[Robin McAlpine Blog] A path of self-justification, all the way to the apocalypse

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A path of self-justification, all the way to the apocalypse

It's pretty petrifying out there. I am hardly alone in finding the many worrying features of the crisis in western democracy deeply alarming. This is the strange thing about it; where we are is petrifying, how we got here is small, petty and mundane. You don't lose trust in a system that makes a few mistakes, you lose trust in a system which feels like it is incapable of working.

Every politician knows the problem – it’s the stuff the other politicians did. They’re all wrong. What is causing the collapse in democracy is what they themselves are doing, almost without exception. All of them. If it was one-bad-man-did-it-and-ran-away, the problem would go away with the bad man who ran away. The problem isn’t a bad actor, it’s an endemic, systemic failure of our political system. Let me show you.

When a First Minister is doing photoshoots with big business promoting projects which they're also adjudicating over (supposedly neutrally), the media shrugs these days. Oh well. And yet this is screamingly wrong and people can sense it.

The government is supposed to act as an honest, impartial judge of whether a project like a large gas-powered power plant is in the public interest when it is looking at planning consent. But what if you've already given the project millions of pounds in subsidies? What does it mean when you're doing promotional videos while decisions are (supposed) still to be made? Does that not sound like corruption?

Yes, yes, it is. This is not how the system is meant to work. The government is meant to be on our side, making sure that big, damaging developments don't happen. If they're subsidising anything it ought to have been after the public benefit test, not before. And First Ministers shouldn't be advertising projects they're supposed to be assessing.

I know this isn’t as corrosive as anything that appalling human Sir Keir Starmer does. He’s actually working hard day after day to prove that they really are all just the same, heartless, corrupt, on-the-take, interchangeable with the last lost of heartless, corrupt, on-the-take chancers. Then again, conspiring with commercial interests over planning is no more corrosive than basically everything the Democrats did in the US – and we know where that ended up.

Likewise, watch First Minister’s Questions and observe how its done. Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon promised to close the attainment gap. In the period after she made that promise the attainment gap widen. Challenged on this, current First Minister John Swinney claims this isn’t true because for five of the seven years before Sturgeon made her promise the attainment gap had closed slightly.

The problem isn’t that we notice all of this, its that each of us notices some of it and it accumulates

But she didn’t say ‘I’m going to take my predecessor’s success and reverse it’, she said ‘I’m going to take my predecessor’s success and improve on it’. Which she didn’t do. And we all know she didn’t do it because the numbers are simple to understand and clear as a bell. So we know Swinney is at it, cynically manipulating information rather than offering honesty.

Over on another planet is Michael Matheson who is fuming that his expenses scandal was blown out of proportion – after all, it was just a simple mistake. I was first to agree, it was a simple mistake. Had his response been honest it would have merited no discussion. But he didn’t own up, he hid, and then when he was found out he lied about it.

The problem here, Mr Matheson, is not that you watched the football (I’d put money on it) and didn’t realise you were using up roaming data. The problem is that afterwards you looked us in the eyes and lied about it. No real contrition has been shown for this, no humility, no real apology, just self-pity. That is why it is a big issue – but hey, keep running at the straw man and perhaps we won’t notice.

No, we don’t notice all of this. I monitor government for a living and I struggle to keep up with the small scale dodgy stuff that goes on all the time. I mean go and have a look at the government’s procurement portal and tell me you think all these contracts are properly scrutinised or frankly necessary. 

The problem isn’t that we notice all of this, its that each of us notices some of it and it accumulates. If you want to explain in simple terms why democracy is where it is then how about ‘they all think they can do whatever they want and so I don’t want to let them’. If voting always, always empowers this behaviour then either don’t vote or vote for something you think might have a different behaviour.

Hence Trump. Hence Farage. They weren’t created overnight, the conditions which pathed their way to power weren’t sudden or abrupt. It is a long, slow journey from trust to not trust. And, really sadly, it is merited. Or at least it is merited enough. The majority of what a government does is honest and driven by public service. It shouldn’t be so difficult to make that all of what government does.

Politicians wish to be judged on part performance. They either want you to focus on the process (which they’re always fixing) or alternatively the outcome (if it’s good), or alternatively the alternative (if it is unattractive). They demand your gaze is shifted from fragment to fragment of what is really happening according to which fragment looks best in any given light.

Except governing isn’t a load of disconnected fragments, its everything you do, everything you don’t do, how you do it and everything that results. It’s the whole lot. The one aspect of government every single one of us is acutely aware of is the decline in public services. What, we ask ourselves, made it so that a services which was working fine ten years ago is now barely functioning?

Because that is now just how it is done, that’s how they all do it, pretending that this is the only way it can be done

‘Quick, look over here! We have a new action plan. No, no, don’t look at our last action plan – this is a process moment.’ The process falls apart and then ‘look, look, this statistic didn’t get worse!’. Aye, but not because of anything you did. So there’s an inquiry into why everything fell apart and, ‘oh, what about that time the other lot did something and it fell apart? Our’s fell apart less badly than theirs fell apart!’.

Here’s the thing; public services are in rapid decline as a long-term outcome of a governing settlement which was revolutionised by Thatcher in the 1980s. That reorientated public service away from public-good=public-good and turned it into commercial-good=public-good. GDP was promoted over health or wellbeing, private sector management ripped public services open, a managing class took control.

Everyone involved in delivery, whether in the public or private sectors, does really well out of this. It’s all big salaries and bonuses and free hand without accountability, and the cannibalising of public funds for personal gain. And because that is now just how it is done, that’s how they all do it, pretending that this is the only way it can be done.

So the people making good on this keep making good and the politicians keep covering for them and telling you that you can’t believe your eyes, what you can see isn’t what you can see at all and in any case none of it is their fault.

This is what we can see; we can see a lot of politicians at it in big or small ways, shrugging off accountability, engaged in endless rhetorical trickery to fool you into thinking what you know isn’t true. It’s the sense that it’s all already decided. It’s the sense of self-entitled arrogance that makes you think you can do PR for a commercial development and expect us to believe you are still an honest arbtrar of whether it is in the public interest.

It is taking £11k to watch football and then lying about it when caught. It’s free tickets to Taylor Swift to keep you entertained while you destroy the lives of disabled people in ways worse than you condemned when it was the other lot. It’s promising change and doing exactly the same. It’s the sense that all of this – all of it – is beyond our control.

It is the disempowerment of citizens through games and lies and smart-arsey. It is the endless, endless self-justified self-pity which convinces politicians that it is not them leading us down the road to the apocalypse but the other lot. After all, that’s only bad people. Like Donald Trump. Not me.

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