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Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] Could the UK ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 16, 2025, 01:55 PMSource: Could the UK general election of 2028 or 2029 end up being the real crunch-point on independence?
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] Make mine a d...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 16, 2025, 01:30 AMGiven that Stew famously "never even mentions me", it's amazing how often I get to be the star of Wings Over Scotland. It's my time in the sun, yet again, today.
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 14, 2025
I'm deeply honoured, Stew.
You'll notice that even though his latest epic rant about me extensively quotes from my previous blogpost, he doesn't refer to me directly by name. This is his standard tactic, both on his main site and on Twitter, in the hope that in six months' time he can tell his fans to do a search for my name to 'prove that he never even mentions me'. Hmmm. I'm afraid that bird has flown now, Stew. Even the hardcore of the brainwashed will have noticed by now that you do tend to blog about me rather a lot.
In the video below you can see my response to Stew's article, in which I address his main point head-on, and explain exactly why pushing for the best possible result for the SNP at next year's election remains the right thing to do and makes perfect sense, in spite of my misgivings about the strategy that was agreed on Saturday.
Source: Make mine a double: why it has to be BOTH votes SNP next May
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] When str...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 14, 2025, 04:46 AMWell I’ll tell you what, you can’t accuse John Swinney of failing to play the long game. That’s him 30 years in Scottish politics and all this time, the whole time, he had a secret plan for independence that he was holding back for just the perfect moment. You know, like when you’re at a recent historic low in the polls and need to feed the troops some pish or other.
Last week in a comment to The National I said that I could write an essay on why John Swinney’s indy plan can’t and won’t work. To do so feels futile. I mean, in the most literal sense possible, I don’t think there is anyone in Scottish politics who is taking it seriously. Not a soul thinks this is actually going to happen.
But just because I want doggedly to try and inject some intellectual rigour into debate in Scotland where I can, let me have a brief go at explaining why this is a wrong-headed waste of everyone’s time.
To begin, let me try to outline what the key elements of the Swinney strategy are – I don’t mean what was in his motion, I mean how the moving parts are supposed to work. There are currently four basic component parts of the narrative, and problem one is that they aren’t consistent with each other.
First, there is boosterism. The vast bulk of the independence papers publish by government are surface level slogans about how brilliant Scotland is and how well lots of other countries are doing. Second, there is civic emergency. Reform is coming – we need to get out as fast as we can.
Then there is a third element which is transactional – you’ll all be £10k better of it Scotland becomes independent. And then there is a question of democratic principle, or Scotland’s right to decide.
When constructing a narrative the one thing about all you’re looking for is logical consistency. I don’t mean that in a philosophy department kind of way, I mean that people operate on some kind of basis of consistent logic and they struggle with ideas that don’t follow that logic. ‘I’m so short I keep banging my head on the door frame’ screams out inconsistency to us and causes us to doubt at least some part of the statement.
And these all point in different directions. One wants you to be scared, one wants you to stare into fluffy white clouds in a clear blue sky, one wants your civic rationality to kick in, one is a pure, venal bribe. Even if each of these worked in their own right, they clash.
Four weak arguments are actually weaker than one weak argument because it tells the listener you know your argument is weak
Think of it like this: "I’ve got a lovely luxury lifeboat. You should try it some time. Its got a minibar and a TV and velvet and a karaoke function for long trips. Which is just as well because the ship has just hit an iceberg and it’s sinking and we’re all going to die.
"But if that doesn’t convince you, let’s contemplate the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea which mandates the need for lifeboats and let’s reflect on the long and involved process of writing those guidelines. Still not sure? I’ll give you a tenner if you get in the boat."
You see how none of that tracks. It’s all pointing in a different direction. It’s like someone has come up with four arguments, doesn’t have confidence in any of them so just decide to dump them all on us. Four weak arguments are actually weaker than one weak argument because it tells the listener you know your argument is weak.
So they don’t work together, but they don’t work apart either. People thinking Scotland has potential isn’t the problem. Put simply, if you look at attitude research work, people who don’t think it are simply not in the indy category. The target audience for independence is people who already believe Scotland has potential but are unconvinced the forces of independence know how to unlock it.
So it is selling a target audience something they already have. There is more mileage in the ‘fear of Farage’, but not this far out, and not just because John Swinney says it. It is definitely the case that worry about the drift of England is a strong motivator, but confidence in Scottish politicians to counter that or stand against it isn’t high.
We went through this with Brexit. Underneath, the Brexit-driven indy advocates (who thought we’d be propelled to independence by the Brexit vote) were half right. There were indeed big doubts about the UK at that point, but we didn’t channel the doubts into a path that led to us.
Think of it like this; you got in a car and the driver suddenly seems like a bit of a psycho. You get out – but is your response just to jump in the next car you see? Getting someone to leave a boring party is easier than persuading them to travel across town to your party.
The most risible of all of this is the cash bribe. Think of your football team, or your favourite friends, or the band you have loved since your 20s. How much would I need to pay you to stop liking those things? Stepping over that, let’s say it’s not your favourite thing. Let’s say you have a tatty old jacket on and someone says ‘if you take it off you’ll get a better one’.
But it’s cold and wet. I can tell you this; I’m not taking anything off until I have something to put on. I’ve heard all the Death of a Salesman pitches before. If it is something I might get mibby at an unpredictable point in the future and you’re definitely not promising me it, I’m placing low weight on it.
