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Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] Just THREE da...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 08, 2025, 07:11 AMSource: Just THREE days to save independence: the John Swinney strategy motion MUST be amended, or the dream could be over
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Schrödin...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 07, 2025, 07:03 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 07, 2025, 06:06 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 07, 2025, 04:13 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
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] A place ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 07, 2025, 03:33 PMArtists – what are they like? Their own worst enemies. They just don’t get it. Audience want musical numbers they can sign along to on a girls night out on the town, or whatever. And what do the artists do?
It’s nutso. They put together a play about the rise of fascism in 1930s Scotland. No, not Scotland, one obscure little region of Scotland. No, not even that, just part of a region, a local area. And they create it in broad Scots, dense, no-holds-barred Scots. Not content they don’t even go to an art house theatre. Nope, they tour it round a bunch of little village halls.
It’s got feminism, and class politics and everything – and then they don’t even charge. You sign up, turn up and pay what you think it was worth on the way out the door. And from that and some limited grant funding they intend to pay everyone involved a proper wage. I mean what did they think was going to happen?
Shall I tell you? They sold out every single performance within two weeks. That’s 800 tickets. There were 200 people who didn’t get tickets and asked to be put on a waiting list. Somehow they were just about all accomodated.
That’s a thousand people saw this show, their fourth in three years (if you include their utterly wonderful reading of A Christmas Carol in Scots last year, easily the most enjoyable time I’ve spent watching people dressed in their civis sitting in a semicircle reading from bits of paper). And you know what, people are very generous. Everyone has been paid full rates.
I’ll own up that for a whole host of reasons I’ve hit a hard spot of despondency this week. I don’t even need to list the reasons any more. And I’m struggling to find something positive anywhere. I am trying really hard to resist the retreat into the purely personal. I could just sit around the house watching films with the kids and pretend the world wasn’t happening.
But on Saturday, at a performance of Braw Clan’s The Needle Room, I had the best, most uplifting time. It was great in so many ways and there is so much that it has prompted in my head. You see, the obscure little part of a region that the play was about is my obscure little part of a region. It’s where I grew up.
Actually the play is set in Lanark, but when one of the three protaganists is introduced as ‘the White Craw’, I instantly said to myself ‘oh, she’s from Carnwath’. The White Craws is the nickname for people from Carnwath – one of my closest friends was from there. I was only one of a couple of people at my performance who knew this and it was strangely affirming that my little patch could be worth telling a story about.
I want to believe that we are a rich and diverse Scotland and that we are worth something, not only when we assemble as one behind which ever public sector leader has called us to Glasgow or Edinburgh
And this was what has been on my mind and is the reason I’m writing this (not just to cheer myself up). In fact it was my question at the Q&A afterwards (Braw Clan is big on audience engagement and constantly tell us that we too are part of the ‘Clan’).
What do we do with this? Regional theatre can clearly work. In fact it can clearly work brilliantly. It can engage people with strong, literary tales of where they come from, in the language of the place they come from. It can be as thrilling as I found this, and as almost everyone I’ve ever spoken to who has been at one of their performances was as thrilled as me.
So what do we do? Do we take these works and share them with a wider audience, or do we replicate this everywhere? To put it another way, do we nationalise regional theatre or do we regionalise national theatre?
The answer from the Braw Clan team was unequivocal – they want more people in Scotland to see this work, but they want it to be here. They want people to come here, to Clydesdale, and hear stories about here. It is a wildly admirable sentiment and not as out-there as it seems.
Because from this I started to drift off into a vision of what this would look like. Imagine 20 theatre companies like this all over Scotland, researching and writing stories about what happened here. The Needle Room is part of a trilogy of plays Braw Clan has done which might be loosely considered a ‘women emancipate themselves from the stupidity of small-minded men – and tradition-bound women’.
But they are very specific – one is based on a real visit to Leadhills by Wordsworth and his party. One is based on a true story of a local woman who escaped to the US and made a minor career as a singer and movie star. This one is heavily based around the real history of nascent fascism in this area.
All three were a joy because they were stories about what I consider home, but all three told me loads and loads of things about my home I didn’t know. They use local dialect. As usual, they are universal themes but they are incredibly rooted in place.
And that’s what I’ve been thinking about since. I want to go to Newton Stewart, or Arbroath, or Bowmore, and I want to hear stories from there. I want to believe that we are a rich and diverse Scotland and that we are worth something, not only when we assemble as one behind which ever public sector leader has called us to Glasgow or Edinburgh.
But here’s the truth; I enjoy theatre but I don’t go often. Money, kids, time, competing priorities. It is not generic theatre that I am enjoying, it is specific theatre, local theatre. It feels almost subversive, almost like a rebellion to say ‘this is for us – please come and share it with us, but we’re not coming to you this time’.
