[Robin McAlpine Blog] When you think the Greens are dodgy, something bigger is wrong…

[ALBA-Bot]

When you think the Greens are dodgy, something bigger is wrong...

Are the Greens rigging their internal election? I think they probably are. I have no evidence for this other than ‘sort of vibes’, but I still have the suspicion something isn’t right. I am probably completely wrong about this, but that’s the result of corruption…

That’s really what I’m writing about here – corruption. For the longest time I was afraid to use the word since it sounded like the kind of Big Claim that therefore required Big Evidence. And then I met an academic expert in corruption who explained to me that corruption does not just mean ‘illegal’, it can mean ‘has been legalised but shouldn’t have been’ and it can mean ‘it ought to be banned but because everyone in power does it it feels normal’.

Once you understand that corruption means something more like it does in computer coding (the outputs are not what intended because something in the process made it go wrong) than as purely a criminal charge, it becomes much easier to understand the problems in Scotland.

Let’s come back to the Greens. Are they rigging their internal election? Party activists say they are, the party says it isn’t, the person responsible for the vote resigns and none of us are any wiser on what is going on. I could break this down further but let me just say that the second the leadership are putting statements out in the name of an official who hasn’t seen the statement who then resigns as a result, my corruption antenna are on alert.

Actually, I probably wouldn’t have felt this way had this all happened a couple of weeks ago. Except there is a critic of the leadership who was organising hard against them and trying to oust their candidates and then they suspended him from the party for unspecified bullying allegations.

So now we need to zoom back out a bit and look at the wider picture. In this picture that kind of transparently manipulative behaviour has now become common place in the SNP. It has become pointless listing the different forms of corruption the SNP leadership has used to make sure that party democracy can never interfere with its interests.

The bespoke rule they passed overnight just to block Joanna Cherry and then made it go away again, the party rank politicians for regional lists in ways that the leadership didn’t want so they just make up completely new rules on disabled people being at the top of the list (which, if it was to be done, should have been made clear long before the vote).

If you don’t do the wrong thing, you can’t get caught for doing the wrong thing

Then they start taking all their voting online and giving only results. We all know that the election of Humza Yousaf was corrupt because no-one is even trying to pretend the party’s machinery behaved neutrally during the election nor that the Yousaf campaign remained within the ludicrous and in themselves corrupt spending limits (you’ll not no financial returns have ever been produced).

Then they suspend someone for bullying days before he would probably have been elected to be the candidate in a seat the leadership didn’t want him to win. So their guy gets it and they quickly find no credence to the bullying complaint. This is so dirty it is hardly worth me explaining why.

And where Sturgeon’s SNP goes (it is still Sturgeon’s SNP), so goes Harvie’s Greens. Therefore by the time they are suspending their primary internal critic at a crucial moment in the selection of candidates I’m getting strong ‘OK, now I don’t believe them’ vibes.

Which means if someone makes a credible accusation of corruption I’m willing to listen and then when the leadership start putting out statements in the name of people who subsequently reject the statement and promptly resign their post – well, by now I have more reason for mistrust than for trust.

And this is the heart of my point – someone I don’t know making an accusation and then a political party press team flubbing a defensive statement followed by someone rejecting it and resigning is evidence only we’re in Scottish politics. There are explanations for it all other than corruption.

Likewise, there are other explanations for Fife Health Board putting out a wild statement they claim to have cleared with their lawyers who deny ever seeing it – but at this stage why would anyone be giving Fife Health Board the benefit of the doubt? ‘At it’ doesn’t begin to cover some of what seems to have been revealed in the ongoing industrial tribunal.

I can definitely tell you that Tayside Health Board fails to reach my basic level of trust because I’ve been involved with the people who are campaigning for justice after having had life-changing injuries inflicted on them by a Tayside surgeon which we all but know the Health Board covered up for. And I don’t want to get onto the subject of Glasgow Health Board – no seriously, I don’t want to get onto it because then I’ll need to go and try and work out how many scandals it has going on at once.