The conflict-averse team around Swinney dreams of a high-minded civic campaign where no-one has to get their hands dirty because an easy consensus gets civic Scotland to do the heavy lifting for you
Bribes don’t change behaviour like people think they do, and it doesn’t change behaviour until the money is in your hand. There is no such thing as an ‘IOU bribe’, and when you’re already in possession of IOUs from the same crowd, you’re just going to file it with ‘National Energy Company’.
If you really want to get into that business you need to explain how this money is being generated, where it is coming from and why you’re the people to unlock the magic to put it in my pocket. And even then I’m taking it with a pinch of salt.
So we get finally to my personal bete noir – the statement everyone agrees with being mistaken for the statement that motivates everyopne. Everyone agrees on a citizen’s right to decide the form of government they are governed by. No-one wants it done to them without their say. That doesn’t mean I necessarily want you to be that person who governs me. I can believe in the right to choose my form of government and want Westminster.
There is an assumption that high levels of agreement with a statement make that statement powerful, but let me try that out on you. Everyone agrees that sleeping outside overnight in the rain in November without cover and wearing only your pyjamas is a bad idea. Great – so buy my house.
No-one was planning to sleep in the rain in their pyjamas and so they’ll readily agree it would be a bad idea. It doesn’t mean they’re going to follow that logic to a very specific end point that I want them to arrive at. Things that everyone agrees with often hold less power, not more, because the ease of agreeing with it is its very weakness.
The conflict-averse team around Swinney dreams of a high-minded civic campaign where no-one has to get their hands dirty because an easy consensus gets civic Scotland to do the heavy lifting for you, everyone is happy and everything happens as it should. It is a fantasy. It is not how politics works.
This is all fairly basic stuff. Message consistency, absence of magical thinking (always A to B to C, never A to C), understanding psychological decision-making theory, basic understanding of the difference between commonality (believing the same thing) and motivation (doing the same thing as a consequence) – the list of misunderstandings of how strategy works is lengthy.
And that’s before we get to the ‘it’s all predicated on a majority no-one believes will happen based on a minority of votes which won’t represent a mandate anyway’. None of this is an indy strategy, it is a hodge podge of bad ideas designed to pacify the troops and hopefully drive some of the core vote to the poll. That’s all this is. It is cynical.
Of course, that’s proved more than enough for the SNP’s nodding heads. They all totally believe in Swinney’s secret plan. Like they believed in Sturgeon’s secret plan and like they’ll believe whatever the next secret plan is.
I guess if your audience’s threshold of credulity is that low, your strategy doesn’t need to work. But you leave yourself in a tricky position if over and over again you say things no-one believes, and they don’t even believe you believe.
Source: When strategy isn't strategy at all
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Land is ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 14, 2025, 04:06 AMLand is power. There is no more consistent reality in history. Those who own the land control the future. On this basis the people of Scotland are some of the least powerful people in the world.
It’s not just that we are the most centralised country in the developed world, with the weakest local democracy. It’s not just that we are now governed by a barely accountable sprawl of public agency empires over which we have little influence. And it’s not just that our economy is now largely owned by overseas investors. It's the fact that we don’t own our own land.
We have to beg landowners to let us build houses. We have to beg them not to strangle our rural communities. We beg them to change their practices to restore our wildlife. If we want to start a land-based business we beg them (usually unsuccessfully) for some land to base it on.
No citizens anywhere else in the world own so little of their own country. Scotland is a nation which has turned its own people into tenants.
Why don’t we fight back? Because land is power. Every single piece of credible research says that Scots overwhelmingly do want to fight back. Land reform is wildly popular, supported by overwhelming majorities. Yet still it doesn’t happen. Why?
The public identifies the SNP as ‘the party of land reform‘ but has very low confidence that the SNP is actually going to do anything – and the public is right. Seeing Scotland’s unequal land ownership as unjust and in need of change was fundamental to the creation of the SNP.
Yet the party has had power now for almost an entire generation. Over that period land ownership has become even more concentrated, into even fewer hands, than it was at the start of the SNP era.
In fact, some of the concentration of ownership is directly the result of actions the Scottish Government has taken. Inexplicably, the Scottish National Investment Bank used Scottish taxpayer money to give a £50 million to a London-based company that gives advice to wealthy investors on how best to profit from Scotland’s land.
That company, Gresham House, has – in four years and with active government support – become Scotland's’ second largest landowner. This fact alone should be considered scandalous. How on earth is this even within sniffing distance of being in the public interest?
But that's not all. The Scottish Government devised a scheme to help the very rich cream off public subsidies for tree planting. Buy land and then the Scottish Government will help you make a fortune from it by planting trees – any trees, anywhere. That is government for the rich, not for the public good.
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To distract you from this the Scottish Government uses land reform legislation like a magician waving his left hand about. We’re on our second government Bill in ten years. Its predecessor was a toothless joke and this Bill is the same. The Scottish Government is going out of its way to avoid 'real' land reform while constantly trying to persuade its members it's tackling land reform issues.
And why? Because land is power. On the one hand making land ownership fairer is hugely popular, but on the other, the existing landowners are very well organised and have enormous influence, exerting great pressure to keep things as they are.
After all, they do well out of this. They are subsidised from public funding in lots of ways. But that is not the fundamental reason why large landowners want to keep hold of their land. If it was economic return that was the primary driver, they certainly wouldn’t manage the land as they do.