We need to escape our mindset that there is a group of gatekeepers in our two big cities whom we must pay homage to before anything of value can be said to exist
And that’s where the shame comes in, because after dwelling on it I realised where my question came from. Despite me being on this website all the time trying to persuade you that Scotland is overly-centralised and turning into a corporate, urban-imagine version of a uni-Scotland which is really only one part of Scotland.
Despite me being convinced that this centralisation is strangling the life out of the country. Despite me having statistics that prove it categorically. Despite all this, still I have been trained to see validation only in Glasgow or Edinburgh. Even I was caught thinking ‘does this count if its only for us?’
This is the truth that is not spoken enough in the Scottish arts scene – it has largely been overtaken by a middle-class ethos of identity. Arts seem now only to explore the ‘journey’ (which is depressingly often ‘spiritual’) of an individual through the lens of some personal identity which, perfunctorily at the end, we are told is actually universal.
I think that there is most certainly a place in the arts for personal exploration, but after a point it turns into utter solipsism. The collective experience is absent. The locally specific feels absent too. We have created a kind of high-brow slop, a repetitive series of moves which sound awfully similar, each about an individual trying to bring you into their personal world.
That’s not what this felt like. It was no less driven by social mission – moreso if anything. When our lead character (spoiler alert) grabs an open razor she is being threatened with and, bleeding, launches into a monologue about how a girl from her social class knows more pain than the well-to-do assailant can imagine, there is a thrill whirls round the theatre. Feminism and class politics as catharsis.
And yet it is not a story of one person we are all expected to internalise as somehow our storie, it feels more like a collective tale we always all belonged to.
Yet this entire article isn’t really about theatre and it isn’t really about Scots language and it isn’t really about then predilections of the governing classes when it comes to art. Really, it is about how much we need to escape our mindset that there is a group of gatekeepers in our two big cities whom we must pay homage to before anything of value can be said to exist.
As the above thoughts clicked into place in my head, I imagine a Scotland entirely without those gatekeepers; local, regional, human, diverse and free. It was an intoxicating image – and I want more of it.
Source: A place no longer in need of approval or validation
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] The bigg...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 07, 2025, 02:55 PMAre very rich people the biggest threat to our civilisation? I know political ideology suggests you should never criticise the rich but what if the evidence suggests that it is them who will bring about the fall of our way of life? What if you can show that our lives and our security are degraded much more by our own oligarchs than by any foreign power?
We have been trained to understand the wellbeing of our entire society as being driven by the accumulation of wealth on the part of ‘wealth creators’. So what if I told you that actually the fall of the rich and powerful is better for most of us, not worse?
For example, everyone ‘knows’ that with the fall of the Rome, anarchy set in and the barbarians took over. Better a lifetime of tyranny than a day of anarchy and so on. Yet this is not really borne out by the facts. Actually, in the decades after the fall of Rome the evidence is pretty clear that this was a boom time for ordinary people.
Skeletal remain of ordinary people grew taller (a good proxy for a healthy, reliable diet) and older (suggesting reduced morbidity and conflict). There is very good evidence that the fall of Rome was great for the surrounding societies, that once Rome stopped extracting their wealth, the quality of their lives improved markedly.
And that is only one of a number of warnings about the threat of the rich which is available in history. In fact what if I told you that there is strong empirical evidence to suggest that the collapse of civilisations is almost always the fault of the very rich? That is the conclusion drawn by Dr Luke Kemp of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge in his book Goliath's Curse.
He analyses 5,000 years of history and finds that, left to their own devices, humans are surprisingly egalitarian and much less violent than we are generally led to believe. For example, there is pretty good evidence that intertribal conflict in the first hundred thousand years of nomadic homo sapien existence was actually rare.
What sets off the collapse in large civilisations is the same thing that makes them large in the first place – wealth accumulation. He says there are three things we always see when large civilisations develop – a means of accumulating wealth, a means of protecting wealth, an a means of preventing others from generating their own wealth or avoiding your control.
Think of the former as being ‘grain from agriculture, not meat from hunting’ (you can’t store meat as a form of wealth). Think of the latter as being enclosure, the control of land and the inability of people to escape the control of the powerful. In between is weapons technology.
And what do we see when civilisations collapse? The collapse is preceded by a rapid period of extreme and rising inequality. Kemp preempts the argument that this is what you’d expect a leftie to find by pointing out it is what anyone would find. It is a genuine phenomenon.
Concentrated wealth leads to innovation, but it is almost always innovation designed to further concentrate wealth, not to improve lives
Now at this point I must admit that I’ve not read the book, just a number of reviews and articles on it. But there is so much logical reason to believe that extremely unequal societies are unstable. There is plenty evidence from our existing world – see The Spirit Level again.
If you think about it, inequality is both economically inefficient and socially divisive and both of those are bad for the stability of a society. Look at the US – if half of all consumer spending is accounted for by the top ten per cent most wealthy citizens, wealth is not touching many parts of the economy. It is unquestionable that for any given sum of money, you get more economic impact if it is spread among a larger number of people who spend it rather than a smaller number who hoard it.
