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Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Scotland...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 11, 2026, 12:07 AMIn the last article I wrote for the National I rejected a de facto referendum as a route to independence. A number of people have asked me why, but to answer that it will be helpful if we start right back at the beginning, with a very basic question; what is independence?
The point of the question is not to have us flailing around to find a precise definition but to highlight the fact that there isn’t a precise definition.
Independence is really just the ability to do things – control your own territory, enter into legally binding contracts, engage with other nation states on an equal legal footing, join international bodies and treaties and so on.
The reason you are able to do these things is because other nations agree to recognise that you have the right to do these things. You can’t force them, they have to agree. In almost all practical terms, independence is really about international recognition.
There is a basic sort of measure of international recognition – membership of the United Nations. To join the UN you must secure the agreement of two thirds of the 193 member states. That’s when you know you’re independent.
But recognition is far from inevitable – Kosovo governs its own territory but Serbia continues to claim territorial rights. In total 111 countries individually recognise Kosovo as independent, but because that is below the two thirds threshold, Kosovo isn’t a UN member, can’t join the World Trade Organisation, can’t sign (or benefit from) international treaties…
Scotland cannot begin to consider being stuck in the Kosovo situation because our economy is too advanced. There is no half-independence for us, no bluffing it, no work-around. Which leaves one major question – how do we get other nation states to recognise us?
In asking this question it is important to put away naïve sentiment; it doesn’t matter how much everyone ‘loves’ Scotland, they will all want to see certain conditions met before they embrace us, and by far the biggest of those is that we are entering the world in a state of agreement with the nation state from which we are departing.
If the rest of the UK has agreed to recognise us, the rest of the world will too. It is possible in theory to gain recognition even if the UK held out, but it would be a long, torturous process during which time we’d be stuck in the Kosovo situation, with the harm that would do to our economy.
I know many of you don’t want to hear this, but you need to – Scottish independence means successfully negotiating a recognition agreement with the rest of the UK
That is the question that should be asked of every proposed ‘path to independence’ – how and where on this path do we achieve full international recognition? If there is no convincing answer, then it isn’t a path at all.
I know many of you don’t want to hear this, but you need to – Scottish independence means successfully negotiating a recognition agreement with the rest of the UK. You can make speeches or fire off furious social media posts about sovereignty or democracy all you want, in your heart I’m sure you know that the world runs on realpolitik.
If you doubt this for a second, note this; there are only two countries which escaped the British Empire without Britain’s agreement. One fought and won a war of independence (the US) and the other declared unilateral independence but wasn’t recognized by the rest of the world for a long 15 years (Rhodesia).
When you focus your mind on this – that as a modern civic nation in an interconnected modern world we need to begin our independence with a recognition agreement from the UK – things become clearer.
The question then becomes ‘how do we get London to the negotiating table?’. If you focus on that, a few things should start to become clear. It is why I am warning you that tricks, proxies and shortcuts won’t work.
Democracy isn’t a science but a collective agreement – it works because (almost) everyone agrees to the rules of how it works in advance. If different parties start to play by different rules, it starts to break down.
For example, a referendum is an agreement signed by both sides which states they will abide by the result. It’s strength is this agreement, this binding commitment. Take that away and it is just an opinion poll. You cannot make another party agree to recognise the outcome of something against their will.
In fact, if you are in two minds on whether I’m right about this, we have a live example. When Nigel Farage got caught in the sleaze scandal of pocketing millions from a rich pal, he decided to run a referendum on his popularity by resigning his seat and forcing a by-election.
The theory was simple; he’d run a referendum on how much the people love him and how much they hate the establishment. But that isn’t what happened. The others refused to play along with him and so he spent the summer arguing with a bin. You don’t get to alter democracy unilaterally just because you want to.
Realpolitik operates in domestic politics just like it does in geopolitics. If you are granted power by law, you can use it at will. But if you want to get elected again, you can’t use it in ways that are wildly unpopular. If you want to talk about a certain subject, you won’t be able to if you are sinking in a crisis over another subject. And so on.
We will win because we build a position of strength, not because we find a way to redefine a no-score draw as a victory
This is how politics works. Scotland does not have the legal power to hold a referendum and it is unlikely that it can effectively bypass that reality and use a proxy, because that is only soft power, and unless you pull a rabbit out of the hat, it is very soft power.
