In 2025, Control the Controllables

Robin McAlpine

In 2025, control the controllables

I like to end the year on a positive. That is harder than ever in 2024. It's getting like the weather – a lot of us thought 2020's pandemic was a record low for bad years, but 2021 seemed to be worse. Then 2022 brought us a cost of living crisis that seemed perhaps worse than 2021 and in 2023 it kept going along with a lot of increasingly bad politics. Yet 2024 still feels worse.

It's getting like the climate – each year a new bad record broken. We'll each have a moment this year where you'll have thought 'this is too much now'. Obviously the events in Palestine and the election of Donald Trump stand out. But in smaller ways other things made me feel a lot worse, with a rapid 1-2 of Tam Shepherd's Trick Shop closing followed by the good people of Edinburgh scaring a baby red panda to death by setting off fireworks being my final straw.

Yet there is little evidence to suggest 2025 is going to get better. Like I say, an end of the year positive take is a little tricky. Nevertheless, I can perhaps offer you something useful, something I've been telling people more and more of late; control the controllables".

It's a rugby analogy. It's that ball, its odd shape, the utter randomness it brings. It is at the heart of a philosophy that is everywhere in modern rugby. There is a lot about the game of rugby you cannot control, and wasting your time thinking about 'what if' is not going to help you. What you can do is focus on the things you can control.

You colleagues will drop the ball. Your opponents will kick a giant touch kick and send you to your own try line. A grubber kick will send the ball tumbling straight through your legs – and there is not a thing you can do about it. But you can be in the right place, be ready to catch the ball properly, know who you're supposed to pass it to next. If you can control the controllables, you give yourself a much better chance with the rest.

(And yes, some of you will have noticed that this is in fact the same principle as mindfulness or meditation. You can beat yourself up about the past and you can worry about the future, but it won't help. What may help is focussing on the present, on now, and taking from that what you can. The principle is very similar.)

What does this mean for politically-active people? In some ways it means we need to be a bit less ambitious, in other ways it means we need to be more ruthless, both at the same time. It gives us a chance of that thing we don't get all that much – a chance of winning. By picking winnable fights.

Let me give you some examples. One of the things I know many readers value that Common Weal has been doing is trying to go after 'consultancy culture' in public policy. This is the never-ending process of every policy being handed over to commercial consultancies with a track record of corruption to write in a way that suits their big business clients, usually with disastrous consequences.

Is there anything that can make this whole rotten corporate capture of public policy stop? Well not senior civil servants warning that these consultancies are often outright corrupt. Not that they have a track record of abject failure. No conflict of interest seems able to bring this to an end. Poor quality of outcomes doesn't even put a dent in the cash flow to these corporations.

You can't control any of that. So do you just howl at the moon and resign yourself to quiet frustration-and-rage? No necessarily. What can you control? Well, you can control who you write to and you can control who you vote for. Pick an achievable task. The next time you are pissed off at the abuse of consultancy culture in the Scottish Government, write to every politician that represents you.

Tell them how angry you are at this corruption. Tell them that you want to know what they personally are going to do to stop this. Tell them that you will not vote for any candidate that does not give such a commitment. 

I can promise you, if enough of you start to do this, politicians get twitchy. They shrug off 'passive petitions' signed online because that's far too easy. They spot model emails sent in over and over again and ignore them. But constituents angry enough to write a bespoke letter? That freaks them out.

Some of you can control more than that; some of you will be comfortable finding your way round a Freedom of Information request. Almost every single piece of outsourced contract work from the Scottish Government goes through the Public Contracts Scotland portal. Go, have a look. Find something you don't think should be outsourced? Find a contract award that doesn't seem right to you?

We'll get in about them with an FoI. Who made the final decision on the choice to outsource? Was it a senior civil servant or a politician? If it is a politician, who advised them? What was the justification? Find out. You can ask or research who has financial conflicts of interest. This all has two outcomes. First, they freak out (again). Outsourcing is a virus that thrives in the dark.

