I was speaking to a guy in the pub the other day who worked on the shipyards in Glasgow for nearly 50 years, starting shortly after the work-in led by Jimmy Reid, and what was really striking as he talked about his long career was how much things have changed but also how much some things have got worse. One question in particular niggled away at me: how radical is Scotland really?

The most obvious changes for the worker over his career were physical things – he was born in a flat with no bath or inside toilet and his family had very little money. But as the years went on, things gradually improved for him and his parents bought their council house and he’s now got to the position where his grandchildren cannot imagine, except as some kind of Dickensian fiction, the sort of life their granddad used to lead.

But underneath all of that – the way in which things have got better – something else has happened as well. The shipyard worker told me about his son who works in the building trade, where for him it’s all short-term contracts and insecurity and sometimes not being paid at all for the work he’s done and the contrast with the shipyards was obvious. Yes, people used to have fewer of the signs of relative wealth, like indoor toilets and tellies, but the work was more secure. There was a wage every week.

There’s also an obvious contrast, it seems to me, in the political landscapes of then and now. I’ve spoken to some of the people who took part in that famous work-in in the ‘70s and, whatever you think of the reasons for the crisis or the rightness or wrongness of the tactics, it was a radical idea at a time when radical options – such as locking your boss out of the yard – seemed possible and actually happened. Mostly, the radicalism was associated with one party – Labour – but it was also strongly linked with local communities and trade unions.

The question is: where is the radicalism now? In some ways, there’s a whiff of the Seventies in the air again with inflation on the up and strikes threatened on the railways. But we’re also in the very weird situation where the party of power in Scotland – a party that says it’s radical – insists it cannot intervene on drivers’ pay while the Tory party spends billions on giving us grants on our energy bills. What on earth is going on?

The answer, I think, breaks down into several parts and Kezia Dugdale, the former leader of Scottish Labour, has done a pretty good job of nailing most of them. Speaking in her new role as director of the John Smith Centre at Glasgow University, Ms Dugdale said that, in a Scotland dominated by the SNP, there is a powerful and in-built predisposition against radicalism even though independence itself is a radical idea.

Ms Dugdale’s reasoning is this: the SNP tells itself and its followers that it’s radical, but it will only win an independence referendum by attracting the centre ground and that means it stays, feet firmly planted, on the centre. The way Ms Dugdale put it was that, far from being radical, the SNP actually represents the centre of Scottish politics and that their vision of how to achieve independence involves “not upsetting anyone” i.e. not being too radical.

All of this is true, but Ms Dugdale also hinted at something which I think runs even deeper, which is the effect the 1980s had on us. Many Scots, she pointed out, liked Margaret Thatcher’s policies, particularly the right to buy your council house. The shipyard worker I spoke to you was one of those who benefited from the policy, passing his parents’ former council house on to relatives and generally enjoying some of the benefits of property-owning that others have enjoyed.

That instinct of his, the desire to own your own house, runs really deep – why else have property prices in Scotland been doing what they’ve been doing? – but it’s tied to other conservative instincts: maximising your income and savings, paying taxes that are as low as possible, as well as caution about reform and change. All of these instincts are alive and well in Scotland, particularly on the centre ground where the constitutional battles will be fought and won or lost.

The wider point is that Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP know all of this and haven’t worked out a way of getting round it. In fact, we’re in a very strange situation where the Tory government is handing out those energy grants, funded by tax and borrowing, while the Scottish government has been ultra-cautious about using any of its spending and taxing powers. The other obvious point is that England seems to be actually prepared to vote for radical change (in Brexit) whereas Scotland isn’t prepared to vote for the radical option of independence. So I ask again: how radical is Scotland really?

The answer to that question is always going to determine the fate of independence and I think the answer has to be: Scotland isn’t radical enough. Yes, since the ‘50s, Scotland has had an anti-Tory majority and our antipathy to Conservatives has become part of our national narrative (even as we buy up all our council houses). But as Kezia Dugdale pointed out: saying you’re anti-Tory is not necessarily the same thing as being radical and for a long time Scotland has mostly done the first rather than the second.

All of this, in the end, creates a kind of trap for the SNP but also a problem for the rest of us too. The raison d’etre of the Scottish nationalist party is that independence, not devolution, is the answer; therefore, it is not in their political interests to prove that the current parliament is capable of being radical. Rather, they must focus on the idea that the only route to radicalism is to dissolve the devolved parliament in favour of independence.

The result, as Ms Dugdale says, is that Holyrood does not want to, and cannot, prove its radicalism because if it can be radical now, what need is there for independence? But who is actually happy with such a situation? A cautious, centre-ground parliament certainly doesn’t come up with ground-breaking ideas for fixing modern Scotland’s problems – chiefly: inequality, bad health, alcohol and drugs. But a cautious, centre-ground parliament also fails to fire up those who want it to go further while also failing, pretty much, to attract the cautious centre-ground voters it really needs.

All of this is obviously unsatisfactory for the SNP, but it’s unsatisfactory for the rest of us as well. I am not, by instinct, a radical person – you know that – but, in a time of economic crisis, to have a government that will not consider radical solutions – in the way that a Tory government will for goodness sake – is profoundly problematic. Ms Dugdale says that being radical creates winners and losers and the SNP is afraid that anyone who loses by their hands will never vote for independence. It is the trap of Scottish nationalism and all of us are in it.

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