(Incidentally, I am also very sceptical that we can get every single member of the potentially independence-supporting public to play along either. Some will be pissed off with the SNP. Some will be annoyed about education policy, or the state of the roads, or any other subject.
If even some of those people don’t act like it is a referendum and instead vote on a policy basis, our hand gets weaker and weaker.)
As I pointed out in my last article, you know perfectly well that the only thing which can make someone in power do what they don’t want to do is sustained political pressure. In our case it is really, really clear to see what that means.
If you want to be independent, the people have to support it. If a strong majority of Scotland wants to be independent and London continues to block it, then and only then does the political pressure rise high enough that it starts to force their hand.
At that point we can start talking about de facto referendums or unilateral declarations or delegations to the UN or mass protest as negotiating tactics from a position of strength – but as means of skipping the process of building strength? Forget it.
Now from past experience, me making this point usually results in another series of questions – how do we change their minds?, what is stopping them?, what about the hostile media environment?, what do we do once we get sustained support? And many more along the same lines.
But I’m nearly at my word limit so all I can say is that we got our parliament back because the Constitutional Convention spent five or six years doing the hard work of producing credible, agreed, detailed plans about what we were going to do, spoke to the public about their benefits and got 74 per cent support. Might I suggest there is a lesson for us in there somewhere.
But I’d want to leave you without one final point – the fact that we need an agreement from the rest of the UK does not ‘leave all the power in their hands’. Because realpolitik comes for us all eventually, and that also means the Brits. They’ve lost this fight many times in the past and they will lose it again at our hands.
When they do, when we show independence is the settled will of the Scottish people, they will have nowhere to hide and they will not be able to pass a TV camera without being asked about the democratic injustice of it. We will win and we are perfectly capable of outwitting them in negotiations.
But we will win because we build a position of strength, not because we find a way to redefine a no-score draw as a victory. The sooner we stop looking for tricks and start building real strength through a solid, defensible case and an enthused and engaged public, the sooner we win.
Everything else is a distraction.
Source: Scotland will be independent but not through electoral tricks
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Bad econ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 10, 2026, 11:26 PMOh, here we go again… Of all the bad economics out there, there are few concepts that get more attention with less consistent thought about it than the mythical ‘Laffer Curve’. It’s back this week, and the sight of the Laffer Curve rearing its head is never a good sign.
Scotland is awash with the Laffer Curve right now because the Scottish Government put a tax rate up and it seems to have raised less money, apparently proving not only that Laffer was right but that we now know Scotland’s ‘perfect tax rate’. Both are nonsense so allow me to just roll my eyes and explain some stuff.
You have probably heard of the Laffer Curve. That is in large part because the idea is so simple/stupid it is easy to remember, and because it is incredibly handy for the low tax, pro-oligarchy brigade. But it isn’t what others seem to think it is and it’s not even an original idea, having been discussed by a 14th century Islamic Scholar and Adam Smith long before the fateful night concerned.
That night saw right-wing economist Arthur Laffer having dinner with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in Washington. Chatting about tax, Laffer made a point that is really so facile it is hard to believe the traction it has gained. He said ‘if you tax someone zero per cent, you won’t raise any money, but if you tax them 100 per cent there is no point in them working so you won’t raise any money either’. He literally drew this on the back of a napkin to make his point.
Yet we know you can raise tax because it’s been happening for millennia, which seems to lead to an inescapable conclusion – if the two ends of this imaginary graph (zero and 100) return a value of zero but points between them return not-zero values, they must form a curve. And if there is a curve, there must be a highest point on the curve. That point is the ‘perfect tax rate’.
Where to begin with this? First of all, the current use of this concept and its original meaning are pretty far apart. Neither Ibn Khaldun nor Adam Smith were thinking about the tax avoidance industry in Edinburgh or London but rather of incentives or disincentives to work. It is this which ‘tax-behavioural relationship’ theory began.
Obviously if I tax you zero it raises zero. But if I tax you at 20 per cent it does raise money, and if you can earn more by working more hours, then each extra hour worked will pay you another 80 per cent of what you earn.
Now let’s ramp it up a bit; let’s imagine you’re taxing at say 40 per cent and you’re working a seven hour day. You pay 60 per cent tax on your working hours, but you are offered overtime. Now you have the chance to work an extra hour – but you only get 60 per cent of the wage. Is it worth it? Possibly.
