Articles by Jon Stanley

3 articles

Boot this Homer Simpson parliament

Boot this Homer Simpson parliament

Holyrood is not a functioning parliament. In its place are 129 Homer Simpsons clinging to a donut. What Scotland needs more than anything, from COVID19 to unfinished hospitals to rusting ferries to fiscal blackholes is a turnaround team.

My background is in medicine and surgery but also in health economics and management. One of the biggest challenges for health managers is turning around a failing hospital, or several hospitals, or even a whole organisation. To turn around the failure we need to identify that the Scottish Parliament, not only the Scottish Government, is failing. That failure needs audited from top to bottom and skilled professionals brought in to both run the government and strip out the waste and the harm in Holyrood's culture. That needs experienced minds, clean hands of devolved politics, and the will and means to sack the board.

Nordic dreams on the road to Belarus

Nordic dreams on the road to Belarus

Nationalists love to point to Scandinavia as their vision of sunny, snow-capped uplands, and of joining their dream team of small economies as part of a ‘Northern Arc of Prosperity,’ as Salmond used to call it. 

However, we are never told how the journey will happen. Everything is sunny. There’s never any possibility of long detours, dangerous events, and dreich weather. Comparing Scotland to Nordic countries is simply a cheap trick that deflects from the reality of where we are now.

The Collective Narcissism of MyScotland

The Collective Narcissism of MyScotland

The SNP is certainly not a party in the conventional sense.

It is a post-national movement that defines itself by creating enemies and enmities. It tears through Scottish society, because it sees Scotland very differently from the rest of us. It is an ugly, frightening imagination of our country that is created through collective narcissism. 

Narcissism is the inability to distinguish self from an internalised ideal. It is pathological, unhealthy and dangerous. You could describe it as an eggshell personality, that rapidly fractures under pressure of criticism. So how do these poor narcissistic souls manage their lives?