At the Common Weal think tank we have assessed the economic return on a hectare of land from a wide range of possible economic activities – from bioplastic crops to ecotourism to energy generation to housing. We compared this to the land’s existing use, largely for grouse shooting.
Suffice to say it is very easy to find economic activity which creates much more return on land but very difficult to find anything which creates less return.
Large landowners in Scotland hold land for one of three reasons. First, as a hobby or lifestyle issue. Some very rich people just want a country estate or want to dabble in rewilding.
Second, as an investment. This is what is driving the current concentration of ownership. It is not the value of what is done on or with the land that matters, it is simply the appreciation of the asset value of the land itself, as a speculative investment. Tree planting increases the value of the asset, tenants or businesses based on the land actually reduce the value.
And third, because land is power. Scotland’s aristocratic families do not cling to their massive estates only because of income but because of the influence if confers – to them, and their children, and their children’s children. It is about controlling Scotland’s future in the way they control so much of its present.
Scotland is truly the most generous of nations. We let our local democracy be taken away from us. We let government shrug off accountability. We let overseas investors buy all our domestic economic assets, then extract and export the wealth. We let a tiny number of people own all our land and we do nothing about it.
No, actually, that’s not true. We do do something. We say thank you. We call it efficiency or foreign direct investment or ‘looking after the land for us’. We celebrate being tenants in our own nation and we let the powerful run our lives for their benefit.
Land is power and in Scotland we are complicit in our own powerlessness because we let all of this happen and then make excuses for the politicians who do it to us. If this country can’t grow a spine, take back its own assets and use them for the benefit of its own people, then our future looks bleak.
Source: Land is power—and Scotland's people have none
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] More analysis...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 14, 2025, 04:06 AMSource: More analysis of the fateful strategic decision the SNP made on Saturday - and my thoughts on how we can best move forward from here
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Escaping...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 14, 2025, 01:08 AMSometimes something happens in politics and everyone goes ‘yeah, you see!’ and I look at it and I say ‘yeah, I see!’ – and we’re meaning completely different things. That is what happened when Andy Burnham said that democracies shouldn’t be kicked around by bond markets and the bond markets increased the borrowing costs for Britain.
The Starmerites were utterly besides themselves – see! see! they shouted. And I’m thinking ‘yes, yes I do’. Because surely it proves Burnham was right. Surely it proves that unaccountable foreign financial markets shouldn’t be deciding what we can and can’t do in a democracy?
Here is the question though; even if he is right, what can anyone do about it? If the bond markets have all the money and government needs money, doesn’t that mean that it is natural for bond markets to set the terms? Well, it depends what you mean by ‘money’…
There is a simple way out of this. It isn’t complicated, it isn’t abnormal and it isn’t really radical. Yet it isn’t discussed – only borrow domestically. In this piece I’ll explain what that means, how it would work and how we could do it in an independent Scotland.
(First, a very quick note: I used to advocate a fairly orthodox approach to monetary policy if Scotland was independent partly because playing the game would help stabilise things in the early years. That ship has sailed; there is no stability in global finance now.)
So what does the alternative look like? To get to this, a very quick primer on how money actually works in the real economy (many of you will know this). The It’s a Wonderful Life version of money is nonsense. Money isn’t a finite resource where you have to find it and put it together in a big lump if you want to lend it to someone (as per Bedford Falls…).
That world ended a good while ago. Now money is just a complex system of IOUs underpinned by a central bank which is able to print money. When someone gets a bank loan, the money that appears in their account literally comes from nowhere. It is not money someone else already had which they are giving to you, it is completely new money.
But how can all the banks create new money all the time without hyper inflation? Because the money is destroyed again. As the person who took out the loan repays it, the bank doesn’t keep the money, it just reduces that notional IOU which was created in the first place. The bank only keeps the interest.
And only a fraction of the money which is lent out is kept as emergency reserves in case anything goes wrong. That is what is known as fractional reserve banking – banks only keep a fraction of the reserves needed to actually bail out loans.
Money isn’t a thing that circulates. It’s much more accurate to think of it as something which is created and destroyed, and that it is created and destroyed in a balance which keeps the money system stable, liquidity solid but not too high (enough money to go round, but not too much) and inflation under control.
These are literally people who are using the buying and selling of bonds to punish governments for not doing what the rich person (or institution) wants
Get the idea? Great. So how do bond markets work? It is not at all dissimilar. An investor buys a bond from the government. This is basically an IOU. That is known as ‘the principal’. Generally, no-one is actually going to spend the principal because you have to give that all back in one go at the end of the agreement period (or ‘when the bond matures’).
So what you do is stick it in your foreign currency reserves where you keep it as an asset. This is ideally left alone for the whole time it is there but can be used in all the normal ways a foreign currency reserve can be used if need be. It just sits there.
But where is the money to pay the bills the government borrowed the money to pay? If it’s stuck in the foreign currency reserve, who is paying nurses’ wages? The answer is the central bank. It creates money equal to the sum borrowed and as the principal sits in the currency reserve doing nothing it is the created money that actually circulates in the system.
And if money is created it must be destroyed again, and it is. Interest payments and tax are both ways to destroy money. That’s what happens. The new money created disappears over time and by the time the principal is returned to the bond market it has all gone again. The loan is repaid, the cash injection it represented has disappeared.
