I'm ashamed by the paucity of ambition for our nation

As I was standing there, my phone was pinging with notifications from The Herald’s Twitter feed about the latest salvo in the constitutional spat between the UK and Scottish governments, over the latter’s gender recognition legislation.

I found it impossible not to feel some internal sadness, even shame, about the state of our nation. Hume was an Enlightenment era philosopher whose main work – A Treatise of Human Nature – is considered one of the most influential in world philosophical history. The irony of its key argument – that human behaviour is driven largely by emotional instinct – was not lost on me.

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However, with the statue of another Enlightenment figure, Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, just further down the road, and standing there on one of the most important days in Scotland’s cultural calendar, commemorating another Enlightenment figure, Robert Burns, my overwhelming regret was that we appear no longer to be a country which attempts to meet the lofty legacy left for us by our famous forefathers.

Irrespective of our views on the gender recognition debate, whether it be the Bill or applications which are unrelated to the Bill, such as the current court case and the largely unspoken issues of how we deal with school-children who have gender-related issues, it would take a brave philosopher to argue that we are covering ourselves in glory.

The truth, of course, is that with the Bill now passed, this new phase of the gender recognition struggle has very little to do with gender recognition, and very much to do with constitutional politics.

Where have we heard that before?

It may very well be the case that a court, in the final analysis, finds that the UK Government’s argument based on the Scotland Act’s Section 35 – the Secretary of State for Scotland’s veto – is compelling, and that the devolved gender recognition does indeed have an adverse impact on reserved legislation.

In that context, it is rather hard to believe that the UK Government could not have exercised Section 35, or its near neighbour Section 33, in years past. There are many of the hundreds of pieces of legislation passed by Holyrood around which a similar argument could be constructed.

It is, therefore, more than a coincidence that the bullet has been fired on the one piece of legislation around which the UK Government believes First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has lost her political antennae; the one issue around which the bulk of the middle-of-the-road Scottish voters might side with London rather than with Edinburgh.

The intervention on the Scottish Government's Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill seems to be more about constitutional politics than gender recognition (Image: Gordon Terris)

The Scottish Government is giving as good as it is getting. SNP strategists well understand the likelihood that this will blow up in the face of their southern adversaries.

If the UK Government’s use of Section 35 delays, or even removes, some of the more contentious parts of the gender recognition legislation, that will please very many Scottish voters, from all political backgrounds. Nonetheless (and this has been a blind spot of the Conservative Government throughout its entire time in office), many of the same voters who may support the outcome will emphatically oppose the process.

The UK Government has a tendency to presume that the one-in-six Scots who comprise the Tory core vote, and who are in one form or another devolution-sceptic, are an accurate cross-section of Scottish opinion. They are not.

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The great majority of Scots, including very many of the 55 per cent who voted No to independence in 2014, will spit blood at the thought of what the using of Section 35’s veto power means for the future of devolution. They may feel gender recognition reform is a mistake, but they consider it to be Scotland’s mistake to make.

If Kemi Badenoch, the UK Government’s women and equalities Minister and the internal driving force behind the veto, thinks Scots who oppose the legislation will thank her at the ballot box, she has a shock coming her way.

What a mess we are in. Gender recognition reform is but one area in which our constitutional psycho-drama is holding us back from achieving anything close to the standards set for us by Hume, Smith and Burns.

Our schools are so worn down by centralisation, so infected by the ambitionlessness of the educational establishment, so scarred by the so-called ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, that as a nation we have become rather disinterested in the pursuit of education excellence.

Our health service is a Potemkin service; behind the revered NHS logo sits a chaotic mess at all levels from primary care through to hospitals and back out again. We invest an average amount of money, compared to our European neighbours, yet have fewer doctors and nurses, fewer beds and poorer outcomes. No Scottish politician is brave enough to tell us why, because they know the only answer is seismic Europeanised system reform; the NHS 2.0.

Our digital and physical infrastructure is in the global slow lane, and we are in grave danger of blowing our chance to create a global hub for offshore wind and other clean and renewable energy.

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All of this – every area of public policy – is infected by the constitutional debate. The emotional instinct of both sides is to score points rather than to make good policy. Conversely, serious, known problems are ‘long-grassed’, lest voters be lost to either the Yes or No camps in the process of them being fixed.

This is not who we are. We can do better than this.

There is a shaft of light at the end of the tunnel; a combination of a Labour government with an idea (however timid) for a new union, combined with an SNP-led proxy referendum, could almost accidentally force a constitutional end point.

We need that end point. That end will lead us to a new start.