But what if I tax you 60 per cent and you get 40. Is it still worth working an extra hour? What if it was 80-20? By this point I think I can safely say that few of us are voluntarily going to work an extra hour for 20 per cent of the hourly pay. So no, we don’t choose to do that extra hour.
Now imagine that you can work out precisely the number at which the wage incentive to work tips over into the tax disincentive to work. For the sake of argument let’s say its 55 per cent. That means that if I tax you at 54 per cent you’ll do overtime and so I’ll raise more money. If I tax you 50 per cent you’ll still do the overtime but I’ll raise less money, but if I tax you 56 per cent you won’t do the extra hours and the amount I raise goes down again.
That’s it; that’s the original theory that became the Laffer Curve, and as a conceptual model for understanding the relationships between tax, pay and work incentives, that’s fine. It’s just not really true, for loads of reasons.
t’s not that we have’t learned anything, it’s that we’ve learned something so facile it is hard to see why we’re bother learning it
First of all, mostly the tax avoiders don’t exist in this kind of universe. People who pay tax accountants are not generally on hourly wages or reliant on overtime. People who work overtime which is paid by the hour do not have tax accountants. The theory doesn’t describe the modern world. People are working three part-time minimum wage jobs to survive; being able to eat is a stronger incentive than tax is a disincentive.
And it definitely doesn’t describe what is happening in Scotland. Because if we’ve lost income from putting up a top band of income tax then its not because they have reduced their working hours and therefore taken a pay cut, it’s because they’re using tax avoidance techniques. More importantly, they’re using tax avoidance techniques where are not available to the rest of us.
Let’s take another theoretical example just to help us here. Imagine for a second that Britain’s tax system was designed in such a way that for some reason you pay a zero rate of tax on earnings but only if they are precisely £30,000. That is, if you earn £29,999 or £30.001, you pay full tax on all your earnings, but you pay zero if your salary is exactly £30k.
Now go away and draw me the corresponding Laffer curve. It doesn’t make any sense, does it? Let’s say standard tax rates are 20 per cent; that means for a start that no-one would be interested in a job that pays £35,000 rather than £30,000. To get more income than earning £30,000 you’d have to earn about £40,000 or more.
But now you can charge 80 per cent tax on all salaries over £150,000 and, in the absence of tax avoidance, it still creates an incentive to take the pay because you’ll still take more money home. You don’t have a curve at all any more, you have an all-but random wobbly line. It literally doesn’t make any sense because the premise is daft. If the tax system allows people not to pay tax, behavioural theory doesn't mean anything.
Yet this is the premise we’re arguing about on Scotland’s top tax tier. It’s not that we have’t learned anything, it’s that we’ve learned something so facile it is hard to see why we’re bother learning it; if you allow a group of people to totally avoid tax then they will. Congratulations Arthur, your theory is great at predicting the bleeding obvious.
Now before anyone gets onto me, yes there are other things we could be seeing as effects. The favourite is the ‘well I’m off’ argument – that wealthier people will just leave the country if you tax them. Again, this is one of those facile statements which on the face of it sounds true but can be shown not to be significant.
In the US, if you track where wealthy people live, it is very distinctly not in the states with the lowest tax rates but generally in high tax states. Why? Because it’s a better quality of life, because infrastructure there is much better. Wyoming is perhaps the lowest tax state in the US, but the billionaires haven’t all moved there.
In fact, in the US only about 2.5 per cent of rich people relocate to another state in any given year, making them by far the least mobile group in society. Why? Because when you’re rich you choose the place with the best quality of life and that is seldom in the lowest tax state.
We have actively designed a system that lets the rich avoid tax and then we use a cockamamie theory that is measurably flawed to retrospectively pin the blame for this on income tax rates
Back in Scotland for a second and I’ll show you the point again. In Scotland you pay three per cent more than in England for any taxable income over about £125,000. That means that if you earn £150,000 (placing you waaaaay at the top of the income spectrum in Scotland) you’ll pay about £60 a month more in tax.
So let’s say you can find another job in England at the same pay and where housing costs aren’t higher, emigrating across the border will save you – well, less than the removal van will cost. Oh, unless your kids go to university in which case you’ve just lost all your gains.
