[Robin McAlpine Blog] 100 days of nothing

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100 days of nothing

Many times I have advised people not to put out a weak press release. No, it isn’t ‘better than nothing’, you’re wasting journalists’ time and you’re highlighting the fact you have nothing to say. And if I’m honest, the Scottish Government’s daily news briefing email is like an illustrated example of this.

But the one sent out on Monday breaks new ground in ‘did you mean to highlight your weakness?’ territory. It is a release about John Swinney’s ‘first’ 100 days since he won the Scottish election. It consists of (deep breath) the stupid and counterproductive middle class homes subsidy he announced before the election, and…

Well, they’re also ‘working on’ the daft school bag promise they made, they are ‘working on’ matching Burnham’s bus far price cap and they are ‘working on’ their vague commitments on breakfast clubs. That’s one semi-delivered bad idea and three half-baked policies that are even half-baked yet; that’s the sum total of the press release.

Meanwhile what I usually tell people when they’re looking at the PR assessment of any given period is o stop and think about what they remember from the period off the top of their head. I can give you a press release telling you what to remember but you’ll remember what you remember anyway.

So what do I remember of Swinney’s first 100 days? Well there was the football bank holiday. And then there was when he got half a millions pounds of public money and gave it to a guy doing a sponsored walk, which was also directly football related. Then he did a football thing sending the players off. Then he went and watched football. 

Then he came home and talked about football a bit. After that he, well, set up a World Cup football legacy fund. In fact if it wasn’t for the fact I get paid to watch what they’re up to, I’d struggle to come up with anything that wasn’t football. What does this tell us?

Swinney isn’t really 100 days in at all, he’s 840 days in

Well, it tells us the same thing twice over. It tells us Swinney has run his course. It tells us that he is leaning heavily into cheap cultural signifiers of popularity and that he has no ideas or ambition left. What is strange for me is the slightly strange mismatch in this – the story of a politician getting stuck or mired or losing momentum and so leaning into national cultural stereotypes is as old as the hills but it’s usually a populist feint.

This is what we see when Trump needs to rile up his base or Berlusconi needed to distract from a sex scandal, which is very un-Swinney. I know he is an actual Scotland football fan but there was a performative nature about it all, one I can’t really see the point of given he was just elected – unless it was to fill a void.

Again, for all my criticism of Nicola Sturgeon, that was another thing she did well. She would play into cultural signifiers all the time but she used them to tell you something about what she wanted you to believe her agenda was, her political persona. It was fake, but Sturgeon did her grandstanding to a more focussed purpose. Swinney is just filling up space.

This is profoundly depressing. It really is a difficult game trying to compare politicians, but I think Swinney may be shaping up to be our worst ever First Minister. It depends how you assess Yousaf – a hapless calamity or a well-meaning guy with a solid agenda who was incapable of delivering. If it was the latter then you have to decide whether failing to deliver an agenda or not having one at all is worse.

But that’s where we are. Swinney isn’t really 100 days in at all, he’s 840 days in. He came in at a snail’s pace and has slowed significantly since. The establishment commentators never ever don’t blow smoke up a leader’s ass (it’s in their nature) but all they can come up with for Swinney is ‘stabilised the party’.

I don’t even believe that to be true. By most measures Swinney has done no such thing, his party has gone backwards. What has saved him (yet again) is the endless ability of Labour and the Tories to discredit themselves further still. He stood still while others failed worse.

The other way you can give some credit to Swinney is just to look at the opposition. He spent the 100 days since the election doing nothing much, but he wasn’t stuck with a party which can’t shut up about marginal issues and can’t get out of the long shadow cast by their candidate selection.

To my eyes right now, Scotland has five parties in decline and the Lib Dems who might be too, it’s hard to tell

The Greens campaign on economic issues, but since returning to parliament they can’t stop themselves mainly talking about the old gender wars talking points. If you’re just going to blurt out the thing you care most about all the time, strategy doesn’t work. Equally, if you just got past bad press on a candidate who is here on a student visa and then have to come up with a convincing reason why someone who said rape was ‘a bit of a spectrum’ has not been suspended, you have a problem.

It looks like what it is. If I’d said rape was a spectrum and bemoaned the demonisation of rapists, I’d have been expelled faster than you can say ‘what the fuck?’. What’s different here? Just the shape and nature of the Green’s hypocrisy which bends itself round their personal preferences rather than be shaped by real principle. It always feels like they serve mainly themselves.

I said at the time that a Scottish Green Party which pivoted towards a Zach Polanski agenda could give Swinney and the SNP a real headache, but I also said that I did not believe Ross Greer’s party was that party and that it would simply revert to type and be a niche affair. That seems to be the path they’ve chosen by default.

The Tories are just playing ‘give us our votes back’ with Reform (who are as useless as you’d expect) with neither feeling relevant to Scotland. And Labour is in a leadership search of which my abiding memory is the picture from the TV debate which left me thinking ‘you two are smiling too much to be receiving a coffin’.

Because ‘undertaker’ is the sense I get of either of them, physically and metaphorically. It is hard to see it mattering much. And, give or take whatever the Lib Dems are doing, that’s your lot, that’s the sum total of Scotland’s national ambition.

Worse than that, this is the burst of energy you get from a new start. This is them energised and racing through their agenda when they still have the vigour and drive. Or it should be. Swinney-SNP should be defining what it stands for other than ‘his turn’. Labour should be alive with new thinking for a new era.

The Greens should be carving out a sharp reform agenda on big issues like the economy or poverty or housing. This is the period when, if all previous administrations are anything to go by, it is at its peak. Everything is down hill from here, but what does down hill from nothing even mean?

Anyone who thinks this problem will solve itself by replacing Swinney with Flynn is only evidence of one more political party convinced it is good enough and it’s only problem is that it isn’t communicating it well enough. That is the moment when you know a party is genuinely fucked. Flynn shows no more signs of ambition or vision than Swinney. I mean no more ambition for Scotland – he’s covered for himself.

Would a fresh technocrat like Mairi McAllan be any better? Will one of the two grim reapers take control of Scottish Labour and revitalise it? Will the Greens every stop talking about toilets? Is there something here I can’t see yet? If so it is very well hidden.

To my eyes right now, Scotland has five parties in decline and the Lib Dems who might be too, it’s hard to tell. Certainly none of them demonstrate any dynamism, any thinking or ideas. They seem – content with this. Or unable to do anything about it. It is a grim picture and I don’t see how it fixes itself.

Another hundred days of this will pass in the blink of an eye. Then another hundred. Then another hundred. Until someone somewhere says ‘enough’ and steps forward with some energy and vision, this is your lot folks. But it’s only 180-odd days until the Euro qualifiers when our First Minister can really get stripped off again and focus on what he does best. Hiding behind a football.

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