Let’s start addressing real issues
THE process of infantilising Scottish public life never abates. It travels along well-worn paths by means of artifice and facsimile. It avoids the hard tasks, demanding time and effort, of improving lives and instead locks on to cultural ephemera requiring little more than slogans and proclamations.
It’s manifest in those corners of public office, invisible to the naked eye, where fake virtue has come to replace creativity and commitment in addressing social inequality.
The respected political magazine Holyrood reports that Scotland’s civil servants received a questionnaire last month asking if they might be willing to consider using pronouns on their email signatures. This would raise awareness of “gender identities and pronoun use across the organisation to create and foster an open culture that is supportive of the LGBTI+ community”.
Let me translate for the hard of believing. Scotland’s senior civil servants – people laden with parchments from the UK’S top universities – want their staff to spell out their gender by means of using a little artifice that is currently fashionable among some Twitter-users. So, you use He/him or She/her.
They think that this will educate and raise awareness because, as ever, they assume that Scotland is a nation of knuckle-draggers who exist in a half-lit world of ignorance about what goes on around them.
If I belonged to the LGBTI+ community I’d be more than a bit troubled by this. Has solidarity in the struggle to end bullying and intimidation now been reduced to a tagline; the use of which will absolve the implacably virtuous from the need to do anything real about discrimination?
I have my doubts as to whether many in Scotland’s political elites give a jot for the physical and mental welfare of transgender people and the challenges they may face in transitioning.
It’s merely another issue to add to the suite of those to which they can hitch their colours as a means of conveying their fake liberalism.
If they can proclaim these loudly enough perhaps it will drown out the clamour in Scotland’s disadvantaged neighbourhoods – the ones that have no representation in the Holyrood panopticon – for sustainable action to end embedded patterns of inequality.
This week we were permitted a fleeting glance of the reality of life in these places. A survey conducted by The Times found that 10 per cent of Glasgow’s Covid deaths occurred within a three-mile radius of the city’s east end, a community whose postcodes are always at the top of Scotland’s multi-deprivation index.
The survey reports: “There were 112 deaths in the neighbourhoods between Celtic Park and Glasgow Fort, areas that regularly appear near the top of national poverty rankings, out of 1,139 deaths in the city.
The combined population of these communities is around 30,000 people.” Possilpark and Craigend in north Glasgow, a neighbourhood also stalked by poverty, suffered disproportionately at the hands of the pandemic too.
The civil servant chiefs who are striving to make us all flag up our gender pronouns also worked hard to prevent these numbers becoming public. They did this with another artifice: concealing Covid fatalities in the community by grouping them with care home deaths. So the National Records of Scotland refused to release a breakdown of care home deaths until it was compelled to do so by the information watchdog.
“Sir Farquhar, they’re all dying of the Covid in there.”
“Let them use pronouns.”
The patterns of death in such places have been signalled in warnings from health authorities all over the world since Covid began to move among us.
The infection rates are highest amongst the most deprived because decades of poor health caused by economic inequality – the gerrymandering of wealth and resources by rich and powerful interests – have rendered them more vulnerable to its effects.
In countering the need to end such motifs in these places the political classes connived at a defensive strategy: blame the poor for their own irresponsible behaviour and tell them to stop drinking so much.
In the meantime, back business to get us back on our feet by letting them ditch their poorest-paid workers as unnecessary baggage while handing out billions of furlough cash.
In Scotland, the government is a little cuter; a little less obvious. They simply stand well back and let the daily Downing Street freak show proceed. Look, we’re not like them. And then they take refuge in their bogus virtues: ending hate crime, imposing pronouns and locking up women who refuse to let their sex-based rights be taken from them. Anything and everything to deflect from decades of neglect in Scotland’s most densely populated communities.
The extent of the Scottish
Government’s genuflection before the titans of corporate wealth means a lot more deflection can be expected in the years ahead. This much became clear this week as the hidden influences pulling the levers of power in Scotland were published in The Herald. Detailed research by the investigative journalism bureau, The Ferret, revealed the extent to which Scotland is being run as a vast neo-liberal project by an administration that uses independence to cover its tracks. The money and resources that Big Energy and Big Business deploys to secure the obeisance of ministers is breath-taking. No sector is untouched.
The overwhelming majority of the electorate might perhaps catch a word or two with politicians on their doorsteps when they come looking for our votes every five years. But if you’ve got lots of money or are paid by the business cartels to shape legislation in their favour you get to see our ministers so often that you could claim a friends and family discount on any resulting deal.
If this Secret State governance created more jobs with better pay and conditions; if they delivered an industrial strategy that benefited working-class communities, you could perhaps thole the lobbying and their means of persuasion. In more than two decades of uninterrupted government by left-of-centre parties, though, our poorest people remain on the margins, their noses pressed against Holyrood’s designer windows watching our politicians bowing and scraping before money and power.
But hey; always remember to practice your pronouns.
They think Scotland is a nation of knuckle-draggers who exist in a half-lit world of ignorance