All that happened is that future wealth was pulled forward in time by borrowing it before it was earned. The system stayed in equilibrium over the course of the agreement. That’s how government can borrow money and not set inflation racing.
OK, as long as you accept that that is all greatly simplified, let me ask you a question – what is the point of the principal? It never at any point goes anywhere near the actual domestic economy and it doesn’t really go anywhere else either. It literally just sits there. It’s not even really insurance because you’ve sort of duplicated the money and that is already circulating.
Think for a second; what if you did all of that but without the bond sale? What would be different? If government had just borrowed the money directly from the central bank, the bank had created the money and then over the course of the loan the money was destroyed again, what would actually be any different?
Technically nothing. The argument is that the bond markets bring discipline, prevent governments from irresponsible borrowing they can’t afford by assessing the trustworthiness of the nation at that particularly moment and setting borrowing rates accordingly. But that’s notional. As we saw with the Andy Burnham instance, bond markets can charge you higher interest at a whim.
What they are doing is not disciplining you but looking after their own interests. That is what is meant by ‘bond vigilante’. These are literally people who are using the buying and selling of bonds to punish governments for not doing what the rich person (or institution) wants.
The UK’s debt didn’t get bigger when Burnham spoke, and our economy didn’t change. The bond markets just wanted him to shut up and not blow the whistle on this whole scam so they could keep controlling democracies around the world.
The world is being turned into a billionaire-run hell-hole and we need to be able to escape them
So this is my fairly simple proposal; an independent Scotland should create a constitutional bar on bond issue to overseas investors. There is no need. The rule should simply be that on an annual basis, government borrows directly from the central bank. The bank does exactly what it currently does but without the principal being involved.
The argument against this is ‘market discipline’ and moral hazard. This is what is going on with Trump and the Federal Reserve (the US central bank). He wants them to goose the economy by cutting interests rates and he’s not really bothered that inflation is climbing in the US and this will come to harm consumers as much as help them. But he doesn’t care. He is a short-term kind of guy.
So how do you stop governments from being irresponsible? The answer is central bank independence. This is a thorny subject. I’ve been tending towards not having central bank independence of late precisely because independent central banks are unfortunately too much like bond markets – they discipline government all right but they do it in the interests of money, not citizens.
However, you can’t let politicians set their own interest rates. Well, actually, I favour returning interest rate setting to government, but most certainly not their own interest rate, the rate at which they borrow. So I’d have an independent panel at Scotland’s central bank which set the rate at which government could borrow.
That would create the discipline. There is so much that tumbles out from this. For example, if market conditions are right, it is perfectly possible to destroy debt too. You can destroy money through tax and interest, but you can destroy debt by writing it off (which is a little bit like a cash injection into the economy).
It stimulates the economy by decreasing debt, not increasing it. That’s better for the nation because its debts fall. And if you haven’t registered, all those interest payments become public money. Rather than bond investors making all the profit, citizens do. You don’t want that money going straight to government (or it’s not interest…), but it can be used for other purposes.
Perhaps it could be part of a Citizens' Income. It could be used to purchase foreign currency and build up the currency reserves. It could be given to the Scottish National Investment Bank as reserve capital. In fact, I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I can see no reason on earth why the Investment Bank shouldn’t capitalise in the same way as government – borrow from the central bank.
The assumption is that if SNIB was a proper bank it would issue bonds and use the capital as reserves to underpin its loans. But for exactly the same reason as above, that is an optional process. If it was borrowed from the central bank the result would be more or less identical.
Those two steps – secure, domestic government borrowing at interests rates that suit the Scottish economy, not the global financiers, and a capitalised major investment bank to ensure that the business sector can always access capital – can be added to a national, mutual banking network that is pure savings and loan and has no speculative wing.
That would create a Scottish monetary system which did everything the existing monetary system does and would do it in more or less the same way, but using sovereign debt and domestic markets instead of foreign capital and privatised banks operating in global markets. It would make Scotland secure.
We need to opt out of a lot of the post-1990 architecture of global finance, capital and digital infrastructure. That is my dominant thinking at the moment. The world is being turned into a billionaire-run hell-hole and we need to be able to escape them. There is no normal any more. It’s becoming a fight for survival.
It is no longer possible to beat them at their own game. We need a new game. Thankfully, when it comes to financing government, the solution isn't really tricky at all.
Source: Escaping the bonds of bonds
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] This won...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 14, 2025, 12:26 AMThere are usually three party conferences going on at once – in the same venue. There is a conference which is about telling the public a story. In the same place and quite separately there is a conference which is about trying to control your party membership. And then there is a conference for the courtiers of the media.
The first conference is about soundbites, the leaders’ speech and ‘vibes’. The second conference is about suppressing debate and trying to buy off the grass roots – quietly. The third conference is about trying to persuade the hack pack that you are in control and everything that happened was what you wanted to happen.
Strangely, it seems that the SNP’s weekend bash is going to be a unified affair, a single conference with a single purpose. The only purpose of the conference is a wrestle between making it go wrong and making it not go wrong. Everything is geared up to that end.
I don’t think John Swinney has a message he wants the public to hear which he can deliver at this conference. He wants to say ‘stop Reform’, but he (probably) knows that this will set his members on edge. They’re tired of the party campaigning against things simply to secure power and riches.
And there really isn’t any difference between trying to control the members and what he wants the journalists to take away from this conference. He is throwing his very inconsiderable all at this single task.
