Her karma ran over her dogma
Feb. 16th, 2023 09:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootWell, she's gone. And while she was a strong character and a wiley politician, I am not sorry.
There are times when the paving of Good Intentions shines bright and clean all along the road to Hell. Housing has been an issue here for a long time, and recently Nicola Sturgeon's government pushed rent controls. The unintended consequences were that private landlords hoicked their rents up as far as they could or lived in/sold their properties, leading to fewer houses available. In what seems like an act of panic, the Scottish government just agreed to more and more housing, often private builds rather than social housing (no idea how that is meant to help the poorest) and across Lothian we see the result; ancient trees cut down, forests hacked, ecological diversity ruined and worst of all, the residents plain ignored, their demands over-ridden. There's no accountability and no democracy involved.
All this and scandals with wind farms,ferries, loans to the party, and I've got to say what looks to me from the outside like a real lack of ability in governance. I think this is a problem in England too; politicians are increasingly performers or devotees who don't work for the people but for the party. They don't care about administration and statescraft; there are no Attlees, no Bevans. They don't want to make the trains run on time, they don't even care whether there are trains at all. The skills they develop are about convincing voters that there will be better trains if you trust them, and that the reason there are no trains is because the other side is wrong and evil. The SNP have not shown anything better than this and have been more autocratic than the average Tory/Labour administration would dare. They may continue to get away with it because Independence as a single idea gives the SNP a substantial majority; but support for Independence has tumbled in the polls, and that might be due to Nicola's sudden loss of support among the voters. The Isla Bryson issue (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64590421) is a major contributing factor.
The average voter was never going to be impressed by the First Minister perceptibly writhing every time she was asked if a multiple rapist is a man or a woman. She tried to steer round it with words like 'individual,' and 'rapist' but this just made her enemies smile and keep asking, framing the question more simply each time, showboating what they could happily label evasion. By comparison it demonstrated to me the remarkable nature of Boris' skill at gaslighting. Boris would never try to answer such a question. He would start a reply that looked as though it might lead somewhere, then just sail off into either a direct lie or a non-sequitur that ate too much time to allow follow-up. Nicola couldn't manage that, because her audience mostly had a set definition in their heads of what men are, what women are, and what rapists are. If one is going to challenge such fixed ideas, one must make the core of the matter as clear as possible while retaining meaning, but I think hubris got in the way, that she had got used to not having to explain herself. Any system or belief that considers challenge to be inimical cannot be put to a democratic electorate, who are pretty much defined by their ability to question. If it cannot be questioned, it cannot be democracy.
The people may not see this straight away, because nothing is ever simple. But they feel it, given time, and once they do...
Bye Nicola.
There are times when the paving of Good Intentions shines bright and clean all along the road to Hell. Housing has been an issue here for a long time, and recently Nicola Sturgeon's government pushed rent controls. The unintended consequences were that private landlords hoicked their rents up as far as they could or lived in/sold their properties, leading to fewer houses available. In what seems like an act of panic, the Scottish government just agreed to more and more housing, often private builds rather than social housing (no idea how that is meant to help the poorest) and across Lothian we see the result; ancient trees cut down, forests hacked, ecological diversity ruined and worst of all, the residents plain ignored, their demands over-ridden. There's no accountability and no democracy involved.
All this and scandals with wind farms,ferries, loans to the party, and I've got to say what looks to me from the outside like a real lack of ability in governance. I think this is a problem in England too; politicians are increasingly performers or devotees who don't work for the people but for the party. They don't care about administration and statescraft; there are no Attlees, no Bevans. They don't want to make the trains run on time, they don't even care whether there are trains at all. The skills they develop are about convincing voters that there will be better trains if you trust them, and that the reason there are no trains is because the other side is wrong and evil. The SNP have not shown anything better than this and have been more autocratic than the average Tory/Labour administration would dare. They may continue to get away with it because Independence as a single idea gives the SNP a substantial majority; but support for Independence has tumbled in the polls, and that might be due to Nicola's sudden loss of support among the voters. The Isla Bryson issue (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64590421) is a major contributing factor.
The average voter was never going to be impressed by the First Minister perceptibly writhing every time she was asked if a multiple rapist is a man or a woman. She tried to steer round it with words like 'individual,' and 'rapist' but this just made her enemies smile and keep asking, framing the question more simply each time, showboating what they could happily label evasion. By comparison it demonstrated to me the remarkable nature of Boris' skill at gaslighting. Boris would never try to answer such a question. He would start a reply that looked as though it might lead somewhere, then just sail off into either a direct lie or a non-sequitur that ate too much time to allow follow-up. Nicola couldn't manage that, because her audience mostly had a set definition in their heads of what men are, what women are, and what rapists are. If one is going to challenge such fixed ideas, one must make the core of the matter as clear as possible while retaining meaning, but I think hubris got in the way, that she had got used to not having to explain herself. Any system or belief that considers challenge to be inimical cannot be put to a democratic electorate, who are pretty much defined by their ability to question. If it cannot be questioned, it cannot be democracy.
The people may not see this straight away, because nothing is ever simple. But they feel it, given time, and once they do...
Bye Nicola.
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no subject
Date: 2023-02-16 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-16 08:33 pm (UTC)They attracted people who did not really have the money to buy a house, and that created a housing "bubble." When that bubble finally burst because housing supply finally outpaced housing demand, it caused a big crash. Supposedly, the economy has recovered from that. Supposedly.
Most of it is due to the fact that housing prices—the cost of land, labor, materials, and loans (i.e. interest)—are going up faster than incomes. That means there's less profit to be made on the margins—and lower-priced housing already has lower profit margins. So, there's a huge disincentive to build lower-cost (i.e. affordable) housing.
It's a real problem. Homelessness is an ever-growing epidemic.