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Robin McAlpine +RobinMcAlpine
This account is about trying to hold power to account in Scotland, help people understand what’s really going on and provide some kind of hope that it might actually change
 Joined September 2021    robinmcalpine.org
336 Posts   9 Followers
Common Weal is about to publish an independence strategy paper - but that will never mean we don't value our supporters who don't support independence.
I'm about to launch a piece of work I care deeply about and I fear it runs a serious risk of being distorted, undermined or misappropriated. Can you help?
Why is it that so many things in politics don't make sense to ordinary people? It's because they've been led to believe that politics is waaaay more rational than it really is...
The public inquiry into the Edinburgh Trams disaster is a fairly neat encapsulation of everything that is wrong in public sector Scotland. And yet it is going to change nothing - unless citizens really demand change.
The independence movement now appears to have many possible strategies to achieve its goal - but actually has none. The reason is because the most important part is missing from them all.
Right now in Scotland a corporation which has done untold damage to communities around the globe is mounting a major campaign to do damage in Scotland. Would you be able to tell who it is?
This three-part series ends with the most difficult problems to solve of all - the identity-based, culture war conflicts. There is no easy way to make these go away, but there is a way to make them less bad.
If you want to change someone else's life, the duty to persuade them and listen to their concerns lies on you. The independence movement should learn this lesson.
In a three-part series examining Scotland's big political divides and how to bring peace to them, this first instalment argues that only the powerful in the independence movement can initiate a workable process of reconciliation.
If a four-day week is treated as a soundbite rather than a transformative policy it will fail - and our society cannot afford it to fail. Let's get this right.
The new First Minister made a speech that didn't only sound exactly like the last First Minister, it contained all the same promises too. This is the different approach which might actually save Scotland.
Not a grassroots march but a branding exercise, the gap between what the politicos say is happening and what the public thinks is happening is miles apart.Independence is the victim.
This week has seen a flurry of new political rhetoric on Scotland's economy. But is any of it really new or does any of it mark a fresh start? Not really. This is just more of exactly the same of what isn't working.
I've supported virtually every independence movement initiative for a decade - but I can no longer support the SNP's plans to splinter the movement and replace it with a carefully crafted replica it controls. It's deeply unhealthy.
It may have taken a long time for the cracks to appear in the SNP, but they've been working their way through the party for years. And they're not done - the SNP must reform or accept a long, slow decline before it can recover.
We fail when we try to solve systematic crises one at a time. If the problem is systematic, the solution has to be too. That's what's going wrong in the 'free speech' debate.
Voices are rising inside the independence movement; burn baby burn, they say. They're wrong - and they must be challenged vigorously.
It's dense and technical, but it is super-important. Scotland has lost billions of pounds because of poor negotiation by the Scottish Government and we're all going to pay a price.
Scotland has real brilliance all over the place, but the wider policy infrastructure which would let us make the most of that brilliance is instead visionless and needy. Until that changes, we'll keep squandering our brilliance.
Let's face it, right now it often feels like nothing in Scotland works. And yet this is a simple choice we are making, a choice to do things badly rather than to do them well.
Scotland flag - the saltire Made In Scotland. For Scotland.
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