Pretend you like me. Pretend we’re unified. That’s it.
It is very perilous for Swinney this conference. He’s going to get away with it for the single reason that there is an approaching election and my guess is that the conference delegates will be just about compliant enough for the sole reason of not wanting to harm the party’s electoral prospects.
But they really, really aren’t happy. This unhappiness is both tangible and intangible. It has a focal point in the independence strategy and a number of ancillary real issues the membership isn’t chuffed at (no-one is impressed with Swinney’s domestic policy agenda – or rather his lack of one).
The party membership really hasn’t warmed to Swinney as a leader. They like him as a man but he was genuinely unpopular as leader last time and no-one wanted him back as one this time. There was a bit of hush when he undertook his power grab because people were so, so unsettled by Humza Yousaf’s relentless chaos.
The SNP’s voters are not going anywhere else, but that includes the polling station and it is that which has been losing Swinney significant electoral position
But that hush has drifted into ever-present mumbling and grumbling. That is really all driven by what everyone now calls ‘vibes’. You can come up with all the rationalisations you like for what the party isn’t happy with and why they’re not happy, but in truth it is mainly about the feeling that this is a weak, characterless, uninspiring administration of technocrats.
Literally no-one in the SNP was saying ‘I wish we were more boring, more predictable, utterly dull and completely centrist’, yet such is party centralisation that that is what they got. There isn’t and never has been anything you’d call a ‘Swinney faction’ in the SNP. Honestly, in as far as he has such a thing it consists of Stephen Noon, Colin McAllister and Stephen Gethins.
I don’t want to be gratuitously unkind but that is like an insomnia cure. Think of the concept of ‘inspiring, uplifting and motivating’ and now think of exactly the opposite and you’re in the right territory.
SNP members see themselves as an insurgency, not a church fete, not a provincial accountancy firm, not a lunchtime nap after Bargain Hunt. The membership wants passion and what it’s being offered is perfunctory missionary position in the dark listening to Kenny G on an old CD player.
The problem they have is that ‘sorting your vibes’ is all good and well if you’re talking about sprucing up your wardrobe or adding a pop of colour to your living room. Sorting the vibes of a political party is a tricky business. You can’t turn the same people into different people and no-one at the top of the SNP is what you’d call ‘vibe heavy’.
So they’re unhappy, but Swinney will get away with it because of the upcoming election. And once he gets this conference out of the way it’ll be onto what he’s really trying to do here. Forget the polls for a second which everyone who knows much about it warn me are misleading. Whether Swinney can govern or not is not a done deal.
The idea he’s going to get an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament is a bit silly but he’ll undoubtedly lead the biggest party. The question is, between these limits, whether he can govern, and that basically means can he get within one other political party’s worth of votes for a majority. If you can form a majority with a single party then it is perfectly easy to govern (which has been happening since devolution).
But if you need two other parties to form a majority? That is a very tall ask. It is not an easy thing to do at all. Swinney (by all accounts I’ve heard) wants to do a deal with the Lib Dems because he himself is a conservative who isn’t going to be happy compromising to Ross Greer. So he has to get close enough that the number of seats he falls short is less than the total of seats held by the Lib Dems.
I amn’t going to go into this here but the more pertinent factor in deciding whether that is the case is not polling but motivation. If Swinney’s voters all turn out, he will be OK. But that is not what has been happening since he took power. The SNP has really struggled to get its voters out because they’re tired of the party and largely disappointed by it.
They’re not going anywhere else, but that includes the polling station and it is that which has been losing Swinney significant electoral position. The best bet is that this will happen again, so it is a question of to what extent it happens.
The party is angry and disillusioned, but it is not suicidal and it will pull its punches this year
And that is the reason the SNP has started talking about independence at all. It could probably have skipped an independence debate at this party conference if they hadn’t put it on the agenda. But the leadership is in a desperate ‘core voter’ race and so they will say independence again and again and again and hope its ambient power gets people off their sofa.
Of course, I’ll bet you money that the election campaign turns out to be a ‘stop Reform’ campaign, but they need to goose their core vote first. Hence all the indy stuff. And yes, it has slightly backfired because what Swinney/Noon mean by independence and a strategy for getting it and what the membership mean is miles apart.
Which means that Swinney’s core vote strategy turned into a ‘conference from hell’ strategy. You won’t go far without hearing one of Swinney’s team telling anyone who will listen that this is a pre-election conference and unity is essential.
My feeling is that this will indeed work. The party is angry and disillusioned, but it is not suicidal and it will pull its punches this year. It won’t be plain sailing and I’m rather guessing they’ll lose on the indy debate, but discontent will be quarantined into that debate and won’t spill over into the wider conference.
Here is my guess though; the price of it will be a horror show next year. I don’t think the SNP are going to do as well in the election as the most positive polls suggest. This looks to me more like 2017 than 2019. The SNP will comfortably be the bigger party but I don’t think it is going to find governing all that easy.
And I suspect it will create some kind of alliance with the Lib Dems and I think that is going to provoke conference even further. I’d put money on it that you will barely hear the words ‘independence’ slip from the First Minster’s mouth from June next year onwards.
Which means that the party is most likely to explode not this year but next. And that is just fine for Team Swinney. It is driven by one thing; Swinney’s desperate desire to rewrite the history book. He was going to go down as a failure, a nice man out of his depth who was given a shot at leadership and blew it. He wants to erase that history and will do anything in pursuit of that end.
