[Robin McAlpine Blog] Starmer, Swinney and the rest are as bad as the public thinks they are

[ALBA-Bot]

Starmer, Swinney and the rest are as bad as the public thinks they are

Look where you will and see if you can find a sign that politics isn’t screwed. Worse, look and see if the commentator class has an explanation of why politics is screwed. The politicians are bemused, their media chums are bemused – whatever can be going on?

The answer is that weak but entitled men think they have the right to change the world without bothering to learn anything of substance about why the world needs changed, so they sit atop the machinery of government and expect it to deliver adjectives on demand. Then, when it doesn’t, they get tetchy, angry and try to suppress dissent and scrutiny. Why they fail and why we hate them isn’t complicated, but the media class think it’s beyond the wit of man to understand,

The current saviour of Britain was an irrelevant afterthought the last time he tried to lead the party a few years ago. Burnham, the ‘oh yeah, I’d forgotten about him’ man of the Blair years is now a dynamic Mayor who can (checks) make busses run like they do in every other European capital city! He can commission a bus using public money! Quick! Suspend the constitution and make him emperor!

Then there is Scotland. Here the liberal commentator classes are still on a Sturgeon come-down, totally taken in by her routine, unable to see what she really was, they still can’t bring themselves to accept that she was bad at her job. So they have no meaningful frame to understand Swinney, because they don’t have an analysis of the Sturgeon failure because in their hearts they don’t think she failed.

They’re wrong. The Sturgeon/Swinney SNP is failing for the same reason Starmer Labour is failing – neither of them have any defined mission. Wanting things to be ‘better’ isn’t a mission any more than wanting to be at the other side of a river is the same thing as building a bridge. Go and try and put your finger on what the SNP theory of change is and drop me an email if you come up with one.

Both Swinney and Starmer are incredibly limited politicians. Both fundamentally think politics is a ‘machine’ that you ‘run’ because ‘you’re the kind of person that ought to run the machine’. Neither of them has got far beyond that – its a system you run, not actual decisions you make or a direction you choose.

Starmer seems to have been a proxy for something else his whole life as far as I can tell. He was made Prime Minister for the same reason he was made chief prosecutor in England – the people who really run things needed a hollow man to front for them.

Swinney is just a mediocre family accountant who happens to exist while a weird set of circumstances happen to have coincided which means that it literally doesn’t matter how bad he and his cabinet perform, nothing can touch them ever. So he just keeps running the machine.

It almost goes without saying that these politically-ignorant hollow men are then susceptible to those they think are powerful

Here’s the reality though – government isn’t a machine. If you need an analogy it’s more like a factory which contains machines. The machinery of government is there to make things happen and it is the politicians who are supposed to decide what that is, what the factory makes. But both Swinney and Starmer fail to understand this. They think the factory is all set up – all they need to do is press the start button each morning and take the salary.

Except someone set the factory up to make plastic dog turds and now neither Swinney nor Starmer can for the life of themselves work out why everything they touch comes out looking like shit. So they ask someone to increase the tension in the belt that takes the unformed brown plastic to the mould and hope that this time it won’t be a shit that comes out. Then a shit comes out.

They have not failed as governments because of ‘external factors beyond their control’ (you know that ‘external factors beyond your control’ is the definition of being alive, right?). They are failing because no matter how bad those external factors get, they do the same thing over and over.

The second problem stems from this. The liberal classes in England can’t begin to fathom why Starmer is so unpopular and consider it to be some flaw in the public – that they’re just angry or stupid or bad ‘uns or something. The same class of person in Scotland are still on that Sturgeon come-down for the same reason. They were all taken in when they shouldn’t have been and now they’re all too embarrassed to admit it.

Why does everyone hate Starmer? Because he’s a fake. The gap between what he says he is and what he actually is is so vast you need to be blind not to see it. He says he’s competent but he’s not. He says he’s bold and that’s just daft. He talks about ambition but has none (other than for himself).

