is nothing that is banned just because you don’t like it. You have to ‘beat the internet’, not ban it. The option to do the wrong thing should be there. People have to choose to not take it or you’re losing anyway.)
But it’s not just about punchy presentation, and it’s not just about curation, it’s about structure, and this is where the TTP analogy is closest. If I can find information by going onto an AI platform, spending money and getting a workable answer, a better system only works if it is actively easier to find better information a different way for less or no cost.
It needs to be harder and less joyful to do it the wrong way and it needs to be less accessible. You need to create ways to shape the path people take through knowledge in the way we used to do with schools and libraries and newspapers (which are at least regulated). The BBC is a good example of investment to create a less bad information environment, imperfect as it is.
I should stop. This is an enormous subject and it is complex, filled with questions and conundrums and it involves taking on serious vested interests. There is no half doing it, no ‘part of the way to a better system’. It is like a bucket – if it has a hole in it, eventually everything will drain away through the hole.
But if we don’t deal with this I have little faith in the future of our societies. I am shocked at the speed with which hateful lies about immigration and immigrants has proliferated across these toxic information systems and the starling rise of far right politics that has resulted. I am basically contemptuous of the lilly-livered politicians who have looked at this and concluded they need to do better TikTok videos (though even that is less cringe than Swinney’s summit).
This is an existential issue for our society every bit as much as climate change or economic breakdown – yet we stare at it blankly and do nothing. We must change this system and what I have tried to show here is that the principles for how to change the system are themselves not complicated. It must be won positively, not by prohibition.
But it must be won and we must start now. Because it seems that, on a computer game, give people enough time and they draw a penis, but on the internet, give people enough time and they start reading Nazi propaganda. We need to stop them. But to do that we need to learn. Behavioural science must be our starting point.
Source: Drawing willies and stopping the far right
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] On custo...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 12, 2026, 11:35 PMI really had no intention of adding to the wall-to-wall commentary about the Cambridge academic caught up in messy race-and-plagiarism row. Indeed I commend Marrissa McWhirter’s excellent take on it and this thoughtful analysis here.
But there is something I think has been under-examined so I just want to cover it briefly. It’s about the nature of current public service and why its problems are so exaggerated in the university sector. I could write a full essay on this but I will instead pull out three specific points.
First, there is a very specific reason that this keeps happening, that institutions defend the indefensible much longer than they should. It is a result of management theory and New Public Management. This is the theory that from the 1980s onwards transplanted private sector management practices onto traditional public service – in the name of efficiency.
In fact one terminology shift explains the routes of this – people using public services became known as ‘customers’. That is a substantial change. When you serve you do not persuade, you deliver – but customers have to be persuaded. That is the difference.
In pursuit of service you take an inward-reflective approach – how did we do, can we do better? You do not prioritise customer feedback data as much as real, hard evidence. I may not like having invasive procedures but in this context serving me does not mean ‘making me like them’.
With customers that’s completely different – the customer is always right. This starts to make performance subjective, a question of whether the customer is happy or not. Perception doesn’t make a procedure better but it can alter how a ‘customer’ feels about the procedure. That is the mindset of modern service – ‘lived experience’.
This just means you shift away from managing a service and towards managing your customers. That means maintaining their confidence, which in marketing terms means ‘deny failure if you can’. If you are managing customers (rather than serving citizens) then there is always a voice who will seek to balance ‘real harm’ with ‘reputational harm’.
With great power comes great culpability.
I have been quite close to this. I have been offering advice and help to the victims of Tayside butcher surgeon Sam Eljamel and the pattern is familiar. Evidence starts to emerge of concerning clinical outcomes, two colleagues raise their concerns with management – and management disciplines them.
Eljamel goes on harming patients until a second more senior medic raises serious concerns. It turns out that by this stage there are about 250 victims and so after 20 years of this he finally leaves the hospital in 2014. But the Health Board continues to obstruct transparency. It took a decade from the point where it was accepted that this was what happened until a public inquiry was agreed.
Service would have listened to the complaints and taken them seriously; reputation management did the opposite. Good stories are promoted beyond reason, bad stories are suppressed, reputations are burnished, the customer is managed – but the citizen is entirely failed.
Second, with great power comes great culpability. Another feature of New Public Management is the cult of leadership. It created an ideologically-defined centralised management class who are said to embody the characteristics which will make the service better. They are service improvement in flesh and blood form.
But that makes them the flesh-and-blood form of failure too. If you want to be a hero on the upswing, you become the villain on the downswing. In a more serious and grown-up system we’d acknowledge that generally neither the success nor failure of a large organisation is down to those at the top.
But if we pretend like it is, then PR goes from being a communication tool to part of your ideological church. You are the best of the best, and if evidence comes out that you are not the best of the best it harms the organisation, so it is in the interests of the organisation to prevent evidence coming out. Simples.
It’s not just PR, it’s legal action (the Sandie Peggie case for example) and procedural corruption (which is my long-standing beef with the Standards Commissioner). All of this protects those at the top but also has the knock-on effect of suppressing information which would enable performance improvement.
