[Robin McAlpine Blog] Scotland is a recipe for disaster and I’m genuinely worried

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Scotland is a recipe for disaster and I'm genuinely worried

Much is written and said about the general malaise in Western democracy – and the word count for commentary about Scotland’s political dysfunction isn’t far behind. It’s a worry, agrees everyone without solution. But for a lot of people I speak to you might better call them ‘worry vibes’ than a specific concern.

So let me give you the specific concern; Scotland is now producing a set of circumstances which seem to me to lead to bad places. I mean properly bad places. And I mean an overwhelming set of circumstances. This isn’t general, it’s specific.

Let’s start at the top. I chuckle now to think of all the people who said they could never, ever vote for Kate Forbes because she was so right wing. The same people are watching the leader they chose instead taking the party further to the right than I believe Forbes would have. The ‘never Kate’ team seem to have changed their mind about their objection to the right.

Then again, they also told me that they would blow the roof off the house if there wasn’t genuine democratic reform of the party through the governance review but they’ve become remarkably comfortable with the stitch-up proposals. In fact, the SNP loyalists who have been telling me ‘this far and no further’ on repeat for a decade are in fact an outright joke by now. Admit it; you have no red lines. You’ll nod at anything.

The latest tales are two fold; Swinney is fixing things and it’s working. Except Swinney is fixing nothing. In British politics you can always, always get some positive commentary by being ever more small-c conservative (and indeed, more big-C Conservative too). Swinney is stemming the tide, they say. Look how cleverly he’s doing nothing, they say. It’s working, they say.

But is it though? I’ve explained this before; John Swinney has fought seven election campaigns as leader and he has lost the party substantial vote share on every single occasion. He’s the definition of a vote-loser. And he’s not letting us down now. Again, you won’t be surprised how often I was reassured that Humza Yousaf was the low point, a mistake the party is moving on from.

So how come Swinney has lost four points in the polls since Yousaf stepped down? If this is working, what is failing? But, I was recently told by an SNP loyalist as she dismissed me as irrelevant, we’re going to be the biggest party in the parliament by far.

Go on, give it a shot – give me the elevator pitch for any of these parties that doesn’t refer to another party, another parliament or, frankly, another planet

And that is my next big fear. If we now have a political set-up in Scotland where you can drop four points in opinion polls and still increase your number of seats by 20, what the fuck do you expect the public to make of it? ‘The worse they are, the less they’re liked, but the less they’re liked, the more powerful they become’.

Next time you ask why young people think democracy has failed, explain the above to me. You can shed support like a Starmer but still win big, like a Starmer. So let’s see, do we have a recent case study of what is the result of that? Oh yes, Starmer. Starmer might well give you the impression that if you win big and shallow you alienate everyone.

That impression would be right. We might be silly and naïve us citizens, but for things to feel right, just, fair, then you shouldn’t be rewarded for failure. Yet again and again people in power are rewarded for failure. Starmer basically got voted for at low-point Corbyn levels but won at Putin levels. You don’t need a degree in politics to intuit that something is wrong.

And it is, because day by day we can be pretty clear that government in Scotland isn’t actually performing better. By the looks of things we are not going to get ‘democratic fairness’ from the approaching Scottish elections and then we’re not going to get any improvement in piss-poor government afterwards. Nothing learned, yet nothing lost.

Thankfully a plural democracy offers alternatives. Or at least it is supposed to. Instead we’ve got multiple shades of beige. Alba seems to hate young people such is its oil obsession, and yet not half as much as it seems to hate itself. The Greens actively choose to be irrelevant to most of us through its selection of obsessions.

You can feel sorry for Sarwar (I’ve never seen a politician so utterly undermined by his leader, ever) without imagining that he’d have been any good. Every day I get media releases from Labour demanding better performance on the NHS or whatever, but I find little evidence that they know what that means. They just planned to ‘manage things better’. Like Swinney did.

The Tories are in an existential battle and what are the Lib Dems even for any more? None of them is offering us anything. Go on, give it a shot – give me the elevator pitch for any of these parties that doesn’t refer to another party, another parliament or, frankly, another planet.

The only people offering anything are Reform, and what they offer is the illusion of protest which will be very quickly followed by the realisation that they are no more on your side than any of the rest of them, and certainly no more competent than the ranks of incompetence. When your protest option is shite, you’re in a bad place.

This is all set inside a UK which swings between a policy of appeasement to Trump (Starmer) and a policy of pretending to be Trump (Reeves). That is inside a Europe which seems barely even to be able to come up with a reason to exist. That is inside a world where Keir Starmer is no longer sure if mass ethnic cleansing is still a bad thing. I mean if his buddy Trump does it.

How do you get to independence, or a better society, or world peace, or even ferries that work in this world?

So what are the politicians doing about this putrefaction and failure? Lovin’ it. They’re absolutely delighted. It is how they are surviving their own incompetence. I’m not sure if you’ve fully absorbed it yet but clearly Team Swinney are under the inexplicable spell of Morgan McSweeney. They’ve adopted his ‘strategy’. They are relishing unpopularity. They are building on it.

In case you can’t see this, the only reason that the SNP is not about to be routed in Holyrood is because it will be a record low turnout and its opponents are split. Why is the SNP no longer interested in climate change or rent controls and why instead does it love oil and gas and landlords? Because they’ve so sickened the young and the activists that they aren’t going to vote. So fuck ’em.

Swinney is adopting the same tactic as Starmer – all that matters is that I’m one point ahead of the other guy in enough seats and if the best way for that to happen is by sickening off the poor, the young, the working classes and anyone else who doesn’t like us but cornering just enough vote of whomever is left while the other side splits its vote, I’m having a piece of that thanks.

Where do you think that level of contempt takes you? How do you get to independence, or a better society, or world peace, or even ferries that work in this world? You don’t. You’ve been rewarded for failure and you plan to collect. You have no plan, no clue, just cynicism. People hate you, but you and your peers have robbed them of agency.

There really is only so much lying, so much arrogance, so much incompetence, so much smugness, so much pocket-stuffing, so many broken promises, so many failures, so little contrition before the kids turn out to be pretty astute in their sense of ‘well this system stinks’.

It does. It stinks bad. To the entire political classes – if you continue to be this dishonest, this incompetent, this visionless, this unreliable and yet you keep getting richer and your smugness just keeps growing, then you are Joe Biden.

You are bringing the only system that prevents us from tyranny to its knees. You will go down in history as what you are – people whose name no-one will know who open the door to people whose name we will one day wish we’d never heard.

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