There are various personality types in life where we can see their flaws very clearly. A fake is much harder to spot, not least because they’re often very compelling. But once you get a sniff that someone actually is a fake, it’s over. No-one likes imposters, traitors, spies, conmen and all the other ‘say they’re one thing when they’re the opposite’ types.

The liberals commentators just think Starmer isn’t a great communicator. That he is an absolute imposter doesn’t cross their minds. Do you believe all the Union Jack stuff? Because people who care about flags don’t. Do you believe the human rights stuff? Because those of us appalled at Israel do not. He is unique – he has an individual lie for each of us.

Swinney is a fake too, but in a much softer way. He is the safe pair of hands who has messed up so often listing the messes would take up the rest of the article. He is the ‘wise elder statesman’ who seems to have no basic awareness of what is going on. From asking for Kneecap to be banned from Scotland to not understanding why anyone would object to a data centre, he seems to have no grip on the big issues of our era.

So he keeps footering around with a summit here or a bung there (today he seems to be dealing with the racist violence over the weekend with… a £200k racism training fund for schools amounting to about £80 a school, which would be funny if it wasn’t so pitiful). People don’t hate Swinney, they just don’t pay much attention to him.

It almost goes without saying that these politically-ignorant hollow men are then susceptible to those they think are powerful. John Swinney is the Factor; but so is Starmer. Swinney keeps the countryside safe for big landed estates by refusing to pass serious land reform legislation and refusing to enforce that which has been passed, Starmer is a middle manager waiting for the Tony Blair Institute to tell him what to think.

Politics has become a home for weak yet strangely self-entitled men and women who have never put the effort into finding a mission in life but have never let that get in the way of their self-importance

Which takes us to the final feature of both. They are weak, and so like all weak men they tend towards authoritarianism. Swinney’s performance since the Murrell scandal is so craven and so dishonest he should be utterly discredited – so he uses power to crack down. He fails so often that refusing to comply with the law (while he ‘has a wee think about it’) is just a normal day.

Above all, him and Ross have the scumbag journalists in a little jail cell now. Well, a holding pen, which is just potatoes/potatos. Two weak men with no great purpose in life who actually think they should be allowed to put people in parliament on a student visa or biological men in a women’s prison even after ruled illegal – and because neither has a good answer they expect not to be asked.

Swinney and Greer as thugs is funny (though that’s how they’re behaving). Starmer makes a reasonably compelling thug, his belligerent and patently unconstitutional all-out war on the Labour left was something he carried out with a glee in his eyes. Again, as the liberals in the media wonder why we don’t like him, perhaps his brutish, lying track record towards those among his own core support might be a place to start.

Do I think Burnham has it in him to escape the gravity of all this failure? Here’s my guess – he’s going to turn out to be a Sturgeon, compelling-sounding until you notice that nothing has actually changed.

Why is our politics so totally broken? Because it has become a home for weak yet strangely self-entitled men and women who have never put the effort into finding a mission in life but have never let that get in the way of their self-importance. They claim they are experts at running government but appear to have little understanding of what governing actually means.

They pose as one thing but the gap between that and the thing they actually are is vast. And so, unable to piece this all together in a way that makes them capable of doing their job, instead they find themselves drawn back to authoritarianism, cheating, lying, corruption and scandal, because if they can’t fix society, they’ll sure as hell try and stop the rest of us from knowing it.

This media pen in the Scottish Parliament turns my stomach. Greer gloating over it disqualifies him to my mind. Starmer crying tears for himself when he has been a full-throated supporter of a genocide is too much to bear. ‘Honest’ John Swinney telling us he’s held an inquiry into the Murrell scandal already (which is a lie) and debating whether to implement the law or not is a disgrace.

The fundamental things that are killing politics is the fact that none of them have any understanding of what is broken, any clue where they are going, any willingness to learn or any vision for what a good society should look like now. But fuck, do they love themselves anyway. Servants of the people? If that was true we’d have fired them long ago, but we can’t even seem to do that any more.

Source: Starmer, Swinney and the rest are as bad as the public thinks they are