I am very much not claiming that there are no incentives effects from tax rates that change behaviour, I’m saying that they are utterly dwarfed by the incentive to use the tax loopholes the system contains. I mean, we’re only talking about income tax here and very rich people don’t bother with wages much these days since it is capital gains that makes them truly rich.
And that is where we get the stupidity. We have actively designed a system that lets the rich avoid tax and then we use a cockamamie theory that is measurably flawed to retrospectively pin the blame for this on income tax rates. It’s all ludicrous. Rich people didn't avoid tax when it was 70 per cent but the tax laws weren't designed to be evaded. They avoid tax precisely as much as we let them.
Because the ‘perfect tax rate’ implied by the Laffer Curve theory has been assessed many times and it falls between about 40 and 75 per cent, with most economists accepting that western societies set tax rates well to the left of the nominal peak of the Laffer Curve. We don’t even follow the theory.
And that’s if you believe in the perfect tax rate. If you have a zero-avoidance system then you literally need to make it substantially cheaper to leave the country to see any effect. Also, I don’t even accept the curve idea in the first place. If I hate red and violet, does that mean all the other colours are spread out along a neat curve which proves the one I like most? And that it's green? You can't just go drawing random curves between two extreme points and calling that science.
So when this week you hear all the right wing ideologues going on about how they’ve been proved right because tax income fell, you might just want to point out that the fact a bucket has a hole in it doesn’t mean buckets don’t work, just that you need to find one without a hole.
Take out all the tax freebies for the very rich, tax capital gains at the same rate as income tax, crack down on low-tax inheritance tricks and tax property and assets fairly and you can set tax at any rate short of that which chases everyone out of the country – which is much higher than you think.
Meanwhile, I’m off to get a napkin so I can draw two dots representing negative infinity and infinity, and then I'll just draw some plausible-looking curve between them. It'll prove that mathematics doesn't work. So hurray me.
Source: Bad economics lead to bad decisions...
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Fighting...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 10, 2026, 10:29 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 10, 2026, 09:09 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 / [Robin McAlpine Blog] We faile...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 10, 2026, 08:37 PMYou cannot use bad thinking to try to understand why your thinking is bad, yet on the economy that is what we do. It really frustrates me – if I have to explain to one more person that no, China isn’t hammering us at manufacturing because of ‘low wages’, I’ll scream.
We forget how deeply embedded the cult of neoliberalism is in our everyday language about the economy. Why is China so much better than us? Under neoliberal doctrine it can only because global capital has allocated resources to the part of the world where wages are lower because if neoliberal doctrine admitted the truth, it would cause a crisis of faith.
So, let me try and explain the real reason China is kicking our ass, why it means that Andy Burnham has zero chance of ‘moving on from neoliberalism’ as he claims he wants to and how that ought to alter the course of economic policy in Britain and Scotland – but won’t.
Let’s start with batteries. I visited a battery test laboratory a couple of years ago and it was fascinating. I won’t go into any details but here is one really important thing you have to understand – batteries are designed with tolerances of a few microns. That is one thousandth of a millimetre.
So if you’ve been imaging large sweatshops full of overworked Chinese women sowing batteries together with old sewing machines, you are at least reflecting the neoliberal argument quite accurately. It is of course utter nonsense.
Battery manufacture is almost all automated. Human labour costs are an infinitesimally small – perhaps amounting to little more than three or four percent of the cost of making a battery. Cut the wages of the battery-makers and you’d barely notice it in the retail price at all.
So why is China so far ahead of us at making batteries? That it is somehow something ‘inferior’ about the people (the subtle implication of the low wage argument) is a comforting fairytale for neoliberalism, but it is absolute garbage.
There are two big reasons why China is so far ahead, and they’re both related. One is that it has vertically integrated the supply chains for batter manufacture. It can get all the raw materials and all the manufactured component parts quickly, easily and cheaply – because of central planning.
The other is simply that China ploughed money into fixed capital assets (factories and so on) at exactly the time that the Western world stopped doing that and instead was directing all its national investment into a housing and dot com bubble.
Once you have built a factory you immediately start learning how to build a better factory. You cannot learn that standing outside someone else’s factory looking in, and you can’t even learn it by taking apart the thing they make to see how they did it. Process learning is crucial, and you can only gain that learning through the process itself.