So yes, I think this will be a single-purpose conference and it’s purpose will be to control the membership and be seen to control the membership. By Monday I expect the journalists will be writing that it went pretty well for him and everyone will sail on quite pleased with themselves.
But it will solve nothing and it will do not more than delay the reckoning. Either way, you can’t be that bad and that dull and not face a reckoning. It is coming.
Source: This won't be the SNP's shitshow conference
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Schrödin...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 13, 2025, 11:53 PMI can be very critical of John Swinney, but in my very angriest moments I couldn’t possible come up with any case whatsoever that John Swinney is a threat to Scottish Jews. In fact, as a deeply religious man with strong ecumenical views, I can’t think of a First Minister less threatening to the Jewish community.
So booing him after a friendly speech? There is no justification at all based on anything he has done or not done for Scottish Jews. If this had been the Orange Order they’d have had a point, but not Scotland’s Jewish churches. There is no credible case to be made against the First Minister.
I mean, one could construct some loose argument that his criticism of Israel’s military assault on Gaza or referring to it as a genocide is harmful to the interests of a nation state with which many Jews feel an affinity, but that would be expressly and directly antisemitic, no?
The International Holocaust Remembrance Committee’s (highly controversial) definition of antisemitism is clear on this. It places "Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel" high up on its list of the more direct, less tangential forms of linguistic antisemitism.
So it should be. It is clearly utterly wrong to hold someone accountable for someone else’s actions simply because they share the same religion. It is patently wrong, clearly unfair, explicitly a hostile act of bullying. That’s why I opposed it when most of Britain’s politicians were calling on Muslim leaders in Britain to decry the actions of ISIS.
But it has to work both ways round, right? It can’t be offensive if you behave as if every Jew must answer for Israel, so Israel and Jews are separate issues. That is clean and honest and fair. So there is absolutely no read-back from criticism of Israel in relation to Jewish communities. There is no link. We have just established that point.
Jewish people must be free from our censorious tendencies to want ‘someone’ to answer for what Israel has done. In turn, we must be free from any bad faith suggestions that criticising or taking diplomatic action against a foreign nation state has something or other to do with their safety. It does not.
And of course I twiddled with that sentence a bit to find a non-clumsy way to say ‘some Jews’ before deciding not to bother because when they refer to the ‘Jewish community’ or ‘Scottish Jews’ they never specify ‘some’. Many, many British Jews are highly critical of Israel.
They have every right to be and a genocide is a genocide whether you have ‘an affinity’ with the nation carrying out the genocide or not. If you see calling a genocide a genocide as a threat to you, that speaks only of you, not of those making the allegation.
If you see calling a genocide a genocide as a threat to you, that speaks only of you, not of the allegation
Some of what has happened in recent days is not only clearly wrong, it is pretty clearly racist. The increasingly abhorrent Shabana Mahmood telling us what is and isn’t British is far right stuff. Do we really want to get into government ministers deciding what is and isn’t British? Good luck with that.
But setting aside her Tommy Robinson impression, Starmer is little better. Let me think…. When did Keir Starmer ask a Jewish or Israeli group at any point ever to "respect the grief" of Palestinians? His relationship with pro-genocide lobbyists has only grown stronger. His every word drips clear Islamophobia (somehow I don’t think the ‘strangers’ in his ‘nation of strangers’ speech were Jewish).
His team openly brief journalists that getting rid of some Muslim Labour councillors was ‘shaking of the fleas‘. Jeremy Corbyn would have been jailed for referring to Jews leaving Labour as ‘shaking of the fleas’. Starmer clearly does not value the lives of Palestinians and is clearly contemptuous towards Muslims. We’ve seen it again and again. But this isn’t mentioned.
So little is really mentioned. The main establishment Jewish religious organisations (with which many if not most British Jews do not align with) are part religion, part lobbyist for a foreign power. They use their privileged position as a church, a position which enjoys many more protections than a general non-governmental body, to advocate for a foreign nation state and they do it fairly openly.
I can’t think of another church which spends anything like as much time trying to dictate this nation’s foreign policy, or one where it would be tolerated. Yet, like Schrödinger’s moggy, they can switch roles at will. ‘You can’t touch me, I’m a church’ is interspersed with ‘you must do as I say because I’m not really a church but the unified representation of an entire race’.
Personally I think anyone extensively and regularly lobbying for any foreign entity should register. I’m pretty sure no-one would tolerate Britain’s Russian Orthodox Church intervening on sanctions on Russia in the same way.
Clearly, of course people should be free to campaign for the interests of any entity they wish, but those on the other side must surely be granted the opportunity to highlight the fact it is happening. It cannot be right to say ‘I’ll lobby for Israel but if you accuse me of it you will be deemed antisemitic’.
What is most ludicrous in all of this is the claim that ‘antisemitism has been allowed to fester’. This seems to be to be one of the most surreal statements I can think of. Comfortably the most extensive political discourse on religious or racial discrimination has been related to antisemitism. The most incredibly restrictive code of practice on antisemitism (the IHRC one) has been widely implemented.
No other group has anything like the extent and detail of codified protection, certainly not that I can think of. The Community Security Trust is something like a private police force which provides additional protection at Jewish places of worship and similar. It is funded to the tune of £18 million by the public purse. To suggest this is ‘allowing’ antisemitism is unsustainable. No-one is ‘allowing’ antisemitic behaviours or attacks in any way whatsoever.
