[Robin McAlpine Blog] Corruption has three characteristics: it is corrosive, addictive and inflationary

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Corruption has three characteristics: it is corrosive, addictive and inflationary

I have a friend who lives in a foreign country. The police stop her car; she pulls out a couple of quid (equivalent). The policeman goes away. It is treated like a small parking charge or a supplementary tax. No-one says anything. It is all assumed. In fact, it is expected. And that is when you’re lost. If corruption is normal there is no way out.

How far on this path is Scotland? Well, it depends on your social class, but if you are senior in the public administration class the answer is ‘pretty far’. In some ways it is almost possible to feel sorry for Sally Donald – it’s not that her corruption was very big, it’s that it was just not quite the right kind of corruption.

I want to show what links her, the Standards Commission, Dorothy Bain and the Chief Executive of Scottish Water. They are all what happens when they assume no-one will ask questions because, like our corrupt policeman, they think it is normal and everyone else is doing it so it is fine.

In case the name Sally Donald doesn’t mean anything to you, she is an avatar for the soulless, meaningless, venal mess that the modern SNP has become. You may know her as the woman who thought it was funny to say it out loud – she is the one who referred to the SNP’s election battle bus as the ‘Gravy Bus’. She was telling us she saw the SNP as a means of self enrichment.

She was a red flag in plain sight. Her ‘This Barbie Goes To Holyrood’ logo really underpinned how utterly unserious this candidate was. I thought of her as the SNP’s Pete Hegseth – US Defence Secretary not because he is qualified but because he isn’t. Trump put him there because he is loyal and clearly inappropriate. It was a statement ‘this is my world now and here’s a fuck you to help it sink in’. 

Sally Donald should never have been a candidate but, the SNP having successfully forced out anyone in the party who ever gave the impression of believing in anything, she was what was left. A pocket-stuffing avatar of the moral corruption of a party where sycophancy is the only currency.

Her mistake was to fiddle disability benefits rather than waiting until she was in power at which point there were multiple avenues for self-enrichment she could have pursued. Dubious expenses claims perhaps, or a place on an Aleo (or is that only a second-salary perk for councillors?). Or wait until she can cash in as a lobbyist later.

I trust the Standard Commission has got good lawyers – because they are no longer in their own kangaroo court and will now have to defend their nonsense in a real court of law

Corruption is addictive because if others do it and get away with it, why wouldn’t you want some? It is corrosive – the people who have been really harmed by Sally Donald aren’t taxpayers but really disabled people whose lives she devalues. They live with the suspicion she generates. Trust goes when corruption rises. And so it is inflationary – start with a little you do nothing about and you’re guaranteed to end up with a lot.

This happens because people don’t think they’re going to be challenged. Mostly they haven’t been – but it is changing. I wrote about Fiona Higgins’ case last week (the Glasgow Councillor being suspended for catching an official in unscrupulous behaviour). Her showdown should have been last week but she defended herself.

She has a team of lawyers who have been building up an ‘Article Ten’ defence. As a politician she had a right of free speech and a clear public interest reason for doing so. The Standards Commission accepted that she could make that defence. So she did – her lawyers presented volumes of documentation to show that she had caught an official in malpractice.

The Commission rejected every single bit of evidence she submitted. Refused to allow her to mention any of it. So her lawyers sought an interdict from the High Court to make clear the Commission was not acting in an appropriate manner. The Standards Commission is used to suspending politicians quietly with no-one looking and no real fight put up. This spooked them and they abandoned the hearing.

It is all now going to Judicial Review, but then it always was. The Standard Commission simply didn’t think it would have its role of suppressing democracy in favour of unelected officials challenged. I trust they’ve got good lawyers – because they are no longer in their own kangaroo court and will now have to defend their nonsense in a real court of law. Stay tuned.

Another example of ‘didn’t appear to expect to have to answer for themselves’ is Dorothy Bain. This is a different category, but that’s the point. I really started out thinking this whole ‘advanced warning to Swinney’ stuff was a bit of a nothing burger. It was clearly wrong, but that sort of wrong happens all the time in Scotland and no-one seems to care. It felt fairly minor.

It’s just that, quite remarkably, the more she talks the worse it gets. She fired out a list of other times the First Minister had been informed of criminal proceedings like that would make it go away. But the list was all major organised crime or big abuse cases. They all had clear wider implications for policing, for public safety, for social work… Suddenly you could see why they were referred to senior politicians, and it only made more obvious the inappropriateness of sharing details of the Murrell case.

It was as if she thought it impertinent to ask, threw out some random list of stuff and expected us to not read it. So we read it and it just made things worse. Then she reassured us she told Swinney only, like, seconds before it was public knowledge anyway. Then it turns out that isn’t true (we’re all working on a leak; it isn’t public knowledge until Murrell appears in court).

There is only one real rule with corruption; if you turn a blind eye it will multiply

Then I realise the leak is because someone in either the police or the prosecution service thinks the delay of the hearing until after the election is corrupt. Gotta say it certainly doesn’t look good. But then it turns out Bain told Swinney all about this a year before she admitted to doing so. Claims she forgot. Hmmm. She then takes a shot at being smart arsed. Her line on this is worth quoting:

“It would have been quite improper for me to make a whimsical or ill informed reference to a document that I hadn’t seen before entering the Chamber and being asked in an unprecedented way in relation to a live case.” Oh Ms Bain, did you have your eyes closed when you wrote it? Why not skip the whimsy and give us a serious response to the revelation that you wrote a document and then appear to have lied about it? She seems to me to have come perilously close to misleading the Parliament twice in quick succession.

In truth, it is Dorothy Bain who has made me start to think this is a bigger issue than I thought it was. It is an awful lot of dodgy behaviour if everything is really in order. She strongly gives of the impression ‘no, I can’t really explain how what I did is appropriate but I’m so surprised to be asked at all I’m just throwing random things at you and hoping you’ll go away’.

Of course this stuff just winds its merry way right through government. A highlight for me this week was the discovery that the Boss of Scottish Water is getting paid a bajillion pounds. The reason given? Well, his Board are all private sector and that is normal for them. This is said as if it’s an explanation when to me it looks like an admission of guilt.

Why is the Board all private sector? Why does that mean they can just pick salaries out of the air and pass it on to bill payers? If the Board were all circus clowns would he have been paid in custard pies? Is there no policy or constraint in Scotland’s public sector? Is it truly a free-for-all? Is the lesson that everyone whose Board isn’t mainly private sector should get their act together and change their Board?

In every instance here the same thing rears its head – behaviour that looks outrageous to an ordinary member of the public being raised but then met with what looks like incredulity as those being questioned throw out flailing and meaningless pap that in their heads make sense because in their heads they should never have been asked because in their heads it is normal.

Do we really need to wait until the Murrell trial to state clearly that the SNP has a corruption problem, because there is more than one reason to feel that it clearly has a corruption problem. Sally Donald is the human embodiment of self-entitled grift, making her the perfect candidate for election in the modern SNP.

And it is a culture which is killing trust in democracy. There is only one real rule with corruption; if you turn a blind eye it will multiply. And once it is widespread enough to constitute normal practice, there is little you can do about it.

But perhaps there is a reset coming, because these questions are being asked more and more frequently now. If the answers given so far tell us anything much it’s that they don’t have an actual defence for how they act. I’d like to believe it could lead to change, but the history of corruption shows one more feature – it is unyielding and difficult to shift.

Source: Corruption has three characteristics: it is corrosive, addictive and inflationary