[Robin McAlpine Blog] Feudalism hasn’t worked; Scotland should try democracy

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Feudalism hasn't worked; Scotland should try democracy

With each outrage I struggle more to explain to people what is going on in Scotland. I am doing this all the time just now, from angry activists on the phone to retired women I meet on the high street, frustrated public sector workers even to some confused politicians. Why oh why does nothing work in Scotland and why do the rules only seem to apply to certain people?

The way the question is asked varies quite a lot. At the blunt end people ask me if there is endemic corruption; at the other they are those who really want me to talk them through the logic behind what is happening. The former think something is badly wrong, the latter don’t understand why it looks like something is badly wrong.

At the moment it is Flamingoland they’re asking me about, but it’ll be no time until it is onto the next thing. On Flamingoland they ask me ‘how can this be happening, didn’t we win that one?’. I try to say kindly ‘yes, that’s more or less the only point of Scottish democracy – it is really only there now to persuade you you nearly had a chance’.

I desperately want you to absorb that point; there is no point from start to finish when Flamingoland wasn’t going to go ahead. Those who thought impact assessments and decisions by officials and scientific measurements and truth and honesty and the views of anyone who isn’t rich would have any impact on this decision have forgotten that Trump owns a golf course built on a specifically protected piece of land which was designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

You’ve forgotten about Freeports, and the Gupta ‘aluminium smelter’ and the Wyndford high flats, soon St Fittick’s Park and… – look, it means you’ve forgotten everything. I challenge you – name me any time when a rich industrialist who wanted something in Scotland didn’t get it. I suppose Sir Iain Wood didn’t get his fantasy garden project in Aberdeen 15 years ago, but that was literally only because the budget got out of control and he was expecting the public purse to cover it.

In Scotland the rich and powerful do not lose and the ordinary people in a battle with big commercial interests never win. To understand properly why this is I want to introduce you to ‘the powerful’. That isn’t the First Minister or the Scottish Parliament. They appear powerless. Four year ago politicians unanimously concluded that the SQA wasn’t fit for purpose and should be scrapped.

This is a statement of the bleeding obvious. Six out of eight teachers I spoke to at a recent parent-teacher consultation for my daughter offered biting criticism of the SQA in the course of our conversation. So how is the abolition going? It isn’t. The SQA appears to have taken the Scottish Government aside and told them to remember their place. Government works for the SQA, not the other way round.

The deal is simple; Ministers protect quangos and in return quangos protect Ministers

Let me give you another example. In what universe is it not massively easier just to put a single token islander on the Board of CalMac? It’s such an easy hit point for critics that is so easily neutralised. No sane government wouldn’t include an island rep, so presumably it is CalMac who is making these decisions. It only makes sense if Swinney isn’t in charge.

Think I’m kidding? Famously, Stalin acidly pointed out that "the Pope has no divisions’. The Pope can give all the masses he wants but he is essentially powerless. So here’s my question; how many divisions does the First Minister have? About 90 per cent of government in Scotland is at least semi-autonomous from him.

From your local leisure centre to your child’s chance of getting to university to your protection from environmental catastrophe to the support for industry to the governance of a hospital, not a single one of these involve the First Minister having any power to make a decision. Moreover, he doesn’t even have the power to instruct someone who is then in a position to instruct a quango.

He is allowed to set targets and pass legislation. He can choose the governing bodies of these entities and he can pick up the phone and shout at them, but that is pretty much the extent of his power. It is time we stopped thinking of the Scottish Government as ‘running’ Scotland and start thinking of them as the PR division of an unelected ruling class.

That’s why the utter powerlessness of the Scottish Government is not only no excuse, it is in itself a condemnation. They have the power to abolish every single quango (nearly; there are one or two that must be semi-autonomous for legal or regulatory reasons). Instead they take all the flak for every failure of Scotland’s ruling class. Why do they do it?

Easy; how else is someone like Shirley-Anne Somerville ever in a million years going to earn a salary of that scale or have anything like the perks and pompousness of life in office in any other line of work she is remotely qualified for? She wouldn’t. Hence the deal.

The deal is simple; Ministers protect quangos and in return quangos protect Ministers. The politicians rubber-stamp all the deals that keep officials in post no matter how incompetent they are or how badly they’ve failed. In turn, the officials do everything they can to cover up the failures of the politicians.

You can derive the former by reminding yourself that, despite it all, CMal still exists. To refresh yourself on the latter, just remember every single manipulated and frankly outright fraudulent piece of data Public Health Scotland put out during Covid to try and persuade you that Sturgeon’s and Freeman’s act of putting Covid-positive people in care homes didn’t kill anyone.

What the data actually shows is that deaths in care homes in Scotland was miles out of proportion to anywhere else in Europe, but not according to PHS. Of course, it had to retract all that data once someone had time to review it, and of course quite a few people (including me) took the arguments apart within hours of its publication. I knew it was at it, so we surely have to assume it did too.

But Sturgeon got her ‘it wasn’t her fault’ headlines (to this day, despite my strenuous efforts, Scotland’s political classes still seem to think she only sent untested people into care homes when she sent people who were tested and found positive, and she is alone on the planet in that) and who really reads the ‘PHS retracts data’ stories?

The whole point of the de-democratisation of public life in Scotland is to merge it with commerce

So Scotland is run by quangos? Yes and now. They run most of the public sector all-but untouched by democracy, but that doesn’t explain it all. You then have to remember that the whole point of the de-democratisation of public life in Scotland is to merge it with commerce. When someone says ‘semi-autonomous’ they mean ‘governed by hand-picked place people’.

And those largely come from big financial interests or from adjacent to big financial interests. The rich can’t get elected in Scotland so they devised a system where they don’t have to, they just have to supplant democracy with something else. That something else is a ruling class operating in their interests. Quangos are like factors for the rich.

This is feudalism in all but name. An extended caste system stretches up above the plebs (i.e. us) and each layer is its own realm, beholden only to those above, contemptuous of those below. Politicians are pretty low down that ladder, but thole it because it gives them the illusion of power and helps them sustain power. So no decision the rich want is ever blocked, or not for long.

Back to Flamingoland to answer the questions I’ve been getting; the Scottish Government via its officials have clearly been planning this for a while. They have pulled off what I’m going to call the ‘Ecuador Shuffle’, after Trump. He took a fast decision to enable the illegal deportation of people to Ecuador then argued it was outside his power to return them. So he is immune for the illegality.

The Scottish Government carefully choreographed a decision made by a semi-autonomous official to support Flamingoland which quickly allowed the Government to indicate that it wasn’t minded to intervene. Thus the unelected bureaucracy give the rich what they want and then work with the politicians to give them a complete policy of complete immunity from having made the decision. It is a cynical con to wash blood from hands, metaphorically-speaking.

Catastrophe machine Tom Hunter (remind me how many billions of pounds of loans with Bank of Scotland he defaulted on yet is still lecturing the rest of us) wants Scotland to be Singapore, to have much shorted planning processes.

Tom, Tom, Tom, you’ve completely misunderstood. Scotland is Singapore already. If they remove the silly pretence that the planning process is neutral and just rush decisions through as you’d like, everyone will notice. And then they might demand democracy. And we can’t have that.

Source: Feudalism hasn't worked; Scotland should try democracy