Can you feel it? The sense of emptiness, the intellectual deadness hanging in the air over Scotland? We’re a nation treading water.
Every person, every family, every country needs a "story" - a sense of where they’re going; something that yields purpose and direction.
What now is Scotland’s story? Our purpose? Direction of travel?
Independence and unionism have both failed. Independence is going nowhere, and while many still cleave to it emotionally, for the time being it can in no way be seen to offer a path to a new future. It’ll be a long time before independence once again presents a viable story about the path Scotland takes.
And unionism? What kind of story is that today? A story of the past, at best. There’s nothing that unionism offers when it comes to the future or renewal; there’s nothing new that unionism can tell us.
Keir Starmer proves that. His unionism presents managed decline. The story for Scotland - and indeed Britain - should be recovery. But it’s not. We’ll endure more austerity, more poverty, more crushing of aspiration and optimism.
READ MORE BY NEIL MACKAY
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Rather than a story of recovery, we’ve the story of a patient slowly bleeding out, just with a kinder doctor in the shape of Labour, rather than the sadistic Nurse Ratched of the Tories.
Our political debate isn’t just moribund, it's climbed into the grave, pulling the earth over itself. Tell me the great ideas espoused by politicians today? There are none.
The SNP is imploding under the weight of years of failure. Divided in every direction, all it offers is more talk of independence - like an old man dreaming of his glory days.
Scottish Labour merely crawls in the shadow of its master in London - whose only idea is to offer some softer form of the dark Conservatism which brought us to this rotten pass in the first place.
The Scottish Tories shred each other, each claw mark revealing another venal strain in this repellent party. The UK Tory Party is void, emptied out by its own idiocy and cruelty.
So from the major parties? Nothing. No ideas, vision, or leadership. So therefore no hope, nor future.
Political debate is reduced to how much we self-harm through cut after cut. Is that the story of the future?
Even culture seems atrophied. Scottish literature is an endless repetitive grind where the only themes appear to be crime and class. The novel has barely changed in decades.
Where are our great artists, great thinkers? Where’s the theatre anatomising this country, forcing us to confront who and what we are? Where’s the music grabbing you by the throat - the voice of youth saying ‘look, this is future that can be built’? Culture is algorithmed to the point of deadening conformity.
Our politics and culture - umbilically tied - are grey, tired, without momentum. There’s nothing pushing the "story of us" forward.
When it comes to Britain - to Scotland - this is it: what we see now is as good as the story gets. But that’s not enough. This cannot sustain us.
If you want a good metaphor for Scotland, look to Glasgow, a once great city in decline; a city where residents are ashamed of its major thoroughfare. Sauchiehall Street garners such emotion in Glasgow because it sums up the sense of entropy - of atrophy - that lies over the city, and the nation.
There can be no real change of direction in Scotland with this Labour-SNP status quo: two parties offering nothing for the future, just this pabulum that’s the present. Every political party talked big and delivered nothing. Their failure has inculcated intense cynicism among us.
We’re so cynical we accept the rise of dangerous men like Nigel Farage, as just another wart on the body politic. We accept our children will be poorer than us, that our life tomorrow will be lesser than the life we once had as the money in our pocket no longer goes as far and public services run dry.
Labour’s big idea? PFI’s return: making public assets - the bricks and mortar we own - goldmines for corporate greed. The SNP throws around words like ‘wellbeing’, yet does nothing to act upon those words.
Politicians adhere to a fiscal dogma that certainly doesn’t harm them, but harms us. Rather than build, they cut; they erode education - the one place ideas may spring from to get us out of this decline.
Humans needs stories - some direction of travel. We need to know there’s hope in the future. Ideas create stories, find paths, kindle hope, imagine new futures.
Our long-term story must be recovery. Recovery will only happen if we all have opportunity, or at least hope of opportunity. We can’t go on like this, with the rich getting rich, the poor getting poorer, and no hope of change.
This intellectual deadness must end. What’s been tried, has failed. Abandon old thinking. All that’s left is addressing wealth inequalities: taxing wealth and capital as we tax income and labour. Trickle-down economics is a fairy tale - a religion that entails only harm.
Taxing wealth doesn’t mean putting small businesses out of commission, or plundering the incomes of white collar workers until the pips squeak. It’s about taxing those with huge reservoirs of wealth, which 99% of us don’t, and will never, have, as mostly its inherited riches.
Tax the multimillionaire class. Use those receipts to build infrastructure: schools, hospitals, railways. That creates jobs. Jobs mean healthier, happier people. Sick, sad people cost money. Use those receipts to invest in our ruined manufacturing base. We need to "make stuff", not simply sell financial services to each other.
Decentralise power so towns can address their own problems. Start talking about returning to Europe. A majority of 53 per cent support rejoining, compared to 36% against.
Would that not be a story of renewal? A fairer society with the rich pulling their weight; where we build schools and hospitals to make a happier, smarter and healthier population; a country where power is shared; a people extending the hand of friendship to their neighbours?
Maybe you hate that vision of the future, maybe you think it’s wildly utopian, maybe you believe it can’t happen. But I ask you: is this better?
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