[Robin McAlpine Blog] Ruling class impunity is out of control

[ALBA-Bot]

Ruling class impunity is out of control

You may know this. In February 1567, Mary Queen of Scots’s husband Lord Darnley was murdered. More specifically he was murdered by the Fourth Early of Bothwell, James Hepburn. It wasn’t really a complicated case and should have resulted in a simple conviction.

But instead Bothwell flooded the city with his armed followers and intimidated the witnesses to the point where the trial collapsed and he got away with it all – I mean really got away with it given that he then went and kidnapped Mary and coerced her into marriage.

That is how the world worked for the powerful; justice could easily be evaded by using their power to quash legitimate procedures designed to hold people to account equally. It is a long-standing Scottish tradition which is being faithfully upheld by the Scottish Government to this day.

That is the only conclusion I can draw from the news that Craig Mearns is back at work. As I hope you know, I generally do not like picking on individual people who do not pursue political power, I’m not a fan of the culture of calling for someone to be fired every five minutes and for all I know he might be a lovely person.

But here are the facts of the case; he is the Director of Operations at Historic Environment Scotland on a salary of £130,000 (dear god), who was at a work event when he referred to waiters of south Asian descent as ‘the chocolates’ (WTF?), who was not suspended but rather allowed to be signed of on full pay with ‘stress’ (how on earth…) and is now coming back to work like nothing happened with only one condition…

…He’s got to do a training course on racism. Racism is an obscure subject which has been little discussed of late and is little known among the governing classes so it is perfectly natural for them to be running around shouting nasty racist shit at waiters. These are honest mistakes anyone could make.

Except that is the opposite of the truth. It is (checks) 2026 and we have just been through a decade of extensive debate about racism and our failure to come to terms with it. Someone in a promoted position who missed this should be fired anyway. An organisation which at no point in the last decade sent any kind of memo to staff saying ‘don’t be racist because its wrong’ needs disbanded.

Is there any ruling class sin not absolvable through the introduction of some token training course or other?

And absolutely anyone (a welder, a cleaner, a high school kid) who doesn’t know that using racist epithets to describe an entire category of people based on their skin colour is absolutely unacceptable in the work place is a liability. My kids were put straight on this at primary school.

It is farcical. At this rate the truly inexplicable level of organisational failure at HES is going to be ‘sorted’ by sending another one of them on ‘why you don’t twerk on guests at a work function’ lessons, another to ‘using public property for personal entertaining purposes isn’t allowed’ school and then getting Angus Robertson on a ‘how to be a Cabinet Secretary’ degree. All good then?

This should really be expanded, no? We could get Michael Matheson on a ‘how to use an iPad and why pretending you didn’t watch the football and really it was your kids is a bit off’ training and he could just slot back into government. Peter Mandelson could do a class on a ‘it’s not real corruption until you’ve been fired four times for being dodgy so don’t do it again’ course then we could get him straight on Donald Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’.

This approach appeared to have been used on Jefferey Epstein who at some point seems to have acquired such a dossier of evidence of abuse that powerful people sent him on a ‘stop raping underage girls’ course and called it a day at that. Oh had Jimmy Saville only seen that bright dawn…

Is there any ruling class sin not absolvable through the introduction of some token training course or other? If Peter Murrell is found guilty, will he be sentenced to arithmetic?

So why are we mucking around? I can tell you one thing for sure; this is the definition of government efficiency. A £100 training course and done? We could empty the prisons with an investment of peanuts. "Mr Ferguson, I hereby unsentence you on condition that you do a class on why breaking into your neighbour’s house and beating him up is really not on."

It never ends, it recurs again and again, a national fuck you to a population that is growing sick of being lectured by people who never face consequences no matter what they do

I’ll tell you why, because fuck the plebs. Sandy Peggie didn’t get to pop of for a couple of months on semi-dignified health leave and then come back with some token training course and all else good. Nor did any of the other hundreds of ordinary workers who will have been harshly judged by public organisations all over the country for failures of behaviour.

Because impunity is for people on a salary of £100,000 or more. For them there is no consequence, ever. So complete is this impunity that the government doesn’t mind if you know. Even when it is really pushed into a corner it just shouts ‘look, there is nothing you can do about it so off you fuck you nobodies’.

This is really massive, screaming, undisguised class warfare now. You put a foot wrong you’re fucked, one of us puts a giant big clown foot wrong and he’ll get a £170,000 payoff for working three days at a ferry company which no-one seems to have thought he was competent to run.

But it’s all a lovely redemption arc, isn’t it? Social media is just bad cinema and likes nothing better than a redemption arc. "See, even Darth Vader got to be the good guy at the end of Return of the Jedi and he literally blew up whole planets, so we should all be sorted".

There is a ‘twitter satirist’ called @dril who is perhaps our best guide on this. He is brilliantly adept at capturing and distilling the shallowness of social media commentary, and he produced a tweet which demonstrated this problem with the redemption arc perfectly. I can’t find it but it went something like:

"My cop movie concept; there is a bad cop who murders women at night but then he decides it is wrong to murder women so he stops and then we like him."

And that about sums it up. In the real world, redemption is difficult and painful. Holywood gets this in a way that the Scottish Government clearly doesn’t. A redemption is meant to be earned through sacrifice. Remember, Darth Vader has to suffer and be about to die before he gets his redemption arc. He didn’t take three months paid leave and do a training course.

It is utter, disgusting, two-faced, self-interested abuse of every power granted to them by the ruling classes of Scotland. It never ends, it recurs again and again, a national fuck you to a population that is growing sick of being lectured by people who never face consequences no matter what they do.

So I guess it’s best just to lean into it then. After tea I’m going to knock together a training course on ‘why lying about dead babies is wrong’. I have a feeling it may do lucrative business some time in the near future.

Source: Ruling class impunity is out of control