Likewise, concentrated wealth leads to innovation, but it is almost always innovation designed to further concentrate wealth, not to improve lives. The entire US economy is now a sequence of monopolies using wealth to change the laws to further expand and entrench their monopoly. AI is just monopoly squared.
But also at a certain point people who have no equity in a society have no good reason to see that society endure. Revolutions are not that common, but un-policeable rises in crime, violence and disruption will quite quickly undermine a society as well.
If you believe in capitalism then you are supposed to believe in free and fair competition. It is not so much the combination of labour and capital in any form which is the justification for the benefits of capitalism, it is that there is always the choice to pick another product which is better or cheaper, disciplining producers to do better and be better.
Google is 100 per cent the opposite of that. It does not compete for your business, it competes to make sure no-one else can get your business. And then, with you trapped in an abusive relationship, it coerces you at will to make it more money at your expense.
But it is not just the power of corporations and corporate monopolies and it is not just this process of enshitification of consumer experience, it is the personal ownership of wealth and what people can do with it.
The US is currently being purchased. The news in the US is being bought by Trump allies. The leverage Trump used to get rid of an editor he didn’t like at CBS news magazine 60 Minutes was to threaten a merger deal which would combine Warner Bros and Paramount into a single entity owned by Larry Ellison, the US’s second richest man and a major Trump ally. Similar threats to ABC affiliates was how they got Jimmy Kimmel (temporarily).
Then again, oligarchs own the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, CNBC, Fox News, X, Facebook and soon TikTok, they’re all Trump aligned and they’re all openly making their media outlets propaganda vehicles. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos publicly told everyone that commentary which was not pro-free market would not appear in the Washington Post.
Let’s go back to hunter-gatherers for a second. How come they don’t appear to be constantly at each other’s throats, trying to kill all the other tribes? Well, for a start, they have no need. They are small, mobile communities. They move towards available resource and negotiate to not all seek to exploit the same space.
The face to face contact in smaller communities means they are embedded in empathetic relationships and that leads to egalitarianism. Those kinds of smaller communities do not celebrate disruptors and divisive people. It is not good for the totality.
Stopping this out-of-control wealth machine may be our only hope
That is humans in their ‘natural state’ (as far as there is one). Something has to turn us bad – which is greed. Another concept you need to get a hold of here is the ‘dark triad’. It is increasingly becoming clear that most humans are peaceful, empathetic and collaborative, but that there is a minority which display different behaviours and attitudes.
One of them is narcissism (placing oneself ahead of others on every occasion). One of them is psychopathy (the ability and willingness to do bad things to others). Another is Machiavellianism (being willing to manipulate and trick others for your own ends). For a much smaller minority we get all three together, and that is the dark triad.
There is increasing evidence that people who display the dark triad are large-scale society’s biggest problem. In smaller communities they are quickly found out, but in big anonymous societies they can thrive, precisely because of a willingness to manipulate and harm others in their own self interest.
And if you’re willing to break the rules and hurt others for your own good, you’re well placed to make money. A lot of money. And once you have it you’re perfectly attuned to fucking others over to increase it. And then eventually you get into Ted Turner territory, the originator of the brilliant piece of explanation that, for the rich, "Life is a game. Money is how we keep score."
Yet we’re conditioned to believe that saying any of this is unseemly. Why? Because great wealth has run the most incredible propaganda campaign for itself over recent decades. We used to hate the Robber Barons so now they’ve learned they need to indoctrinate us into their church. We have worshiped the rich as policy and as culture.
And while we did it they have taken from us, and in so doing they have undermined the foundations on which their wealth was created – the rest of us. Wealth is not harmless, and there is very little evidence that its concentration actually good for the totality of us, yet there is evidence it is deeply harmful.
Last week I fretted a little about how to frame stories which hold people to account but do not create more hate. This is where we must get it right. Lazy name-calling of the rich doesn’t help, and personalising this as just a couple of bad guys fails to get to the point of it.
What we must call out is the entire system of wealth, it’s enabling legislation, its facilitators, the space between the tax loopholes where it grows, its capacity to buy politics and bend it to its own aims, its control of the means of communication. We have got to stop being cowed by the suggestion that this criticism is unseemly or unworthy.
It is not. Stopping this out-of-control wealth machine may be our only hope. Because things are not good right now and, as Dr Kemp points out, having created a global system of total reliance on money, this civilisational fall would not be good for any of us.
Our biggest national security threat may now be the rich. We should take that seriously.
Source: The biggest threat we face? The rich
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] One week...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 07, 2025, 02:24 PMThis time last week establishment politics were playing out as they always do. Shitty people cowered in front of shittier people and ‘respectable’ people were grudgingly supporting it all. It’s the British Way. I want to argue that not for the first time, establishment centrist commentators claim a wisdom they do not demonstrate.
