Indy: which masters of the sooniverse?

We have a United Kingdom with:

• an operational principle of government that is neither designed for nor fit for what it needs to do in today’s world;
• Northern Ireland currently in retrogressive mode;
• Wales flexing its muscles when it looks at what Scotland is getting and is getting away with;
• Scotland playing the prima donna – it’s all about us;
• England disenfranchised with no say in its own government and with much of it further away than Wales from the seat of UK government;
• the UK government paying serious attention only to the 2015 General Election;
• terminal tedium.

We have a parliamentary system which a devolved Scotland bought into and appears to see no need to change, where:

• five year terms between general elections fatally obstruct strategic future planning;
• long term planning of all kinds is simply not done – no one has time to take on the endemic problems of the NHS, for instance;
• party politics which, allied to five year terms and our anachronistic adversarial system of ‘government’ ensures that the country has no stable policy platform for development but staggers from one partisan agenda to the next, giving the other buggins a turn – and, at any given time, is denied the service of much of the best talent in the house;
• the checks to the parliamentary system are applied by a majority of time serving mediocrities sitting in unelected patronage in the House of Lords;
• the home nations are asymmetrically governed, with the biggest and most economically powerful, England, denied devolved power over its own affairs.

We have a Scotland becoming a worryingly totaliltarian state, where:

• successful prosecutions will no longer to be required to produce corroborative evidence;
• police are being routinely armed at work across Scotland, without that change to operational practice being made public or consulted upon beforehand;
• police powers of ‘stop and search’ are being used against children;
• all children from birth to legal maturity are already being given state guardians, without public consultation and with  authority superceding that of the child’s parents;
• the Scottish civil service has become highly politicised and no longer acts with trustworthy objectivity in support of codes of practice;
• the national audit commission looks the other way;
• the media are institutionally intimidated from criticising the independence prospectus – there was even serious attention paid to ways of shutting down For Argyll – nats good; gnats bad;
• individuals who express support for the union or who present evidence to challenge nationalist orthodoxies, experience behind the scenes ministerial efforts to threaten their job security;
• senior managers who simply get across senior government ministers lose their jobs;
• businesses are intimidated from expressing commercial concerns about independence by hints of less favourable state regard in the future;
• ordinary people who express concerns about the independence prospectus are hit by a swarm of personally abusive cybernats who, from our own first hand evidence of behaviours, are clearly an organised force.

But hang on. We may – rightly and necessarily -  be unhappy with Scotland’s sliding into a totalitarian state under the SNP- but they learned some of their bad habits at the breast of the Union and they suckled hard – although they fail to acknowledge the debt. Nothing new there.

Much of the degradation of our national politics is the direct consequence of former Prime Minister, Tony Blair’s long and highly formative regime. History will certainly hold him responsible for being the active agent of the greatest weakening of parliamentary democracy and ethical politics the United Kingdom has seen; and for being the man who rammed us into the sights of Islamist terrorists for the first time.

But Blair was successful in winning three elections and Alastair Campbell controlled the media like an orchestra with an electric probe disguised as a baton. The SNP – amongst others, marvelled, admired and copied. The end, for too many, continues to justify the means.

Blair’s legacy is:

• the ‘reform’ of the unelected House of Lords, a constitutional mess;
• the dilution of the authority of the elected House of Commons in its circumvention and in its deceeiving;
• the introduction of an invasion force of advisers and spinners – producing government ministers who cannot think their own thoughts or speak their own speeches but who have these core functions supplied to them by barely post-pubescent ‘advisers’ who are unelected and have no experience or history of responsibility to validate their ‘advice’ or the authority they have been gifted;
• the politicisation of the civil service and its invasion by a class of special advisers deemed to be temporary civil servants, working from within and on the pubic payroll, who may, in some cases, instruct permanent civil servants;
• the growth of naked patronage – right from the start. Rory Bremner recalled that when, at the outset, he refused an invitation to write speeches for Tony Blair, the PM, during a game of tennis said to him by way of persuasion: ‘How does Lord Bremner sound?’;
• the increasing access and power of the business lobby – Bernie Ecclestone, Lakshi Mittal, the Hinduja Brothers, Diageo; Powerject… shall we go on?;
• the intimidation of the media – the Guardian’s performance guarded nothing; and the BBC has not and will not recover from its spineless collapse in the face of the indefensible and discredited Hutton report on the still unexplained death of Dr David Kelly;
• the ‘instant rebuttal’ unit – an ‘attack dog’ system instituted by Alastair Campbell [for which, one way or another, Dr David Kelly paid with his life] – and a system faithfully replicated in Scotland by an observant SNP and evidenced in Campbell Gunn’s instant briefing against Clare Lally;
• the acceptance of taking personal profit from the privilege of public office;
• the destructive arrogance of serial interference in the nature and affairs of countries whose cultures are utterly foreign to us – with the chain of consequences in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East a daily nightmare for thousands of vulnerable civilians, while ‘The Quartet’s Envoy to the Middle East’, Tony Blair, stays unusually silent but is known, with Alastair Campbell, to be advising the new Egyptian President, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, for money;
• the serial passing of illiberal and poorly drafted legislation, with the enthusiastic aid of Home Secretary, David Blunkett and designed to silence legitimate public criticism – as with the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act 2005, which siubstantially extended and simplified the powers of arrest by police and introduced restrictions on public protests within a narrow radius of the Palace of Westminster. Under this Act – and quickly, Maya Evans was arrested opposite the Cenotaph in October 2005 – simply for refusing to stop reading aloud the names of British soldiers who had been killed in Iraq following the Blair/Bush driven war there in 2003. She was the first person in the UK to be convicted under this Act – for taking part in an unauthorised demonstration within 1 km of Parliament Square. She has a criminal record which survived a visit to the appeal court;
• the translation of the role of Prime Minister – first amongst equals, to an undeclared neo-presidential status.

It is not hard to see the birth of many of the brutalist, opportunist, centralist and vainglorious SNP traits amongst the Blair ‘achievements’.

There has, moreover, been a recent incident in today’s coalition administration at Westminster where a senior aide to UK Secretary for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, is claimed to have threatened potential shut down to foodbank charity, the Trussell Trust, for being critical of the government in its response to poverty. Naturally, for propagandist purposes, the SNP squealed in virgin horror – but the truth is they’re all at it.

The UK Government might well have similar totalitarian urges that predate and tutored the SNP Scottish Government’s but, where a totalitarian regime in a small country has you by the short and curlies, a larger state of similar ilk but with the centre at a greater distance, offers manoeuvering room.

On issues of trustworthy government, voters in the indy referendum in September have a simple choice between our liars and their liars, our megalomaniacs and their megalomaniacs, our thugs and their thugs, our duffers and their duffers. While the devil you know is supposed to be preferable, sometimes the devil you know is the one who knows too much.

Flicking a coin is abdication – so we will have to strip out the personalities, the parties and the tricks and go back to the fundamental realities of the two political identities on offer, to tease out where Scotland’s and the UK’s most secure interests lie.

We will progressively be doing just that.