[Robin McAlpine Blog] Serious people are consistent

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Serious people are consistent

As I often point out, the mechanics of politics and the mechanics of a con trick operate similarly. Politics and governance is so complex and diverse that it is very difficult to know what you’re ‘buying’. You can’t ‘know’ politician X or Y will fix the NHS; you can only have varying degrees of confidence that they can.

Con tricks work by projecting the confidence that you will deliver on a promise, false or otherwise. We hear the promise but we follow the confidence, and it’s the same in politics. More than that, this continues through into government. Can you get civil servants to follow you, can you wrestle others into submission during negotiations, can you get the public to believe what you tell them is happening?

It is therefore very risky and generally damaging in the long term if you take actions which undermine an audience’s reasons to have confidence in you. My concern is that that is what has just happened in the case of Scottish independence.

John Swinney has just done a 180 on the trigger mechanism for progressing talks on independence. It is only a few weeks since everyone was clearly whipped to say that the pre-existing strategy (that the only legitimate trigger was giving the SNP an overall majority in its own right) was the right and proper one and the only one that would work.

Now it looks like that wasn’t the only option after all. It seems now that he will seek progress based on a majority of pro-independence parties of any stripe in the Scottish Parliament. Under usual circumstances that would be considered a jarring, major U-turn, particularly this close to an election. This election is so insipid that people seem generally to shrug at everything.

So it probably won’t make any difference to the result – but that doesn’t mean it won’t make any difference. And (you’re going to have to bear with me for a minute), it’s going to make a difference despite making no difference whatsoever.

I’m clearly going to have to unpack that. Let’s start with ‘it won’t make any difference’. It won’t. Whether the request came from an SNP that had a majority in its own right or whether it is a request that comes from the SNP that has a pro-indy majority by including Green MSPs, the answer was going to be ‘no’ anyway.

Flipping on policy like this from one extreme to another makes us look unserious

We can look at why in two different ways and it won’t make any difference. If we look at a ‘how strong is the mandate’ question, we find that the answer is ‘not very’. I’ve just had a double check on this and the highest combined Green/SNP vote in polling for the election so far is about 40 per cent of votes cast.

It’s a little complicated because the Greens aren’t standing in many constituencies, but if you take the first vote then the best is about SNP 35, Green five and if you take the second then it is 29 and 12. (I know there are some outlier polls but this is taken from a raw summary of all the polls – look for yourself here).

If the SNP crawled its way to 30 on the list and the Greens bounced up to 20, it’s still barely a majority of votes cast. Remember, at the last election the SNP got 48 and the Greens got eight and a 56 per cent majority wasn’t enough, so I don’t believe 40 is a crushing mandate that can’t be ignored, which (in politics) means it will be ignored.

The other reason is simply that Westminster is in chaos and even a legitimate mandate would probably be likely to receive short shrift in the immediate term. There is very likely to be some kind of leadership challenge within the UK Government and until it settles down, no-one is going to do anything even remotely like giving Scotland a referendum.

That’s what I mean by not making a difference, at least in the short to medium term. It wouldn’t have worked anyway and 40 per cent isn’t a mandate. But in the longer term it does have consequences, even if they’re only perceptional.

Let me put this as simply as I can – flipping on policy like this from one extreme to another makes us look unserious. I thought the SNP’s original policy was stupid (at the time it looked almost impossible the SNP would achieve it, and it still probably won’t). Creating a condition you can’t meet is unwise if you want to keep the issue alive.

But having adopted it the party went to some lengths to project confidence in its policy. One review of its recent conference highlighted the number of delegates who were bullishly ready to say that Swinney had it spot on and it was the right policy. Like I say, in politics it’s good to be right but essential to look like you’re right.

Now it looks like people were bullshitting. It was exactly the right proposal until we decide it wasn’t so do keep up. You can frame this any way you want (they never really meant it, they’ll say anything, if they can flip on this…, it’s so cynical, Swinney Always Chickens Out, this lot lack credibility), all of it is bad.

Remember, Swinney has two audiences here if he’s serious, and this does harm with both. One audience is the other side in a negotiation, whether that is Westminster politicians in pursuit of a Section 30 Order or a negotiating team actually agreeing the technical terms of such an order. In both cases this makes the other side’s job easier.

If you tell people ‘this is the end of the road’ then you pull new road out your back pocket as soon as it is convenient for you, you do not look confident, you look like a chancer

Just to take the politicians as an example, if I was advising I’d give a simple instruction – just keep him talking about him things. If you can keep him talking about having flip-flopped and U-turned, you win. ‘Can I get a biscuit?’/’you said you’d tidy your room first’ is not going to turn out to be a conversation about biscuits.

Keeping Swinney on uncomfortable territory is now much easier. Say what you want, the other side may be anti-democratic (depending on your view) but they are at least clear and consistent. The SNP keeps saying opposing things. In the media, that’s a dark abyss which will suck you down.

The bigger problem though is with the other audience, the electorate. I know I’m like a stuck record on this but it’s because it’s true; the key voters we need to swing to independence are not unsympathetic to the idea of independence but repeatedly question whether we’re serious, whether we’re actually ready to deliver, whether we have a plan.

And this stuff, this saying one thing then saying the opposite according to what suits us any given day, is a big part of what they mean. If we were a serious liberation movement we wouldn’t be shifting our position every time the weather changes.

I totally get what has happened here and why. The original strategy was to goose the SNP vote in the election by trying very, very hard to give demotivated supporter a motivation, cynical and wrong but it makes sense. The second strategy is just ‘Save Swinney’ stuff. I’ve been pointing out for a while that the trade-off for Swinney is that unless he delivers a majority he has literally run out of road. There is no spinning this out further.

Well now there is, by just totally contradicting himself. As it stood, independence was probably going to be dead for five years after the election. That would have been very painful for Swinney internally. Now they think they’ve just opened up some additional tarmacadam about the right size to accommodate a kicked can. The problem is credibility.

If you tell people ‘this is the end of the road’ then you pull new road out your back pocket as soon as it is convenient for you, you do not look confident, you look like a chancer. Have you seen what it looks like when a mark loses confidence in a con artist? It’s brutal. It’s a sudden switch. There is no coming back.

That’s the risk here. I’m not sure anyone really believed the original Swinney pledge but I can’t see how they can believe in the new one at all. Perhaps this is better for Swinney than potential trench warfare with an unhappy party from day one of his new regime, but it is definitely not better for the long term interests of independence.

For 12 years now the only consistent feature of SNP strategy is that giving them and their friends jobs first is always the initial perquisite for any action on independence. But all con tricks hit the rails at some point (no-one is conned forever), like all political careers end in failure. In both cases the trick is to be far enough away with their money in your pocket when it does.

U-turning with a week to go to an election is not the way to do it. It seems foolish to imagine there won’t be consequences.

Source: Serious people are consistent