This of course is about dinner with Trump (sorry I’m late to this – lot of commissions last week…). What is not in question is that Keir Starmer debased Britain and John Swinney debased Scotland. Nobody has argued that it was morally right to do what they did, or that it was dignified, or that it cast our nations in a good light. The justification is that it was unfortunately necessary.
Of course, being the establishment they usually operate in slogan form. It was necessary because of ‘tariffs, whisky and investment’ and ‘because that’s how grown up politics is done’. I found not a single piece of explanation of this that went beyond saying that and ad hominem attacks on the left.
Engaging with unappealing actors on the world stage is indeed part of the game. I was very clear about this at the time of Swinney’s meeting in Scotland. That’s political business. Don’t get into politics if you don’t want to do it.
But a state dinner is a completely different thing. That is nothing other than open, craven sycophancy and that is most certainly not part of the business of politics. You have to accept that you will compromise yourself sometimes, but that is not the same as undermining the integrity of your administration.
No business was done at that dinner. Everything happened through formal channels. The people who went to that dinner wanted to be at that dinner and wanted to be seen to be at that dinner. There is no soft-soaping it. That was a calculated action of debasement. It is most certainly not non-negotiable
Of course, the whole ‘grown ups must go’ thing was undermined by the fact that lots of serious grownups chose to be washing their hair. In fact for my money it was the two least serious political leaders in Britain who turned up. Starmer is an embarrassing creep and his main function now is a subject for a sweepstake – more than six months or less?
For me, Swinney is just too pleased with himself. Like I have pointed out before, he is the Factor. He is exactly the personality type that gets a kick out of hanging out with important people. I am pretty sure that this was a career highlight for Factor John.
It’s not about throwing your weight around, it’s about not kneeling when you want something
Suffice to say Trump has not bombed London, cut the internet to Wales or sanctioned Northern Ireland. Their leaders showed courage and best of all, they called the establishment’s bluff and revealed its Emperor’s new clothes.
So let’s drop this ‘no choice, grow up’ crap and let’s look at the substantive ‘more good than bad comes from it’ argument.
As best as I can tell, the only real practical reason anyone thinks Scotland should have had to suck up this humiliation was whisky. If Trump tariffs whisky it is bad for Scotland. That is how far any thinking I saw has gone, and it really needs picked apart.
Let’s park the fact that this is not a devolved responsibility and that the negotiations are being handled by London and let’s dismiss the idea that there was no choice but to have our First Minister fellate the President of the USA, just to help juice the negotiating efforts of the British Government.
Instead let’s look at both the industry concerned and the tariffs involved. Scotland makes whisky, but Scotland doesn’t sell much whisky because Scotland doesn’t own much whisky. Most of the big business of whisky takes place in London where distribution and sales is based. If we are making whisky, Scotland gets the money. If we are selling whisky, foreign businesses get the money.
And not a single drop of whisky being made today in Scotland will be affected by Trump’s tariffs. The absolute minimum time legally from distilling to bottling is three years. By the time any whisky being made in Scotland is being sold to America, Trump will (presumably) be history. For Scotland, whisky is long term. A capricious President will not cause major industrial changes. The tariffs may not even make it to Christmas depending on the Supreme Court which starts hearing a challenge in November.
I was a professional political lobbyist so even if you want to go out to bat for whisky, you don’t go with a sack of carrots and no sticks at all. Whisky consumers in the US presumably like whisky. The Scotch Malt Whisky Society of America claims to be the biggest whisky club in the world.
I’d have been over to seem them immediately and got them on board behind a ‘no tariffs on whisky’ campaign. My next move would have been to go see the Democrats. They hope to regain the House in what is only a bit more than a year from now. The House undoubtedly has the power to vote down the President’s tariffs since the constitution makes clear they can.
I’d have gone, met them, persuaded them on tariffs on whisky and hopefully have got hard approval for a reversal. And I’d have done all of that long before talking to Trump.
Then when I met Trump I’d have played all this very differently. I would have used my background work to gently imply that we want to work with him now rather than with his opposition in a year, and I would have given the strong impression we were working on a significant domestic backlash. It’s not about throwing your weight around, it’s about not kneeling when you want something. That’s how it’s done.
Whisky is incredibly profitable and the mark-ups are huge. It is almost all owned by wealth-extracting foreign corporations. It is a private sector business. It can swallow short-term drops in sales just fine. It is very far from clear that Scotch whisky (a premium product) is all that price sensitive anyway. The point is luxury.
Of course this is probably as much about Scotland’s cheap vodka industry (whisky is just a marketing tool for the booze corporations – fast turnaround vodka is how they make their billions). But I’m not talking about it until they do, so I’ll continue to pretend this is about whisky just like they do.