Yet it is this ‘private police force’ which is given the power to create its own evidence. It is hardly a neutral body in collecting statistics. You would never know that in the last two years attacks on Jewish property have fallen 19 per cent or that assaults have decreased by 26 per cent.
Last year there were 201 incidents classified as assault, but only one that was ‘serious’. There were 157 attacks on property. There were 250 threats, a decrease of 20 per cent. Mass produced antisemitic literature (don’t know what they include in this category) occurred 27 times.
Jewish people must be able to live in Britain free from threat, free from harm, free from prejudice, free from discriminatory behaviour.
Add all that up (allowing for double counting) and it doesn’t account for much of the 3,528 incidents of antisemitism reported by the CST. On the other hand, this ‘surge’ in antisemitism included 1,844 incidents classified as ‘antisemitic’ which were specifically about comments over Isreal’s actions in Gaza. Another 1,533 were use of the word ‘Zionism’.
These may be uncomfortable for British Jews but it does not imperil their safety and since even the CST accepts that these are explicitly interpretative, it is perfectly reason that there could be alternative interpretations. And (yet again), 2024 is the last year with complete figures and it is a sharp 18 per cent decrease since 2023 (although that year was a high).
I can only write any of this because I have been relentlessly anti-violence. There is no instance anyone will ever find of me accepting or condoning any kind of violence. I fundamentally oppose violence as a tool. I have also, throughout my life, consistently stood up for any persecuted minority and I always will.
Last year there were six criminal cases with convictions for actions related to antisemitism. In the majority it was far right ideology which was the source and only one was islamic related. There was one violent act and those were teenagers. There were two acts of violence against property. All are to be condemned. All are wrong. And all were successfully policed and prosecuted.
I have challenged people before when they have used antisemitic language or framing around me. For what it’s worth, I am not aware that I actually know an ‘antisemite’ if that means a consistently held discriminatory ideological view, but I’ve known people to stray into antisemitic language when making an argument or through lazy cultural association. We must never, ever turn our eyes away from prejudice. Any prejudice.
Jewish people must be able to live in Britain free from threat, free from harm, free from prejudice, free from discriminatory behaviour. But free from fear? I know people whose skin is not white who were utterly, utterly petrified by the Unite the Kingdom rally. Should it have been banned based on their fear?
I wish I could reply ‘yes’, but I can’t, because no law was broken in the organisation of that march and we must protect our freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of protest with all the vigour we have. That will mean annoying, offending, and even scaring other people. And that is the price of liberty.
The rhetoric from the UK Government is pretty shocking, but we’ve grown used to it ever since the party was captured by a right-wing faction. If anything has surprised you since Starmer’s ‘fine to starve Palestinian babies‘ comments then you have more benefit of the doubt to bestow than me. But John Swinney? Really?
Antisemitism is real and awful and we must be vigilant. But if you are using unsupportable claims about antisemitism to reduce civil liberties and protect an abhorrent regime far away, it seems to me to be you who is harming your religion, not those calling for an end to a genocide.
Source: Schrödinger's lobbyist
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] What abo...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 13, 2025, 10:54 PMEverything is now precision air power. No, hold on, it’s all about tank battles. Wait a minute, where are the tanks? This is trench warfare. Oh no, drones can get over trenches – this is now drone warfare. We need a missile defence shield. Except that doesn’t work against drones. We’ll need to invent space lasers.
And that, dear reader, is precisely four years of western military debate. From the start of the Ukraine war until now, the military has basically had no idea what was going on, much in the same way it didn’t understand what was happening with militia-based gurrilla warfare in the Middle East during the war on terror.
It is time we stopped pretending otherwise; no-one wins an arms race. If one great power finds a new technology, the next will copy it. If one administration uses overwhelming violence, another group of insurgents will find a way round it.
We need a new theory of peace. We always see peace through the lens of the military and the bomb makers. Our collective model of peace isn’t really rules-based at all, it is deterrent-based. We still frame our future as a ‘balance of terror’ on the belief that if everyone is permanently held over a precipice of destruction, we’ll all behave sensibly.
If ever there was a theory that has failed, surely it is deterrence. It has stoped superpowers from facing off directly with each other, but it has done next to nothing to slow down the flood of global military violence. We can’t keep going like this if we need to survive. We need a new model of peace.
This is one aspect of what I’ve been writing about all year. We are locked into a series of narrow ideological assumptions about how things work and how you can use the tools that are there. This is mainly a western thing, and the West is in freefall.
Our economic model clearly doesn’t work now. Our welfare model is in jeopardy. Our democratic model seems under attack everywhere – it is easy to see this as ‘just Trump and Putin’, but we now seldom go a week without the Scottish Government or a public agency being pulled up for breaking transparency laws. Our trade model is a mess. And our model of peace and coexistence is now lying under rubble. None of this is working.
So on peace, if we can’t win through an arms race, how do we win? I mean all of us. The anwer has to begin with the times we achieved this before. It was all about negotiating between hostile partners. It worked. Both the fall of the oppressive Soviet Union and the period of comparative peace that resulted were the outcome of direct negotiations, not military build-up.
The problem is that things have got so bad the great powers can’t even talk to each other properly and those on each side are not really trying to achieve peace through talks but rather domination. Certainly Trump, Netenyahu and Putin have a vision which you wouldn’t call peace.
