YOU never wait long before one of Scotland’s professional political savants mounts a pulpit to tell us where we’re all going wrong. In recent years this narrow public space has often been visited by Jack McConnell.

The Former First Minister of Scotland, now known as Baron McConnell of Glenscorrodale since he was ennobled with a life peerage, has become fretful about what he describes as “the coarsening of public discourse”. In an interview this week with BBC Radio Scotland the baron became the latest political figure to get all statesmanlike about Boris Johnson’s infamous Jimmy Savile jibe at Sir Keir Starmer. To get noticed in this busy sector you need to produce something that stands out from the crowd: a sort of designer hypothesis.

The baron chose to fall back on a familiar theme for his turn. Presumably after some profound soul-searching, he gave us the result of his cogitations. According to him, all the beastliness swirling around the UK Prime Minister can be traced back to the first referendum on Scottish independence. This last decade of political debate, he said, has “been horrific and it has been horrific for a while”.

I’m not sure Boris Johnson’s latest bout of verbal incontinence signifies a general coarsening in public engagement but if this is the best that a former First Minister of Scotland can produce then there’s certainly been an infantilising of it.

In the absence of anything resembling an original policy to arrest Labour’s tailspin north of the Border Baron McConnell and several of his fellows in the party’s ermined patriciate have enthusiastically embraced this theory. It’s a premise entirely devoid of evidence and based entirely on a fantasy. Yet, it has formed almost the entire strategy of Holyrood’s main Unionist parties in the last decade.

Unionism’s most influential Scottish figures routinely obsess about the errors of devolution and always reach the same conclusion: that civic discourse has become soiled in the post-referendum era. Yet, this neglects to address the main one: that the Scottish Labour Party in particular have failed to produce much beyond the tired old motif of independence being nasty and divisive.

This is a recurrent theme among Labour’s artisan elites. It often betrays a primeval fear of what might happen when the idiot punters start to get lofty ideas about political engagement. “What do they know? Don’t they know that this is what they pay us for? Just put a big ‘x’ in the box on the coloured paper. And stop all that swearing.” This old tune has accompanied the burial rites of the Labour movement in west central Scotland since 2007.

The latest instalment in Baron McConnell’s saga of the Big Bad Referendum came as it was announced that he had been appointed chairman of an organisation called Reform Scotland which styles itself as a “think-tank”. Perhaps Reform Scotland’s directors might care to have a gentle word with the baron. Something along the lines of: “Lovely to have you, Your Lordship but we tend to emphasise “think” and not “tank” around here.”

Like many such enterprises Reform Scotland’s heart is in the right place. In another very crowded sector it seeks to enrich civic Scotland by improving public dialogue and conducting debate. This usually comes with policy papers and research. There’ll probably be a tie-up somewhere down the line with a leadership noviciate or a centre of excellence.

Reform Scotland’s goals, as outlined on its fetching website, are: Increasing prosperity; a positive climate for entrepreneurs and innovators; modernisation of public services; widening opportunity for all; greater appetite for risk among policy-makers. Its scope is admirably wide and reassuringly inexact.

It also offers “compassion for those who slip through the cracks”. This will surely comfort the growing numbers of those who’ve been falling through the cracks in Scotland for the last century. “Don’t worry, lads; we’re thinking about you.”

On the basis of it being preferable for clever people to think lovely thoughts like these rather than the wretched ones favoured by rockets like Boris Johnson then of course space must be cleared in the public arena for this type of outfit. And as they’re largely funded by private donations they’re not a drain on the public purse.

Regrettably, very little space in public policy forums is occupied by groups representing the bulk of the Scottish citizenry. Neither is there any acknowledgement that for meaningful and lasting change to occur in the lives of the majority of Scotland’s people there must be a class-based approach to effecting change.

Those who proliferate the think-tank sector routinely dismiss this as a kind of sentimental Marxism advanced by people they don’t regard as “grown-up”. In these rarefied spaces “grown-up” means someone who seeks glacial, incremental and deferential change within the prevailing political system, even when said system has signally failed to improve the prospects of its most populous communities.

The main obstacles preventing the “widening of opportunity for all” are health inequality; addiction; the educational attainment gap; medieval land ownership and the predatory conduct of banking and energy cartels. Yet, those with the lived experience of dealing with these vices in their everyday lives are excluded from those “public spaces” where well-behaved ideas get discussed and then go quietly to sleep.

It’s why organisations like FAVOR, the addiction charity promoting real routes to recovery, are often overlooked when large quantums of public money are instead doled out to maintain a sprawling, ineffectual and lucrative bureaucracy.

The writer and campaigner, Darren McGarvey drew on his lived experience to produce Poverty Safari, one of the most important Scottish books of the 21st century. In it, he lamented the way in which the voices of those experiencing the main drivers of inequality were often patronised and excluded when the well-spoken ‘grown-ups’ of civic Scotland came visiting to channel empathy.

It was these communities that largely rejected Scottish Labour and which viewed independence as an opportunity to force change. Maybe their voices were a bit too raw for Baron McConnell’s tastes, but he would do well to listen to them rather than disparage them.

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