We’re helping to polarise the world by backing its most disruptive figure
I am first in the queue to argue for pragmatic politics. I have been one of the few people who argued that we should have been keeping direct channels of proper diplomatic negotiation open after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I am no friend of tyrants, but it is rare that total isolation makes anything better. We live with the reality of that world.
But that does not mean carte blanche or that we should actually fully submit to tyrants. That is what is happening. John Swinney is now out in the world actively backing up is new best friend in his desire to shoot down Russian fighter planes. This talk is beyond reckless and is how wars start.
Swinney stands side by side with a man who turns up at the UN and gives that speech. It shames the nation. Trump is capricious – what happens next time he threatens us? How do we bow lower than this? How much debasement is enough for Trump? How much is too much for us? It won’t even work medium term.
I was going to go into a whole analysis of the geopolitics of this but I’ve been going on far too long. Once again, people with actual wisdom will explain that our unlimited sycophancy for Trump is actively pushing China towards Russia. China correctly thinks it can’t trust us because we’re in Trump’s pockets. We’re helping to polarise the world by backing its most disruptive figure. For foreign corporations.
So no, I don’t think Swinney’s debasement was clever, or wise. I definitely do not believe it was unavoidable and I think the fact that everyone else avoided it confirms that. I most certainly don’t think it was in our long term interests. No partner respects us more as a result. Certainly no-one thinks we’re strong. And I am certain it didn’t make the world a safer place.
And all I did there was look purely at Scotland’s self interest. I didn’t mention Gaza once. That is a whole other compelling reason in itself that this was a travesty.
The long and short of it is that Keir Starmer is basically a State Department asset who is currently working flat-out to sell Britain down the river and make sure we are permanently and unchangingly in America’s pocket. He is knowingly and openly acting against the national interest.
Swinney? It is almost worse. He is just pathetically needy and inordinately in awe of the British state and of powerful people. He is just the Factor so delighted to be at the laird’s birthday party he is beside himself. I know you all think this is over now, that Trump has gone home. But this is never over. It was appeasement and it is carved in the permanent record.
Plus this dinner was white tie. So my question is simple; how on earth will we ever get the stain out?
Source: One week ago Scotland was debased – and it wasn't necessary
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Mostly a...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 07, 2025, 01:45 PMOutside Holyrood, a sinister group of sea birds perch menacingly overhead. They murmur to each other in harsh cawing sounds. "Douglas Ross just disrespected us. When our enemies come for us, we strike back ten-fold. Activate Bruiser Hepburn."
There’s a theory you’ll be familiar with which says history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Really I increasingly think humans are just trapped in a perpetual sequence of tragedy and farce to pass the time while we prepare to destroy ourselves and everything around us.
What isn’t in question is that Scotland is pulling its weight on the farce front. A group of people debating into the night on whether to scrap a verdict which will make literally zero difference to Scotland’s justice system having watered a bunch of bad ideas down to nothingness were piqued about another guy hijacking their debate to talk about seagulls. Take your pick
A lot of people want to believe that the biggest problem for independence is just the UK Parliament or just John Swinney, depending on their faction. But the biggest problem for independence is the biggest problem for everything we do – our politicians have made Scotland small.
If you’re going to have a fistfight in parliament, pleased god make it over something more significant than seagulls. The last time I felt like this was sitting in the house on a Saturday getting a notification saying the police had impounded an SNP vehicle as part of Branchform. Having heard rumours about both a Jaguar and a camper van I remember thinking ‘oh, please let it be the Jaguar because that is much less embarrassing’.
It was the camper van.
This lack of seriousness is everywhere. No-one bothers to remember the names of SNP chief executives any more. Like French Prime Ministers it’s not worth the mental exertion. They’ll be off on another vague and hard-to-swallow pretext in no time.
(Does anyone not invoke health, children’s wellbeing or some protected personal characteristic when they depart politics these days, subjects which are conveniently incredibly personal meaning it would seem inappropriate to inquire further? It devalues the times this is real.)
When there is no ambition of scale, small things look big
And the new name not to remember? It is ex-MP Callum McCaig. I never knew there was an MP call Callum McCaig which explains my lack of recognition of an ex-MP with that name. So I checked.
Callum McCaig left university to become an SNP researcher, then left that to be an SNP councillor, then left that to be an SNP MP, then left that to be an SNP Spad, and left that to be SNP head of policy, and left that to cash in for a year in SNP-adjecent lobbying outfit 56° North, then left that to become SNP Chief Executive.
This guy is basically Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Fran Kubelik in The Apartment. It is this endless recycling of tame insiders who no-one has heard of but with sugar daddies that is eroding Scottish politics so constantly.
But this farce stuff is getting everywhere. I came in this morning to a press release announcing a hunger strike to force John Swinney to include an open debate on independence at the SNP conference. There is so much in that sentence that doesn’t track.