That is the reality of why China is so far ahead. On batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles, injection moulding, metal tooling, LED manufacture and much more, China invested in productive capacity while we were speculating on financial assets. Our financial assets made our elites rich but brought little value to the rest of the economy.
That is a rough encapsulation of the crisis in Western economics – we can’t do useful things because we spent all our money playing poker
China’s productive capacity enabled a 30-year learning curve during which time they became very, very good at manufacturing things quickly, efficiently, cheaply and to a high standard.
(China will make what you want. If you want crap they will make you crap. Temu sells you cheap crap because apparently you want to buy cheap crap. Apple sells you first rate technology because you want good quality. China makes all of it to order. I hear people say ‘China only makes crap’, but that’s just the West projecting our low standards onto others.)
So why is this about planning and why does that mean Burnham will fail? Because of the varying theories of how capital should be allocated in an economy. In the West we believe that capital should be allocated by the market. This is the theory that only self interest will ‘correctly’ assign investment to purpose.
And it is nonsense. It is only ‘correct’ if you define the task as being ‘find the investment that costs me least of my own money but makes me the most profit in the shortest time possible’ (i.e. debt-fuelled leveraged Western finance). In the longer term, all you end up with is online gambling and Ultra Processed Foods. The operation has been a roaring success but the patient is bleeding out.
The Chinese approach of centrally-directed investment has this entirely different purpose. It is not about making the people who have money more money in the shortest possible timeframe but to develop the overall economy to be strong and useful. China makes incredibly efficient batteries only because it decided to make incredibly efficient batteries.
This is why it really matters how you allocate investment capital in an economy. It’s back to ‘choosing brown bread in a sweetie shop’ – if you permit investors to cream off everyone else’s money through non-productive speculative gambling, they will. It just means no-one will build a factory and no-one knows how to make a battery.
That is a rough encapsulation of the crisis in Western economics – we can’t do useful things because we spent all our money playing poker while China can do useful things because the state stopped people playing poker and forced them to spend it on useful things.
Now I am not advocating for state planning or even state-directed capitalism. It has its problems. For example, while China’s centralised decision-making means it has enormous industrial capacity, it also misread the economy and built far, far too much housing too quickly, leading to a long-standing major economic drain on the country. Central planning is effective but can be inefficient or plain wrong.
But what I am saying is that you can’t make our free market madness achieve what state planning can achieve and there is no bridging that reality. Either capital is free and will be spent on robbing more people or it is directed towards a national purpose. You can’t make a free market invest in a national purpose just because you want it to. You need to make it.
You have to make capital be better than it wants to be if you do not want your society to be eaten away from the inside
This is the Burnham point. I don’t really know if he is sincere about moving on from neoliberalism given how neoliberal much of his policy agenda in Manchester was, but I do buy the fact that he knows we have a fundamental problem with our economy.
Why I think he will fail is that we already see every sign that he will try to huff and puff his way to a post-neoliberal world without addressing the allocation of capital in the economy – so it won’t work. We have already seen this happening with his administration, talking about doing something differently then backing off immediately it gets lobbying kick back.
Burnham wants capital to be allocated to a national mission where Starmer wanted to make the interests of capital the national mission, so there is a difference. But capital won’t do it unless Burnham makes them, and making them will cause pushback so he won’t.
The reason this is so, so important in Scotland is that Scotland has the problem China did when China started more purposefully directing capital to create manufacturing infrastructure – we have very little productive capacity and we do not make anything like enough of what we need to survive.
We treat ourselves like a cookie jar from which the world can take what it wants – we call it inward investment and increasingly I think of it as an utter national betrayal, devised by lawyers and consultants who get rich by selling their country to foreigners on the cheap.
Instead we need to invest in productive capacity, and it will never come from industry itself. So it must be directed from somewhere, and only government can do that.
The options are not limited to British-stile extreme laissez faire or Chinese state control. There is a different approach to the same thing that bridges these alternatives, and we’ve been going on about it for ages. It is called an industrial strategy.
But it doesn’t happen, because people do not understand that an economic strategy and an industrial strategy are totally different things. The former is generally take to be the British model of ‘tweak levers to maximise the returns to capital’ and is almost always value-free. Industrial strategy is nothing like that. It acts to direct capital like the Chinese did, but in a slightly different way.
