In political strategy the ‘dead cat bounce’ is a deception whereby a piece of good news is spun to make us believe that the bad times are behind us and the sunny uplands beckon.
The SNP in government is fond of this approach. It’s a concept borrowed from economics when a modest price surge in a terminally doomed stock is falsely portrayed as a sign of long-term recovery. It comes from the old adage that even a dead cat will bounce if dropped from a great height.
The SNP has customised it and given it a Scottish politics makeover. Their perennial dead cats are the Scottish Child Payment and the baby box. If Scotland was ever declared bankrupt and bread riots were erupting on the streets, the SNP would say “aye, but we’ve got the child payment.” The party talks about those baby boxes in a way that makes you think they must have assumed supernatural powers.
In recent weeks, the SNP has been embroiled in a series of calamities and misadventures that in other parts of the world would be considered proof of a failed state. This happens when both the government and the opposition cease to function, having lost all moral authority. As a consequence, all the institutions in which its writ runs get poisoned.
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The latest manifestation of this malaise began with the judgment in the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal against NHS Fife. Ms Peggie was vindicated in her action against the health board. She’d been harassed in four different aspects of her employers’ treatment of her after she’d made a complaint about being forced to undress in front of a biologically male doctor.
Ms Peggie’s triumph was in bringing a powerful health board to its knees; influencing the early retirement of its chief executive and triggering the highest level of investigation by Scotland’s information commissioner about its many failures to engage appropriately with it.
Such, though, is the extent of the decomposition in Scotland’s public bodies and services that the judge’s rejection of her separate claim against the doctor began to disintegrate on first contact with daylight. It actually reinforced the strength of her victory against NHS Fife. His 337-page judgment was shot through with errors and misinterpreted precedents.
It gave rise to the suspicion that it had been produced with considerable input of an AI tool. If so, the chosen model must have been ShiteGPT. The judgment was so chaotically ridiculous that it embarrassed Scotland’s reputation for legal probity and authority. No other case in recent history had attracted such global scrutiny. The conduct of the tribunal itself left you with only one conclusion: that Scotland’s political establishment were so fearful of what Ms Peggie represented that nothing was above sacrificing in order to silence her. The judgment effectively implied that womanhood was based on lipstick, stockings, stilettos and a robust skin care regime. Parts of it read like a Benny Hill sketch.
When the government acts with such abandon in trashing respect for the law; and basic mores of decency it's only inevitable that the ordure flows downwards to infect all the institutions and organs that feed off it: the police; the civil service; the trade unions; politicians and large sections of the media.
Some other commentators have likened this to a silent coup. You get their point: that the main offices of the state have been usurped by a zombie class of zealots. This would suggest that there was intelligent design behind it. I’m not having that, though. The Scottish Government and its glove-puppets aren’t bright enough to stage a coup. Rather, Scotland is in a state of institutional anarchy. The rules that once governed decency in public office; respect for the law and a desire to be the best we can be have all been circumvented.
These values still operate in local communities. They’re evident in the selflessness and self-policing that help maintain peace and stability. They’re undermined, though, by a governing class at national level which has ditched these values and considers itself untouchable.
A few days after the Sandie Peggie judgment, we witnessed the troubling conduct of a deputy head teacher at a Highland school. The teacher is a drag queen who had hauled a clinical psychologist to a misconduct panel after accusing her of ‘liking’ some social media posts deemed to be gender critical. The case was thrown out. What could possibly have given this teacher the confidence to pursue such a course of action?
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Last week, Scotland’s Justice Secretary, Angela Constance was caught in the act of falsely claiming endorsement from a grooming gangs’ expert. She’d done this to justify her refusal to hold a public inquiry into this evil. Ms Constance’s appearance in front of Holyrood’s Education Committee was a car-crash in which she insulted the intelligence of her questioners and that of the Scottish people. This is the face of Scottish justice. The man who leads Scotland, John Swinney doesn’t think she’s done anything wrong. This was followed by the revelation that a male SNP staffer had bugged the office of a female MSP from his own party. We’ll surely be told he was rogue and acting on his own. Meanwhile, the news that Scotland’s drugs death numbers have increased again now barely rates a mention.
It's like a political PONSI scheme. Instead of admitting wrongdoing and pledging to do better, they simply contrive another one. That way, public outrage over the previous delinquency gets deflected by a fresh misdemeanour.
Its success rests on always having the Scottish Greens in your pocket. As civic Scotland sinks into an ethical abyss it was inevitable that the conduct of Parliament itself would get choked by the weeds. How else do you explain Ash Regan’s two-day suspension for using social media to rebuke Maggie Chapman, the Scottish Greens MSP?
Ms Chapman had surely brought Holyrood into disrepute by verbally abusing the judges who’d made the Supreme Court ruling on gender? Yet she had escaped censure. After 25 years of devolution, we’ve regressed as a nation and not because of the behaviour of the people. It’s our governing class who are the hooligans.
Conduct which would previously have led to instant dismissal is now rewarded. Politicians who consistently fail are promoted. Chief executives walk away with massive financial settlements, having dragged their organisations through the muck. Activists who harass and threaten women are indulged by the police and by Holyrood. When they complain, they risk the 2am knock and disciplinary proceedings by their bosses. We’re living in a dystopia where no arm of public government or administration holds itself accountable. You can’t reasonably be confident that justice will prevail or that you’ll be treated fairly by the main instruments of the state’s apparatus: the elected politicians; the judiciary and the police.
When The Muppet Christmas Carol was released in 1992, critics felt that giving Dickens a sock-puppet aesthetic was a stroke of genius that could never be topped. The Scottish Government begs to differ. “Hold my beer and step aside.”
Kevin McKenna is Scotland's Feature Writer of the Year