People shouldn’t have to go on hunger strike to get the SNP to debate independence strategy. On the other hand, mass immolation wouldn’t drag ‘fair and open’ out of the current SNP regime. A hunger strike seems over the score (it is) until you try to think of alternatives. Then again, this is a party being led by a man that precisely one person wanted to lead the party.
But I didn’t need to parse this for long because it was all cancelled by lunchtime. Here is the sad thing; it was cancelled because an election is coming and keeping our Reform is the priority and that there will be a better time to seek leverage on the SNP when it has just won a stonking victory at Holyrood on a prospectus that includes the policy the hunger strikers are opposed to.
That achieves the remarkable task of making the climbdown less credible than the initial over-the-top initiative. I mean seriously, from starving yourself to wheeshting for the SNP in one press release? There was more chance of the hunger strike working. At least someone would notice.
It is the new mantra at Holyrood that no-one must try anything big. Sturgeon ran about saying big things and it all went wrong because she didn’t deliver them, so best not to talk about big things. But that just creates a landscape without perspective. When there is no ambition of scale, small things look big. We’re just small things now.
And everyone can feel it. As someone messaged me today "My party is a total waste of space – I’d resign but there is no point in that either". You can stay in the SNP and achieve nothing or you can leave the SNP and achieve nothing. As long as you’re achieving nothing you’re on message.
The desire to offer nothing, try nothing and achieve nothing is no reflection of the world or reality, it is purely a reflection of the politicians who have captured our entire democratic machinery
The problem is that this is 100 per cent nothing to do with the moment we are in. The moment we are in, more than any other in my lifetime, is screaming a need for big action. On ever possible front we’re in trouble. Next to nothing is going well.
The desire to offer nothing, try nothing and achieve nothing is no reflection of the world or reality, it is purely a reflection of the politicians who have captured our entire democratic machinery. Someone was on to me asking if I could recommend a good MSP, like I had a list of secret MSPs they’d never heard of.
It has reached the point where people I know who are outwardly not only loyal but full-on boosterish about the Swinney SNP are, in private, they tell me ‘it’s a shitshow, literally no-one wants John leading the party and everyone is desperate to get rid of him’. Two worlds, neither of them credible.
The problem with all of this isn’t just me scoring points or telling you things you don’t know, it’s a strange kind of rule of politics. You create your own context. You really do. When Jack McConnell was First Minister he wanted to do less, better. It created a reality which cost Labour its power. Salmond promised big things and so did Sturgeon. Neither really delivered, but it propelled them to power.
Now Swinney has turned the Scottish Parliament into an HR department of a company no-one caress about. It is – well, tiny. So small I can’t bring myself to look at it. He has created the context for nothing. Nothing can happen in this world. There isn’t space.
The public wants big action. The politicians used to pretend to be leading big action. Now they don’t even pretend that. They are making the smallest things impossible in a parliament with no room for anything much more than a spat over seagulls.
It is fucking embarrassing and it’s getting worse and worse. But not important. Not significant. Not of value. Just worse.
Source: Mostly as farce
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] These ar...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 07, 2025, 12:49 PMLet’s leave the silly ‘five per cent of GDP on defence’ stuff to the boys and their toys. They’ve got their work cut out trying to come up with a way to stop a swarm of £500 drones using £100 million intercontinental missile, a £9 billion aircraft carrier and a £200 billion nuclear arsenal without losing or going bankrupt.
Because when it comes to national security, that’s not what the grown-ups are talking about. They’re talking about the fact that the vast, vast majority of the threats to our national security have nothing at all to do with guns and bombs. Let me demonstrate.
I live in the small town of Biggar. A couple of weeks ago we awoke to – nothing. No phones. No internet. No mobile signal. Nothing. For 48 hours we had no communication with the outside world. It turns out a utilities company cut through a cable.
There was no bank, no bank machine and no way to get money. Elderly ladies stood outside waving cheque books, saying ‘but there’s money in my account, how can I buy food?’.
The answer was that local shops with regular customers either just closed or converted to a complex system of paper IOUs. The poor folks at the Coop had to try and invent an entirely new economic system on their own one Wednesday morning with no advice or support.
There was no petrol. The electric car chargers didn’t work. My house has off-street car charging but it relied on an internet handshake and wouldn’t start (though we found a workaround).
The health centre was cut off. There were no medical records, no way to refer patients. You couldn’t call them, and they had no way to call 999. Some fire alarms are hard wired to the local fire station, but I have no idea if they could summon the part-time fire fighters.
The schools had no guidance. In the insanely risk-averse world in which we live there is no way they could have completed a risk assessment (how would they have dealt with a child having a seizure?), but they opened anyway.
Thank goodness, because how would a parent deal with a seizure? At least there were people at the school who could have carried the child to the health centre.
No-one could work from home. But what was most unsettling was that in our modern, always-connected world, there was no way at all to gather information and no way to pass it on.