At this point I started listing other examples of public sector corruption in Scotland but I deleted half a dozen paragraphs worth because either the list goes on for page after page or it gives the false impression that it might be a few isolated incidents. Just assume that there is an awful lot going wrong that can’t simply be explained by ‘human error’. There are real problems in the system.

Instead, a quick story from my childhood. My dad was a councillor and he helped get a difficult piece of planning permission for a constituent. That constituent happened to be a close family friend. When it was all done he came to the house with a bottle of whisky to say thanks. Dad wouldn’t take it. I didn’t understand.

‘It’s just Gus’ I said. ‘I’d have done it exactly the same for any constituent’ said dad. ‘That’s my point – it’s a friend bringing a wee present’. ‘But if I take it I did the wrong thing’ said my dad, ‘and then I’ll always have done the wrong thing’. It was drilled into me by my mum and dad – if you don’t do the wrong thing, you can’t get caught for doing the wrong thing.

Simply the fear of knowing that someone is watching over them would change attitudes – but not half as much as the first conviction

I earn very little but even so I go out of my way to ask whether anything at all that looks like a freebie is OK. I came quite close to asking the Board for guidance because I’d been paying for legitimate work coffees for meetings in cafes but then I had a loyalty card full of stamps. I used it for a personal coffee once and then wondered whether I should have. (I decided not to bother the Board but I didn’t do it again.)

I’m taking chances here, threatening power (best I can), making trouble. It is therefore incredibly important that I’m as honest as I can be, that when I call for probity in public life I can also show it in my life. Hypocrisy is the enemy of change.

Yet round Scotland the opposite is happening. Corruption is being normalised in endless ways. Perhaps the most insidious form of the normalisation of corruption is the failing up, the ‘lessons will be learned’, the golden rule that no-one in power ever pays a price themselves for failure or dishonesty. It’s known as moral hazard. If you can break the rules yet know you’ll get away with it, rules are for losers.

This moral collapse has two crucial functions in contemporary politics. First, behind most of this corruption (though not all) is big business interests. The corporate sector doesn’t pretend to be particularly honest – they’re the make a buck guys and morality isn’t really anything to do with it. They are very happy to have corrupted politicians.

Why? Because if the public realm is no more moral than the self-serving private realm, what moral superiority does it have? Why not just privatise the public for profit? The efforts to erase the line between public and private has been equally welcomed by the big businesses who get the contracts and the senior officials who get the kick-backs (mostly not illegal, it is important to note).

The second function of this moral collapse is that it is good for those who think democracy is inconvenient. This brings me back to the Greens. As soon as you know that corruption exists, then it could exist everywhere, anywhere. So much has happened in the SNP that is so impossible to defend that I can now easily think the worst of anything that happens. Now it’s started happening in the Greens.

This makes collective action for collective good harder to achieve. Corruption is like a virus that infects not just those involved but spreads beyond them in an uncontrollable way. Actually I amn’t desperately sure Patrick Harvie and co have the technical competence to rig an election. I just sort of feel that they wouldn’t hesitate if they needed to.

I have long wanted the Western Australian model of a corruption commissioner, a powerful post with a wide range of powers from ordering wire taps and intercepts to compelling evidence under oath. Simply the fear of knowing that someone is watching over them would change attitudes – but not half as much as the first conviction.

I used to have very, very high levels of trust in public process in Scotland. Minor corruption is everywhere, but I believed we were free from most of the serious, structural corruption that does so much damage elsewhere. Over the lat 20 years I first struggled to sustain that belief and then gradually couldn’t believe it any more.

This means I probably overestimate the scale of corruption, and yet I’m probably right to do so because it is now substantial and it is so universal. I mean, since I started writing this, news can’t have broken about significant corruption relating to a senior trade union figure. That wouldn’t happen, right?

Source: When you think the Greens are dodgy, something bigger is wrong...