[Robin McAlpine Blog] The vibes of arrogance

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The vibes of arrogance

As you may have seen, I’m trying to work out what is behind some of the strange polling dynamics which are taking place. There are a number of factors which I haven’t really discussed yet (high among them the fact that political insiders imagine that these decisions are instrumental rather than emotional…).

But I also want to highlight what is current called ‘vibes’ but which is really about intangible messaging, the signals we gain by osmosis rather than because they are directed at us. This is what produces the value judgements we make about political parties. They all tell you they’re trustworthy, but we believe some of them and not others. What are the signals that cause that?

It is much easier to understand the collapse in the Labour vote as an instrumental-intangible hybrid. Labour has under-delivered and is clumsy and artificial in its speech and presentation. But what is going on with the SNP? As I’ve pointed out, if Labour is falling, the SNP ought to be rising by default. It isn’t. Why?

The instrumental answer is that it has been in government too long and is dragging too many skeletons behind itself. But my experience of non-political people talking about the SNP is not wholly explained by that. There is often a hostility from former supporters which isn’t accounted for purely by ‘failures in government’.

To explain part of what I think it is, let me run through a recent event. I had been keeping the details of this to myself because those involved are shaping a response and didn’t want it in the public domain, but someone else leaked it to the Daily Mail so it is. (I’m still withholding some bits of information here for a very specific reason.)

The story happens in that cauldron of intrigue Dalkeith. The local SNP constituency has been struggling for participation and three office bearer roles were vacant because no-one would put themselves forward for them. An EGM was set to solve the problem.

These might be expected to have, say, a dozen or 20 people at it. So suspicions were immediately raised when the MSP (Colin Beattie, arrested during Branchform but not charged, and recently in a scandal where he offered to make a donation to the local party but only if he was selected as the candidate again, which is very close to inducement) turned up with 15 people no-one had seen in years.

That represented a majority in the room. The meeting opened and someone moved a motion of no confidence in the constituency chair. That is Tim Rideout of Scottish Currency Group fame. Tim is a friend of mine and he is a case study in scrupulous adherence to ethics and even-handedness. Tim is not really one of life’s natural rebels, but he is also fundamentally not a head-nodder.

Everything in that local Labour Party was simply a question of who was getting the jobs and which faction was in control

It means he finds himself on the wrong side of loyalists not because he ever wanted to be there but because he is not minded to turn a blind eye. He has been far from a disruptive chair, but at the same time he is not a compliant one who will do what he is told if he thinks its the wrong thing.

This has led to tension with Beattie – Tim supported a different candidate in the recent Holyrood candidate selection process. So when the vote of no confidence was raised, Tim pointed out that it requires two weeks’ notice to put such a motion to an EGM. Except a rule was pulled out that says that this can be circumvented in the event of immediate gross misconduct.

So the meeting secretary put it to the meeting and, of course with the votes stacked, the meeting agreed to take it. To be able to put it to the meeting they should have been required to demonstrated that it was eligible for emergency consideration by outlining a reasonable case for gross misconduct.

Not only did that not happen, they agreed to go straight to a vote with no form of allegation or complaint made at all. This is all procedurally outrageous, but the meeting was stacked so they took the vote and got rid of Tim. And then Colin Beattie effectively appointed himself as constituency chair. None of this is within a country mile of constitutionally appropriate.

My point isn’t to engage in discussion of this particular case. Everyone involved is perfectly capable of fighting their own fights. My point is that I have seen this before. I mean I have seen almost exactly this before, on a number of occasions. They all took place in Lanarkshire Labour in the late 1990s.

Labour had some kind of healthy internal debate at the national level. Unlike in the SNP, the Scottish Labour Action grouping was actually challenging the nature and soul of the party. But in Lanarkshire, in those days, the ballots used to be weighed rather than counted. There was no policy debate, no consideration of big issues. It was much more like internal squabbles among a ruling aristocracy.

Everything in that local Labour Party was simply a question of who was getting the jobs and which faction was in control. That was all that would ever happen – logistics and low-level Game of Thrones shit. I saw dirty politics the likes I haven’t seen again in Scotland. At least not until now.

My guess is that what Team Swinney thinks is stability, Team Public thinks is self-interested self-serving.

Control was so complete at the top nationally and the party was so completely immunised against ideological debate (this is Blair Imperial Phase) that all that was left was to fight over the spoils at a local level. And – this bit is really important – everyone knew it. In Lanarkshire the public was broadly aware that this was the way things were.

The denouement was the Monklands jobs-for-the-boys scandal (which Wikipedia says was called Monklandsgate – which is odd because I was doing media for the leader of the Scottish Labour Party at the time and I’m damned if I can remember anyone calling it that back then). It was such blatant, in-your-face corruption that people just felt a loss of faith in local politics.

Ironically, I suspect that you may be able to trace the public’s attitude change towards the SNP in the same place. It wasn’t exactly jobs-for-the-boys, it was ‘our boy has been accused of sex offences so let’s circle the wagons to protect him’.

I want you to be clear what I’m saying. If the drop in support for the SNP was driven by this, that would be an instrumental reaction and I don’t think that’s what is happening. This is not a reaction to an event, it is the accumulation of a sense, a vibe.

In 2007, Scotland had gained an intangible sense that Labour was just too cosy behaving like Scotland belonged to it. Of course it didn’t need to debate policy or society, because Labour was all you were going to get anyway and it would do whatever it wanted to do – so there. It went from representing people to being empowered by them to being disinterested in them.

What Team Beattie just did is exactly what it looked like in Labour when it had gone from being a social movement to being a factional jobs machine. Had you asked the public in 1996 they might not have been able to explain what they felt, but they felt it. Labour was disregarding them and taking them for granted, certainly in West Central Scotland.

I think a large part of the reason that the SNP is stuck endlessly on 35 per cent in the polls no mater what happens to its biggest rival is that a lot of people have arrived at the same place about the SNP they did about Labour in 2007. If it takes you for granted, why empower it?

There is an assumption that the collapse in support for the SNP is instrumental, that Sturgeon made mistakes at the end, that Yousaf was chaotic and that the public were rationally marking them down for this. Which means that Swinney steadying the ship should, in instrumental terms, be starting to reverse that – and it isn’t.

My guess is that what Team Swinney thinks is stability, Team Public thinks is self-interested self-serving. He is almost literally promising to do less, better, which is literally the final straw that broke the back of Scottish Labour between 2003 and 2007. Remember, it was Jack McConnell ‘steadying the ship’ after the ‘chaos’ of Henry McLeish that ended Scottish Labour’s dominance.

Let me put it another way; it is too easy to act like a self-interested lynch mob inside the modern SNP because it has given up on mission, on ideology, on agenda. It is simply a jobs machine. And so long as it remains that, it may prove impossible for the party to recover.

Source: The vibes of arrogance