Third, this is all turbocharged in the university sector. If other public services believe themselves to be ‘like’ the private sector, the introduction of variable tuition fees made universities certain they were actually the private sector. Where marketing analogies are used in the NHS, universities are now marketing bodies that deliver education as much as the other way round.
They were made to rely on competition for fee-paying students. Reputation is everything, PR is king, the customer is always right. And their customers are largely liberal, so PR must emphasise the extent to which universities offer a home for ‘that kind of person’. Management then becomes about fabricating the narratives that make their customers believe the fabrication.
There is no service-to-education in this, only education as service to be sold. And these three points help explain the Jason Arday case. He was a brand leader for a corporation targetting a young, liberal customer base. What he represented and projected was more important than what he was.
Why did no-one ask searching questions? That in itself is the wrong question. No-one sits down during the development of an advertising campaign and says ‘hold on, is this actually true?’, only ‘is this all legally sustainable?’. You all think they were appointing an academic when they were really appointing a brand ambassador.
Then, as it starts to unravel, we get back to ‘the good of all requires the reputation to be protected which requires a cover-up’. When that unravels the crisis starts to lap at the feet of those actually responsible and so they go into self-protection mode. This happens in direct relationship to how marketised a service thinks it is, hence the brazenness of this university example.
Incidentally, lots of us warned this was going to happen when fees were introduced and we were dismissed because it was argued strenuously that a university would never sacrifice its academic reputation. That too was just lobbying PR.
When you have really important points to make and you extend them outwards towards ludicrousness, it is the important central point which is damaged
What I’m trying to get across here is that while the right is now scenting blood in its pursuit of black people – hold on, sorry, ‘diversity’ – what we should be emphasising more is that this is in large part the fault of capitalism in its bullshit salesman phase. The whole cult of markets keeps causing this to happen. It is ideological, but not in the way the right thinks.
Cambridge set out on this course to help it market the university to a young generation it judged ‘wanted’ young, diverse academics. I believe this was more about giving an audience what it wanted than it was about an ideological pursuit of the management class.
That does not mean that I think the version of race theory which dominated for a decade was helpful or not culpable for where we have reached. It was. There was genuinely a moment when people were calling for ‘numbers’ to be decolonised. Bizarrely our current number system (which is known as the Hindu-Arabic Numeral system folks) was claimed to be a western imposition on ‘people of colour’ (who invented it in the first place).
When you have really important points to make and you extend them outwards towards ludicrousness, it is the important central point which is damaged. Both Me Two and Black Lives Matter were essential and both tackled very real problems – but that doesn’t mean they were entirely effective, for this precise reason.
But it is wrong to see the Jason Aday case as mostly about tackling structural racism because it should be seen mostly as a marketing stunt in a system of public service which has been forced uncomfortably into the shape of neoliberal capitalism and its obsessive focus on sales theory.
I can’t tell you how much my heart sank when I read the details of this. Every fibre of me wanted to defend Arday, but I can’t. I think race theory fetishisation did play a part in this. But honestly, this was more about the pursuit of cold, hard cash. Don’t let the racists drag your attention away from that reality.
Source: On customers, Cambridge and capitalism
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] The Scot...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 12, 2026, 11:00 PMThere is a concept used in the building trade someone told me about – Catnap. It stands for Cheapest Available Technology Narrowly Avoiding Prosecution and while I don’t know how widely the term is used, the mindset it describes is one I know prevails (a friend of mine refers to a Tree Preservation Order a ‘tree removal tax’ because the fine is only £5k).
The key thing about Catnap is the second part. If this was ‘cheapest legal technology’ we’d be in one place, but that is not the mindset. The mindset is about precisely how much you can break the law before anyone takes action against you, and since every government I’ve known is always ‘cutting red tape’, we can be confident that the threshold for action is high.
Now let me introduce you to a new concept I’m going to call Morolaw, or Most Obstructive Response that Only Leads to A Warning. Because that is becoming the driving philosophy of the Scottish Government.
I’ve been dealing with FoI issues since before they were even a law (I was lead for the universities in lobbying over the draft legislation) so one way or another I have a reasonable awareness of how they have been working. And until recently the answer was ‘pretty well’.
I am wracking by brains to try and remember an instances in the first 15 years of devolution where I saw an FoI response and felt it was unreasonably obstructive because of redaction or exemption. That doesn’t mean I was happy – I’m a full disclosure kind of guy and so for example don’t think commercial confidentiality should be a (permanent) exemption when it comes to the use of public money.
What I mean is that over that time, within the system as it was set up and the remit of the legislation as passed, I seldom thought the responses that came from government were unreasonable or outside the spirit of the legislation. It could sometimes be frustrating, but it was seldom enraging.
I can’t even begin to say that now. Every single FoI reply I can think of having seen in as long as I can remember has been utterly littered with cheats and tricks and obstructions which are very clearly outside the spirit of the Act.
Worse, everyone but everyone knows this is happening, but they also know there is nothing much that can be done about it. If you submit a Freedom of Information Request now on any subject that could embarrass the Government, you need to strap in for a long process.
