It’s been a little while since I cast an eye over Scottish politics. After a week off buried in sawdust and surrounded by power tools during which I actually managed not to think about the domestic political scene, now seems like a good time. I will try and explain why I’m not filled with hope by looking at four issues.
First of all, while I continue to believe John Swinney is the least unknown property in Scottish politics and his track record is much less impressive than many believe, and while I think he started abysmally with the whole Matheson thing, I had seen a couple of signs that maybe just maybe he was pulling things together a bit.
This basically revolved around the fact that they were dumping a chunk of the legislation which was most likely to give them highly predictable headaches. For my money they were a long way from dumping them elegantly (why it took so long to acknowledge that the juryless trial proposal was never a runner I don’t know). But they’re better dumped than not.
But I just don’t see any evidence that they are getting anything together at all. It seems mainly to be about poor political judgement – and a rigid, visionless managerialism that seems little less obsessed with control than the preceding regimes.
Let’s just start with the obvious; just before I went on leave Neil Gray had to apologise for taking government limos to see his favourite football team. Dear god what is wrong with politicians? My children can easily identify why that is wrong. What blinds them to this other than their enduring sense of self importance and self entitlement?
But having finally realised the apology was inevitable and after five days to craft a statement, they come up with ‘really sorry – my only regret is that I didn’t do it more’. If you missed it I suspect you think I’m kidding or exaggerating, but that is literally the line they came up with. It was an attempt not to admit fault, only to acknowledge that ‘things could have been handled better’ (as failures always say).
Who writes this shit? Had he said sorry the next day this was a non-event. Five days makes it an event. Five days with that response makes it incompetent. There is no excuse for this stuff. This really does seem to be at the heart of Swinneyism – ‘never give those fucking bastards a win’, with the bastards concerned being whomever is putting him under pressure.
It takes some going for a leader of a devolved administration to breach the Landmine Ban Treaty
But it’s only a glimpse of his poor political judgement. What on god’s green earth made him think that breaking with global political protocol and intervening in the US election was a good idea? You’re simply never meant to do it, however strongly you feel. I mean, did all Swinney and Alex Coal Hamilton’s efforts help any? It has damaged Scotland.
Likewise, what on earth is Swinney doing endorsing and encouraging the West to supply landmines to Ukraine for? That is literally a breach of Article 1(c) of the Landmine Ban Treaty to which the UK is signed up, and it takes some going for a leader of a devolved administration to breach the Landmine Ban Treaty. (Can’t link, tweet seems to have been deleted.)
This is all redolent of a politician who isn’t good at politics. Matheson, Gray, Trump, landmines and all the rest of it – and can you think of examples of good judgement? I struggle.
It’s not just his strategic leadership, it’s his policy leadership too. John Swinney really hates the Scottish local government sector. I don’t mean antipathetic, I mean outright hostility. It goes way back to his Finance Minister days and is a result of his deeply partisan nature. Cosla isn’t a tame organisation he can buy off and he doesn’t like that.
I don’t really know how the dreadful National Care Service legislation really came into being. I continue to believe it was mainly the result of the usual bad ‘policymaking’ (actually, empty announcement making) from Sturgeon which senior officials seem determined to turn into a privatisation charter.
What I know is that Swinney likes it because it very substantially disempowers local government and centralises power in his own hands. Except as everyone now knows, everyone hates it. So why does it keep coming back in the same form? We honestly believed that an almost total boycott was the killer blow, but last week we discovered that no, it’s only the umpteenth pause.
They’re clearly trying to find a way to bring it back again. From the outset their strategy was to pit care-experienced people and informal carers against local government care providers (not tricky because this emaciated, managerialised service lets people down through lack of resource). And now they’re at it again, pitting disabled campaigners against Cosla to create a justification for not backing down.
It’s really appalling, and heartbreakingly now the Greens are in on the game. God knows why but Patrick Harvie put a lot of effort into preventing his conference from voting to withdraw support. It appears that they too want to pick a fight with Cosla, though for their own reasons. They are certainly overturning the will of their party. This is everything that is wrong in Scottish politics.
So what hope anything will change? I mean I find increasingly that Swinney is at times behaving as a vaguely malevolent figure seeking a kind of revenge on his perceived enemies in Scottish politics, but showing no more competence than his predecessors. Will this change?
It is hard to fathom how bad Starmer has to be, how mediocre Anas Sarwar has to be, to let this pretty useless Scottish Government extend a poll lead based on nothing
Enter Stephen Flynn. Honestly, I’m remaining open-minded about Flynn because I don’t know enough and I’m struggling to get a read on him. Other than ‘Stephen Flynn’, what does Stephen Flynn stand for? The only real conviction policy I’ve seen him take is to support the oil and gas industry.
He’s clearly a capable communicator, but then there is a reason I used to refer to Mhairi Black as ‘Mhairi One-Speech’. Pulling off a bit of political vaudeville is all well and good but in itself it doesn’t mean much. And being good at chucking insults at Tories is shooting fish in a barrel. I mean, the Tories even made Keir Starmer look good and he’s clearly bad at his job.
I have never seen Flynn do a TV round defending the Scottish Government track record. Show me that and I’ll tell you whether he is a capable communicator. I fear there is a reason he never does. And certainly he doesn’t have 30 seconds of ministerial experience. God knows what his politics are (not getting an ideological read on a politician is seldom a good thing) and I’m told he’s not only close to energy corporations but big equity investors too.
Perhaps he is really good, and he’s clearly more capable than 95 per cent of his colleagues. Certainly he shows more spark and wit in his engagements with the media than anyone else I can think of in the party. I am certainly not saying he’s a lost cause.
But is this really the best the SNP has for a next generation? An untested guy with the gift of the gab but who only takes easy gigs whom I’d not heard of a couple of years ago? That’s it? That’s all they’ve got? If I had some doubts before, they weren’t helped when he announced that the job he just applied for a couple of months ago isn’t good enough and now he was promoted.
Has he no political acumen? If he was coming to the end of a five-year term at Westminster, by all means go ahead and jump to Holyrood. He’d have had my full support. But months after being elected? And still intending to cling that job so there wouldn’t be a bye election which I’m pretty sure the SNP would lose as a result? Did he think Scotland would cheer at hypocrisy?
If his aim was Holyrood he’d have made it with no real problem – all he had to do was sacrifice a Westminster salary for 18 months. In not doing that it also demonstrated either a kind of cowardice (if he always knew he was going to do this) or cynical opportunism (if this is just because he was re-elected with significantly reduced status).
I really am trying to keep an open mind, but I’m not going to be naïve. He made a complete mess of this and that kind of decision-making is not an upgrade for the party.
Which leaves Scottish Labour, which ought to be climbing higher and higher in the polls every day but is actually doing the opposite. It is hard to fathom how bad Starmer has to be, how mediocre Anas Sarwar has to be, to let this pretty useless Scottish Government extend a poll lead based on nothing.
What signs are there devolution might stop disappointing us any time soon? Not in government, not in politics, not in party succession, not in the opposition, not in any way I can see. It’s heartbreaking. Scottish devolution is like a patient whose vital signs are all fading. Revitalising the patient is perfectly possible, but its physicians seem neither interested or capable.
I mean, Lorna Slater won an award at an awards ceremony for politician of the year. It seems that botching and killing a deposit return scheme is the best environmental contribution of the year. Once again, god help us all…