I could keep going. I utterly dread to think what would have happened had there been a major car accident.
The solutions to our vulnerability look an awful lot more like open source software platforms, domestic food production and walkie talkies than like aircraft carriers and fighter jets
Our society is more vulnerable and fragile than any other in human history. Our communications networks are now crucial to the basic operation of our public infrastructure. Our energy networks are open and vulnerable.
Our entire access to the global internet (the whole of the UK) comes from a handful of undersea cables. The points of failure in our modern world are too numerous to think about without starting to panic.
Once again, the boys with their toys are in the queue buying useless bombs to use against ‘the baddies’. But human error, extreme weather events, underwater earth tremors, a software ‘failure cascade’ or even some lone hacker sitting in his teenage bedroom could trigger this.
What I can promise you is that if there was a Scotland-wide outage of this sort for even a week, our social fabric would break down. A regional outage wouldn’t be much better.
And that is only one of the actual, real threats we face. The range of climate-related threats to infrastructure are proliferating. My household spent five days with no electricity (and so no phone or communications) after Storm Éowyn.
You can all get on X and debate climate change with Elon Musk to your heart’s content – today’s weather is the mildest weather of the rest of your life whether you like it or not. Our energy systems are based on flimsy cables held high in the air on sticks. It’s 1950s technology ill-suited to 21st century weather.
The threat that worries me most is that it would take only two or three years of a particular pattern of extreme weather and the world could lose very substantial proportions of its food crops. That would trigger a panic buying spree at a national level and could utterly disrupt food distribution patterns. We have no fall-back food supplies in Britain and would run out quickly.
Or perhaps it’s the fact that we are so utterly dependent on US software platforms that a hostile US Government which geoblocked them in pique at some perceived slight or other could basically bring our entire nation to its knees in hours.
And I quiver when I think about the future security risks from the fact that mass climate migration is only just beginning. It is estimated that in the next 20 or so years, 200,000 households in England will have to be relocated because of rising sea levels. That’s about ten per cent of the population of Scotland. Let’s see what that anti-immigration campaign looks like up here. Or rather, let’s not.
These and more are all real, imminent threats to our way of life in this country. A land invasion of Great Britain is fantastical, and in as far as Scotland is any kind of target for anyone it is 100 per cent to do with the fact that we host most of Europe’s nuclear weapons.
In 1,000 words it is hard even to capture a picture of these real threats, never mind offer solutions. But I can tell you this – the solutions to our vulnerability look an awful lot more like open source software platforms, domestic food production and walkie talkies than like aircraft carriers and fighter jets.
I want to see credible investment in territorial defence and the ability to contribute to global peacekeeping. But every penny we waste on the military vanity show is putting our real security at risk.
Source: These are the security threats we should really worry about
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] How to t...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Oct 07, 2025, 12:11 PMIn recent weeks both Common Weal and I have been circling round a similar subject – in the enormous turmoil in which we find ourselves, how did we get here and how do we get out? I’ve been trying to walk readers through my own thinking on why this has happened.
We’ve tried to go over the collapse in vision, the reason our economy doesn’t work, the way a generation was priced out of housing, how the financial elite have preyed on our crises to get very rich at our expense, how the top ten per cent kept pulling away from everyone else, why we need stories to tell about the future that speak to people.
But none of this is because I’m fatalistic or don’t believe we can’t get out of it. I just don’t think we can get out of it using our old stories. In this article I want to explain what I mean by ‘better stories’, what I most certainly don’t mean – and how to start building them.
I use the term stories here to describe what variously can be called anything from narrative to framing to perception to ideology. Humans organise our environment and try make sense of it by telling stories to ourselves that fit what we see. This gives us everything from gods to the standard model of quantum physics – they’re all narratives that explain the available data in ways that makes sense and help us live with and master our reality.
None of us ask why the sun rises every morning these days and few of us even understand the theories that explain the quantum realm. But we care super-deeply about our experience of our lives and we want explanations. At the most basic level, humans are social animals that respond equally to our perception of our material position and our perception of our social position.
If we experience pain and duress in our material conditions or if we feel our social position being challenged or eroded, we need to find a reason why this is happening to us, and what to do about it. Those are the stories that shape how we see our world. They also define how we change it.
I’ve covered in some depth why our current stories aren’t working. But that does not mean we cannot find strong stories that do work, that win back those we are losing, to give us a new conversation with those we never had, and to galvanise and direct those who are with us.
But before we start that search there is something to clear from our minds first. Stories are not manufactured from the things we want to do. A bullet point list of all of our usual asks and requests does not amount to a story. That is an us thing, not a them thing. Their data is their emotional experience of life and that is where we must start.
We need to find out what they’re feeling about their lives and why, what their hopes and aspirations are and how we can describe what we are proposing as a better future – but on their terms.