And ironically it is the authoritarian Chinese who are least in favour of an unstable militarised world but are being shut out by Europe and the US, sending them towards Russia. None of this really makes any sense until you remember who is leading the western world now.
If all you use is a stick and if you offer no carrot, people just get bruised and angry
So what on earth can we even negotiating over? It isn’t enough simply to seek to excise things we don’t like through negotiation, great as some weapons restraint from international diplomacy would be. Just like the backlash against net zero, if an agenda is only restrictive without any give-back, you can’t ask people to feel good about it.
Or, to put it another way, if all you use is a stick and if you offer no carrot, people just get bruised and angry. We need an awful lot more carrot in our international engagement now. The problem is that the mismatch between what we all think a carrot actually is at this point. The thing Europe wants and the thing Putin wants are currently in different dimensions.
Which is why I want to bring in one of my least favouite phrase concepts – prefiguration. Prefiguration is important. It simply means talking about the version of the future you actually want to see as a means of establishing its possibility in people’s minds.
Personally I hate the word. It is yet another centre-left pointy-headed jargon term it feels embarrasing to say out loud outside pointy-headed centre-left circles. But moreover, the centre left has constantly substituted action for loose vision. It prefigures a (slightly) better future in part because that reduces the pressure to actually do anything.
And yet that is what I have been writing about a lot recently. When I say ‘we need more utopian thinking‘ or ‘we need to stop assuming the current way of doing things makes sense‘, what I have really been saying is that we’re so lost up a blind alley that we need to imagine there is a different alley altogether before we have any chance of getting there.
As I have been pointing out, it is hard to do this because one of the precepts of contemporary politics is that utopia is for fools and that talking about it is embarrassing. This is part of the trap in which we find ourselves.
When it comes to global affairs though, our stupidity is multiplied. The liberal establishment find utopia silly but see dystopia in every foe. To imagine a foe as not a foe on any terms other than their surrender is anathema to a liberal tradition which has come to benefit from an external enemy every bit as much as domestic nationalism has.
This makes it feel strange to say, but the only meaningful future for Europe is an alliance with Russia. There is no version of our future which is pleasant for as long as half of our continent is pointing guns at the other half. This ought to be clear enough. We need an accord.
And yet the path from here to there is almost impossible to see. I doubt there is any negotiation with Putin which would make sense for either side right now. Putin is where he wants to be and the EU (with Britain) can’t commit to anything because we are still desperately trying to pacify an out-of-control United States.
If there is one thing that we know right now it’s that change can come disorientatingly quickly
So let’s take a step back for a second. Might we at least start to imagine a future without a specific timescale, a future without anyone’s surrender (those never work because the humiliated refuse to stay humiliated so it all kicks off again), a future we might actually want to live with? Let me take a shot.
We need to be on the same page on security on one continent. The only way we can do that is throuh a proper continent-wide coalition. It needs to include Russia. It may also need to include Turkey. It would take over European security assurance and eventually replace Nato as the means of collective defence for Europe.
But it can’t just be a guns and bombs treaty. We need to find a space where our nations can converge on some kind of agreed terms of behaviour and attitudes. We need to have some form of protected democracy. It doesn’t need to come at the expense of any nation, but it must mean something.
It needs to offer everyone some kind of economic gain, but it cannot be predatory. We cannot be eyeing each other trying to work out how to screw each other over. It has to be give and take. It needs to be an inspiring model.
We cannot have a continent that is wholly reliant on another. We need different social architecture for our different society. We need a European tech platform. Ideally it would be interoperable with other people’s tech platforms and we don’t end up in a post-Babel tech world. But it is mad for a continent like Europe not to be self-reliant on the fundamentals of our way of life.
This has great opportunities for all. We need to create a new kind of economy that works for everyone without climate change, but we need to get there without anyone being punished. It is possible. We want to trade as self-sufficiently across this continent as we can. We want to take a real, continent-wide approach to migration.
As people flee parts of the world which the climate is making uninhabitable, at the same time Siberia and the far north will become constantly more habitable. There are threats for all in this but also enormous opportunities. Resettling new territory – if we do it properly, together – could be by far our best hope to manage the accelerating flow of people.
And then we can embed this all in a global system that doesn’t need to pit one against the other. If we use resources better it doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game.
No, none of this is realistic just now. But we are perfectly capable of making it possible. The first step is to offer a vision and a pathway for reformers in Russia which offers the people of Russia a vision and a hope that can work. It is no justification of Putin to accept that we have continually taken a hostile stance towards the people of Russia.
So progress would be contingent on there being very real reform. But Putin isn’t going to be there forever and it would be really stupid to wait until he goes before thinking about this or to expect that the outcome will be Russia’s surrender to the EU.
To this very day all the liberal commentator class can do is out-compete each other in their reverse virtue-signalling over how much they hate Putin. But if your only tool is hate, every solution is violence. That is why all anyone is talking about is cutting welfare spending to buy more bombs.
Someone has to be wiser than this. There is a genuinely peaceful future there for the taking on this continent. We’re not close to it, but we must not assume we’re many decades away. If there is one thing that we know right now it’s that change can come disorientatingly quickly.
Peace through deterrance has failed abysmally. In that context, peace through hope and good will is nothing like as crazy as it sounds in 2025.
Source: What about some peace through hope?
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] The Scot...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 13, 2025, 10:23 PMI 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