Rather than compelling investment or making it all yourself as a government, you decide where you want capital investment made and you incentivise it, while disincentivising the alternative. Why it is not an ‘economic strategy’ is that it states a mission, not a target. A mission might be ‘build the capacity to make wind turbines’. A target is ‘erect 100 wind turbines’.
They sound superficially the same but very clearly they are not. That is why the West can’t change itself. It doesn’t understand this difference and vested interests spend a lot of money trying to prevent you from understanding this difference.
That is why our capitalists wants you to believe that the Chinese are successful because of low wages because it implies that you as a worker can’t possibly want the same success. But you do, because of why capital doesn’t want an industrial strategy – and that is because theft is easier than work, and there are so many ways to steal money from us now.
Hence we have Ticketmaster charging you a gazillion pounds to see a corporate pop act and China is about to break the $40 per kWh threshold for sodium batteries which would transform the world.
If you let capital do what it wants it will fleece you. Adam Smith understood this a long time ago. You have to make capital be better than it wants to be if you do not want your society to be eaten away from the inside.
Scotland needs to get its courage up and undertake a massive process of directing capital towards the development of productive domestic capacity. Neither Burnham or Swinney are going to achieve this and the latter doesn’t even pretend he wants to. We wake up to this now or this is going to turn into China’s century and we’ll just be vassals to a new master.
Source: We failed to invest cleverly – can we learn?
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Despite ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 10, 2026, 07:50 PMThat World Cup did not leave me feeling good. It said a bit too much about the world we live in just now that was a bit too on the nose about the state of moral decline we appear to be in. It is a strange feeling – on the one hand, there are aspects of this last six weeks which show the best of humanity in the fans. Then there is the rest…
It is perhaps important to say that my take on this event may not be coloured in the same way yours is. We were in Egypt for two weeks of it and became fervent Egypt supporters in the process. Also my partner is Mexican with join Spanish nationality and a lot of what I saw came from her social media feed, which in turn wasn’t coming from Europe.
I suspect that has heavily coloured my feelings about the whole event. And let me start by being really clear; as the usual western centrists retreat to their usual western centrism of agreeing profusely with any powerful institution and calling its critics ‘conspiracy theorists’, my answer is ‘oh, we’re not debating conspiracies, we’re counting them’.
Because no-one denies that the pseudo-fascist president of America phoned that little ball of condensed corruption that runs Fifa and that a red card was rescinded as a result, and no-one at all is justifying this as procedurally correct. So there we are, one conspiracy confirmed. You have no high horse to get on.
So let’s start with some more stuff we can all agree with – "hydration breaks" (if they are necessary) do not need (conveniently) to last the length of a US broadcaster’s advert breaks. Do not tell me that isn’t selling football out. Likewise, that excruciating final.
I have an intrinsic dislike for American bombast. When I grew up, everyone in Scotland did. The final opened with that national competition they seem to have where some singer I’ve not heard of sings the American national anthem and wins based on precisely how many unnecessary notes they use.
Then some mentalist who apparently usually shouts in a deranged manner at people watching men fight in a cage was instead screaming in a deranged manner at all of us. On and on this all went, until half time. I went to check on the washing when Madonna came on but when I got back they were making children sing schmaltzy crap and then that arse from Coldplay appeared and I went to reorganise my sock drawer.
Let that be the last half time show in football
This isn’t just a matter of taste (though it is very much a matter of taste – or lack thereof). I need to suck up warbling talent show finalists and screaming fight barkers if that’s what the host nation insists on, but you do not stop a proper sporting match for half an hour just to advertise more shit through the power of singing and dancing.
There is a limit surely to how much American capitalism should be allowed to destroy everything, no? Let that be the last half time show in football. Football has its problems, but surely it can salvage some self respect. It isn’t only about money, is it?
You’d believe it was if you left the Euro-American information ecosystem. My experience of the degree of cynicism coming from Mexico and that I experienced in Egypt made me wonder if I was seeing things wrong.
I watched the Egypt-Argentina match in a bar surrounded by Egyptians. Egypt deserved to go through. I hope you’ve seen one of the multiple compilations of egregious decisions that handed Argentina the victory.
Now I was committed one way on this one and it looked like more than just errors to me but that happens when you’re supporting one side. It’s just that it wasn’t just me. By this point the Mexican half of comments that are being relayed to me all operate on the basis that Fifa had decided who the sponsors wanted to win games.