When we understand what citizens are telling themselves about their lives, why it is happening, who is to blame, we can understand how to build a better story. It has to tell the people we’re talking to the same thing they’re telling themselves but in a different way which leads them to a better place.
The most difficult question for us as we build these stories – how much can we tolerate the creation of villains?
At this point we meet the most difficult question for us as we build these stories – how much can we tolerate the creation of villains? As we construct stories that engage with people who think (correctly) they’re hard done by, can we do it without apportioning blame to some malign actor?
Things are caused in one of two ways. Either the laws of nature cause things to happen because it is inevitable (the umbrella response) or what we are experiencing is the result of conscious human action (the make the landlord fix the leak we’re sitting under response). This has been the battle ground of centrist politics for years now.
They call the latter approach ‘populism’, which is garbage. Populism is a very intentionally derogative term that refers to the victimisation of minorities as a governing creed. We know the wealthy would like to put criticism of their wealth and control out of reach, politically-speaking.
But while we should ignore them, we also need to take some care about how we’re creating villains. There really are villainous things taking place but we need to do what we can not to personalise it or we just fuel more social division. That is a big task and is largely itself an issue of perception.
We absolutely must call out those who are to blame for failure and we have to make sure people understand who has gained from this failure, by how much and why. But it is a mistake to generate more hatred, so getting the balance right is important.
Fine, but what does all this look like? These two examples offer no more than a very loose pointer. But I hope you get the idea.
Issue one – ordinary people feel like they lack control over their own life. They feel things are done to them not by them. "What I think doesn’t matter", "no-one listens to me", "the powerful do whatever they want anyway". Obviously, they’re right.
So what would you do about it? Well, you’d want to look at finding ways to make sure they do have more control over their lives. This is a decentralisation, participatory democracy, economic democracy and economic ownership issue. Empowering people through local governance, making the voice of citizens non-negotiable during policy development, changing how the economy is owned and governed – those are all powerful and popular policy responses.
Respect emotion, offer credible explanation for emotion, explain way out of emotion, describe what it will be like emotionally at the other end
But for the love of god don’t say that. This is the most obtuse, pointy-headed agenda if you start listing policies before you’ve told the story. So what is the story? Well, ‘take back control’ has been taken. What's our audience saying? What is at the heart of this story they’re telling themselves? It’s that they lack power and social standing. It’s that they’re second class. They’re not at the big table.
Put them at the big table. Make them feel first class. The terminology I use is ‘powerful citizens’. So your story is ‘the powerful have been controlling you more and more and you are getting less say over your life than ever, so fight back and demand that you get to be a powerful citizen too. Stop them making decisions about you and make your own. The right to be heard when decisions are being made is a right of every person in this country and we will make sure your right is protected’.
It’s not a technical policy-making process, it’s picking someone up from the floor and telling them ‘right, now you’re powerful, so take a grip’. Empowered people act. But you need to play on their sense of disempowerment first and you must persuade them you are serious about giving power back. Then the story can work.
Issue two – everyone feels like public services aren’t working and that they can’t get a doctor’s appointment. They don’t understand why. They’ve been told its ‘tax’ or something. But it all went down hill very fast and their tax burden didn’t.
What are the Common Weal solutions? We think there is inordinate waste and demoralisation across public services. We think this greatly reduces productivity and syphons off money. We think a management class has inserted itself between patients/pupils/constituents and frontline services and is absorbing far too much resource.
But this needs told carefully. Health sector managers have a lot to answer for but they’re not society’s great villains. Turning this into a ‘them’ thing is risky and basically unfair. But they are a problem. So we need to think about describing this in terms of the alternative.
"I don’t care who it is – some manager or some profiteering drugs company – no-one should come between you and your health care and no-one should be allowed to leach off your taxes. We need a Frontline First health service where we crack down on every penny that isn’t making it to your health care and where we trust our doctors and nurses again and let them run their hospitals".
I’d hoped to get a few more examples in but this is only a starter to encourage you to think about the stories that you believe can work and can change our politics. Begin by seeking out the deep felt emotional response of the person you’re talking to (anger at powerlessness, despair that you can’t get healthcare fast enough).
Be patient and respectful in acknowledging their emotions. Do not do that and then immediately talk about something else you care about but instead give them a reason to think about what they feel on your terms and which leads them towards being susceptible to your solutions. Then don’t tell them your solutions but first tell them how your solutions will work in general terms and how it will make them feel when they do work.
That is the story. Then and only then you can start talking about policy. Because, unlike so often, you’re actually talking about them and not yourself. Respect emotion, offer credible explanation for emotion, explain way out of emotion, describe what it will be like emotionally at the other end. And then offer practical policy solutions.
I can’t tell you how bad we are at this generally. The other side do it much better. We need to learn if we’re to beat them.
(**And folks, if you come up with some good stories, let us hear them. Email me them to the usual robin@common.scot address.)
Source: How to tell stories for the future