Second, if you find anything you think is dodgy you can send it to us (hello@common.scot) and we'll try and get it in the media for you. If we can't, we'll certainly promote it over all of our communications channels. This is something you can control. This is a win you can win.

There are few media outlets with the resource to hold things to account. A group of people I know in Fife are taking turns monitoring every development with the freeports so nothing goes unchallenged. Find something you are angry about and don't let it off the hook. Find out what's going on. If it's wrong, send it to us and we'll try and do something about it.

You can organise. I was enraged on the morning I'm writing this to find the holy trinity of 'utter disrespect for Scotland's communities', 'we promised to reform dodgy quango and we lied' and 'behind all of this is one of the four big corrupt consultancies' in the no-reform-of-CMAL story today. These define modern Scottish Government.

It's too late; you can't do much about this now except kick up hell. So do it; kick up hell. You can't control everything, but if you live on an island or in a coastal community you can control how noisy you are in response to this disrespect. You have a willing media and you've done a good job of using it. Be creative. Go further. I'd be utterly furious if I was you. Use the energy to organise.

In the independence movement too many people are trying to solve problems that are too big in one go. We were encouraged to believe that we could win purely through the initiative of ordinary people acting alone. This was never true; every winning campaign is broad and coordinated. No-one ever won a campaign by inventing a solution for everyone else, launching it and then saying 'follow me!'.

There have been so, so many attempts to do this. In fact they're sprouting all over the place again. The problem is some of these are good ideas being executed badly, or they are good ideas that struggle without the proper resource they need, or they are good ideas done well but at totally the wrong time and without political support.

Don't. On your own or with others, think of something you can do which is self-contained and doesn't require lots and lots of people you don't yet know to agree to join in. I can give you an example; at some point we're going to have to get our finger out and draw up a nation-wide list of 'winnable voters', target voters we assess to be winnable for the cause of independence.

We don't have a campaign to win them over yet, but we need names first anyway (if it's a targetted campaign). I hope you know my maths on this – there are about 300,000 or 400,000 more people we need to win over to get in to a strong enough position to triumph. Unless we know who they are we can't talk directly to them.

Gathering a first 20 names might seem futile. But what if you and five others make it a first 100 names? What if this caught on? This is all valuable data we will need and don't have. No-one gathers that data all in one go. You could all keep your own list then, whenever we get our act together enough to run an actual campaign, you've given us all a head start.

Or, perhaps most constructively of all, we can build something in our own community. The people of Strathaven couldn't get a bus anywhere because the local authority cut the bus services – so they started their own bus service and it's amazing, it really is.

Make no mistake, if you try to do something good in your own community you will be punished. Scotland's local authorities will try to stop you. The Scottish Government will try to stop you. Some private corporation with a government contract will try to stop you. Someone in a position of power will try to stop you. It's what they do.

And you'll probably get very little help or support from a local politician, given that they preside over the 'make them stop it and wait until we fix them for their own good' regime. But hard as it will be, it will be worth it if you can get it done. (If you succeed, politicians will be all over you – with photographers in tow, natch).

We fell into the activist version of 'influencer culture' – that we could 'manifest' our way to an outcome much bigger than us through the power of talking about it with total self confidence. Everyone was 'starting a revolution', everyone had a 'game changer' in their pocket. Yet the revolution didn't start and the game didn't change, so we got frustrated and angry.

The response to this isn't to retreat and do nothing. It's to pick something you can win for once, and win it. Then another of the same nature. Then another. That's how we get to tipping points. That's how we build a year which isn't rubbish.

That is my best bit of advice for 2025; control the controllables. I've been trying to focus on doing that for a year or two. There will be a moment for big gestures, for grand schemes. This isn't that moment. Find something you can make happen and focus on that. You'll get more done, and you'll feel better in the process.

Until then, control this if you can; have a wonderful festive season. Enjoy time with your loved ones. Enjoy peace. Enjoy the temporary truce in the war of all against all. Enjoy those moments of goodwill and kindness. Recharge your batteries. Because this I promise you; 2025 isn't going to fix itself.