Certainly for the rest of our holiday we just had to say ‘fucking Fifa is corrupt’ and we made friends. People we spoke to were split between whether it was the financial clout of Messi and sponsors or whether the fact the Egyptian coach had been a vocal supporter of Palestine which caused the bias. I know some will think it was just a bad referee.
And yes, I know that the European centrist community will be calling accusations of racism conspiracy theories – and then you need to remind them that a referee was prevented from attending the tournament because he was Somali. So yet again, we’re not debating whether there was racism, we’re counting it.
What has bothered me is the silence. I mean, there is no version of the way Iran was treated that should not have been an utter scandal – yet who spoke in solidarity? So that’s at least three screaming irregularities that aren’t ‘conspiracy theories’.
And then there are the sponsors which themselves suggest something is sick in the game. Repressive petrostates, crypto-bros, the junk food merchants – the ‘partners’ represent nothing but greed. It is hard to feel love for all of this.
Which leaves Fifa. I have asked a couple of people in the realms of sport (this isn’t my expert area) whether Fifa is the most corrupt organisation operating freely in Western Europe. There was a general agreement to this suggestion, and it’s not just about ‘Fifa Peace Prizes’. Both the World Cup and the Olympics are now self-contained economies that no-one really regulates.
The endless efforts of the European centrists to persuade you that their neoliberal empire isn’t fundamentally dirty is just an us thing
So having started with the joyful, madcap non-hope of Scotland (let’s be honest, we were absolute rubbish) being saved by the wonder of our fans and ending with the most consistent team in the tournament winning and their fans making it about Palestine, this tournament retains much magic. But for how long?
Because the disgraceful behaviour of Argentina during and after the final is perhaps more redolent of this affair altogether. This was surely the dirtiest World Cup since Mussolini was himself calling senior officials to ‘advise’ them on decision-making in 1934. And before the centrists tell me that is an irresponsible comparison, you’d have said that to me in 1934 so give it a rest.
What this has left me feeling is enormous solidarity with everyone outside the stinking corporate Fifa bubble. I sat across the Nile from Luxor hearing the many fan zones roar so loud at each goal we didn’t need to be told the score. We saw that country come alive (and then unite in disgust) and it reminds me what football can be.
But yet again it left me feeling that the still-dominant European-American axis that pervades our media ecosystem is increasingly oblivious to the rest of the world. You know that outside Eurmerica no-one supports Isreal and ‘is it a genocide?’ isn’t a question? You know it’s just us equivocating about the greatest Western-backed atrocity this century?
Likewise, you know half the world just assumes that the White Man will rig everything in their favour? The endless efforts of the European centrists to persuade you that their neoliberal empire isn’t fundamentally dirty is just an us thing. The world believes we have instituted a rule of legalised corruption for ourselves. It’s hard to suggest they’re wrong.
I sort of remember Argentina 1978. I mean, I don’t, but I clearly remember asking my mum why everyone in the whole country was sad (I was five years old). Italy 1990 became the moment the World Cup became ‘mine’, a weeks-long Odyssey that I got to make my own, along with people all over the world.
The day after Scotland was knocked out of the 1998 world cup by Morocco a man fell asleep in his car, drove into me and fucked up my ankle to the extent that I have walked with a walking stick since. It is a landmark of my life, and the football hurt more.
In 2010 we had a Spanish intern staying with us and we watched the whole tournament up to Spain’s historic victory. These are all all various forms of joyful or painful-in-the-right-way memories that have been gifted to me by this football tournament.
But Qatar started to push at the boundaries of how much blind eye I could turn to all the shit, and this one has pushed me further. I simply cannot feel good about the Trump Games.
Money ruins everything. I wish we could just play football for fun again. Even if just once every four years it was pure, it would be such a different experience. As it stands, football is getting lost in among the commerce and politics. It isn’t a beautiful game right now, just a lucrative one. What a shame that is.
Source: Despite the joy, this World Cup left a bad taste
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] Bafflement as...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 09, 2026, 03:59 PMSource: Bafflement as Gerry Hassan claims the 1979 devolution referendum, in which Scotland voted for devolution but didn't get it, is proof that Scotland is in a "voluntary union"
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Drawing ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 08, 2026, 10:08 PMThere 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 08, 2026, 09:24 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 08, 2026, 06:33 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