Because the Scottish Government is treating an appeal to the Commissioner as a mandatory third stage of an FoI request for information which might embarrass it, the Information Commissioner is overwhelmed
First, you cannot expect the initial response to come in inside the legal deadline. They just send it late at will – as long (mostly) as it is not so late they’ll end up in court. No-one has the resource to take action on this habitual refusal to meet the law (which is what that is), so you just have to accept it.
Then you’ll find out that you’re staring at multiple sheets of paper with explanations of why you’re not getting the information. The exemptions used will often be entirely spurious – we’ve seen entire correspondence exempted because one person’s email address was visible so a ‘data protection’ exemption was used. They literally don’t care at this stage.
Anything they can’t exempt they’ll just redact, so in between the cut-and-paste list of exemptions you’ll need to read through, you’ll find lots and lots of black redactions. Again, I am struggling to remember a time in the early days of devolution when even a controversial request came back largely blacked out.
But it’s not worth getting too hung up about this because you’re now in what is effectively ‘mandatory stage two in trying to find out something the government doesn’t want you to find out’ which is appealing their decision to them. You get 40 days to write an appeal, they get another 20 days to tell you to fuck off. If they do it in time of course.
Realistically, you’re now four months into the process and this is the first time you can appeal to anyone who isn’t the person you’re appealing against. You can now take this to the Information Commissioner. On the upside, he is very good and is robust in upholding your right to information as a citizen.
On the downside, because the Scottish Government is treating an appeal to the Commissioner as a mandatory third stage of an FoI request for information which might embarrass it, the Information Commissioner is overwhelmed. The number of appeals he is dealing with have more or less doubled since John Swinney took office, and they were rising rapidly before that.
He describes the situation in his organisation as ‘to the bone’ and they are now having to ration how many they can look at. The Office of the Information Commissioner needs three times the funding it is getting, but its funding is set by the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body and that opaque committee doesn’t give the impression of caring much.
Of course, if you do get through the initial submission, the initial appeal, the appeal to the Information Commissioner, he is able to actually look at your appeal and then he rules in your favour, this does not mean you are going to get the information. Because now the Scottish Government can appeal your appeal.
I can’t keep going round this Kafkaesque process much more here other than to point out that you can already have a successful appeal by the Information Commissioner in your hand which he has upheld after appeal, and you can also have a Judicial Review instructing the Government to hand it over and you can be past the legal deadline for that and they might still tell you to fuck off.
Why? Because at this stage in Scotland’s devolution era the Scottish Government gives little sign of caring much even when it is found in contempt of court. For me that should scream ‘powerful actors committing crimes must face powerful consequences’, but all of the above happened and the Scottish Government got nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
Think of it like a Tree Preservation Order – take your slap on the wrist and you can obstruct information for literally years. And yes, all of this is expensive, but those being found in contempt of court don’t actually pay for any of this, you do.
It is almost as if the Scottish Government now refuses to recognise the FoI Act when it inconvenient
The reason I’m feeling this particularly now is that we’re on the wrong end of this one again. We know for almost certain that the Scottish Government pulled its ludicrous ‘First Homes Fund’ out its arse with no impact assessment purely because it had no election campaign so needed some kind of giveaway. We know the impact assessment would say ‘will make the housing crisis worse’.
So we submitted an FoI and got back dozens of pages of excuses for why they wouldn’t give us this information. Worse still, we assumed that would happen when we submitted the initial request. Worse than that, we knew we’d need to appeal – and then appeal to the Standards Commissioner because we never at any point thought the Government would act in good faith. Obstruction is normalised for everyone involved.
They did the same when we tried to show that they also pulled their Council Tax Freeze policy out their ass with no impact assessment and we got the same result. We’ll do the same for the ‘free school bags’ and expect the same. All these are piss-poor policy making, done on an expensive whim for electoral gain, none properly considered.
But because the Scottish Government can just obstruct the public from knowing this it will without real consequence, it does. Like so much in Scottish officialdom, this has gotten out of hand. It is almost as if the Scottish Government now refuses to recognise the FoI Act when it inconvenient.
The problem is that I don’t really trust any of the politicians on this. We worked extensively with Labour backbencher Katy Clarke on extensive reforms to FoI which would close down a lot of these loopholes but the SNP did everything in its power to obstruct it and cause it to time out.
I can go through an explanation of why this has happened (it really started to balloon because Nicola Sturgeon played fast and loose with rules and procedures and spent more time covering things up than getting them right in the first place, and John Swinney is by nature a party hack who has always been the SNP’s cover-up man).
But it won’t help here. The only thing that will help is to focus on this reality – the only people who can clean up the behaviour of politics is the politicians. All the above abuses of the system could be brought to an end swiftly by any parliament with the will to do so.
Unfortunately, as I am trying to document extensively, Scottish officialdom is way past the point of honest straight dealing and well into its ‘cover up of the cover the cover up’ stage. As a result, you don’t get to know the information on which your government operates.
Scotland needs a major political reformation. That will require either an enlightened group of politicians to take power or a public rebellion. In the meantime, we can only guess at how bad policy-making in Scotland really is if this is how hard they are trying to hide it.
Source: The Scottish Government is shutting down transparency, one obstruction at a time