You can’t not see it. I’ve tried. Scotland is shrinking in front of our eyes in almost every possible way bar the literal and the signs are relentless. It feels like Newton’s First Law – this decline was put into motion a while ago and now it will just keep moving on its predestined path unless something external acts on it. Except I think even an intervention now is too late to prevent the damage.
That doesn’t mean we can’t regain our way as a nation, regain our sense of self-worth and ambition. It certainly doesn’t mean we can’t repair what needs fixed. The world has dragged itself out of worse situations than this.
But to drag ourselves out of this we need to get more alarmed, feel more urgency, be more outraged. We have to get beyond grumbling. We need something like the shock of awareness that things really are deteriorating fast, because somehow we need to jump from ‘accept what you can’t change’ to ‘change what you can’t accept’.
So let me share my dark mood, a mood I thought might have been further darkened by three weeks struggling with Covid but which looks no better now I seem to be getting out the other side of it.
Each day feels like a repeat of the last day but with one thing made worse. The same poor economic indicators but with one more Scottish company bought over by a foreign competitor, one more hospitality business closed for good, one more failure on renewable supply chains.
The same social crisis driven by the same poor economic indicators but with one more statistic on hunger, one more measure of collapsing social care, one more marker of rising mental health problems. The same creaking public services but with one more deterioration in waiting lists; the same creaking democracy but with one further drop in public faith and confidence, one more scandal, one more failure.
The same struggling arts sector, starved of resources but with one more box to tick in the never-ending quest to prove to some over-paid administrator that art is ‘useful’. The same lack of vision for our future but with one new avenue that might lead to change instead closed permanently, money spent, decision made, move along.
I watched as Scotland was literally demoted to region status, a participant in a photographic castration-by-selfie. I think that was three weeks ago, and I think the weekend preceding it brought forth new information in a criminal case in which someone has been charged with embezzlement from the country’s most powerful political party.
I think the following week saw the remaining wheels come off the National Care Service Bill, then awaiting only the final blow as incompetence and intransigence drags another important, transformative policy to the edge of the abyss into which the National Energy Company and the Deposit Return Scheme plunged before it.
The desperate Commonwealth Games coming back to Glasgow looks like as good a metaphor for our current condition as any I can find
I think it was that weekend that Salmond died and left a distinct sense that we do not have any politicians of that stature operating in Scotland just now. By the next weekend Scotland had offered up the unedifying sight of the final remains of a former First Minister of the country being put onto a plane with the dignity that befits a major international figure but taken off the plane like luggage.
Certainly by the following weekend the nation of Scotland had somehow managed to plunge one more knife into the heart of the poor, dying National Care Service but still not managed to put it out of its misery (though the Scottish Government seems to be facing facts and suspending further development work on it).
And between these tentpole moments of failure lie seemingly endless little failures, that restaurant closing down, that letter noting the civic deterioration of Glasgow, that latest statistic on health service performance, another piece on brisk trade at food banks.
Even the ‘good news’ felt like bad news. I started to draft a piece last week under the headline ‘Desperate Games Find Needy Host’, but I couldn’t face being the voice of more negativity. It’s just that the Commonwealth Games coming back to Glasgow looks like as good a metaphor for our current condition as any I can find.
Ten years ago, when last the games took place, Scotland was in its pomp. Everyone was pretending that the future was so bright that we’d need to wear shades, the unionists on the basis that the union had never been more vibrant, the City Council on the basis that Glasgow was Scotland’s great success story, the SNP on the basis that it showed that Scotland was a nation state in the waiting.
Well no-one is pretending anything this time. With every other country with any sense declining to host this visibly-collapsing event, everyone here seems slightly embarrassed this is all happening. The symbolism in this is painful; it is not only the games that seem to have got so much smaller in ten years.
But as relentlessly as the glaciers which ground down the land to form the Scotland we know, so our sense of ourself is ground down by the endless stream of warning signs that all is not well in our nation. We seem unable to pass laws or set budgets with any degree of competence. Relentlessly our system of government is drawn closer and closer to a state of failure.
We are shrinking not because we are being forced to contract from the outside but because we are curling up smaller and smaller on the inside
I can warn all I want about the inevitability of the collapse of the National Care Service proposals and did regularly. I can warn all I like about the horrendous chain of disrepute which drags around behind Nicola Sturgeon and those who facilitated her and I did. Yet still I get to watch the legislation crash mindlessly on its £28 million-and-counting path to more national humiliation and gape in awe at the seemingly unconstrained jigger-pokery that defined Sturgeon’s era.
She refers herself to an inquiry where she picks the secretariat (well, John Swinney does, but that seems to be the same thing), a staff member who seems then to leak the reviewer’s thinking to those being reviewed and is afterwards rewarded with some sort of senior job close to the person being reviewed having redacted the bejesus out of it. That’s what the lawyers were saying behind these latest redactions, right?
It’s a horror show and it’s all casting Scotland in the most dreadful light. On and on this coagulated body of failure, error, corruption and cover-up sails, a body in motion with seemingly no force to counteract it, our media too weak, our option-formers too gullible, our civic sector too complicit, our democracy too hollowed out.
It is the result of a cascade of accountability failure; one blind eye turned allowed another barrier to fall, another fallen barrier encouraged another blind eye. It is too late to stop this since it’s already on its way, like meltwater from the hills. I keep trying to explain; much of the next couple of years has already happened and we’re just waiting for it to unveil itself.
This is becoming like political entropy, the continual loss of energy in a system tending towards chaos. Energy is being lost everywhere; hope, determination, commitment, belief. But therein lies our solution, because the energy is there. If you hunt it out enough, there is enough democratic energy in our system yet. It just needs an outlet.
We need to create conduits for that energy – democratic, political, civic, cultural. Someone or some group of people have to create paths that can bring that energy to the places where it can make a difference. That’s the whole point. Someone or something must do something.
But who? Who in Scotland is ready to do something? In a very real way, about 15 years ago Scotland chose to be bigger, to stand taller and try to see further. It decided it wanted to believe in itself and it found a way to do that. We are shrinking not because we are being forced to contract from the outside but because we are curling up smaller and smaller on the inside.
I know I write about this all the time. I know it must be hard to read at times and I know you must find yourself thinking ‘what good does it do me to read more of this?’ I can only reply that other than my unrelenting drive to create some energy and ideas and excitement through Common Weal, I don’t know what to do other than try and sound the alarm bell.
We have to shake ourselves out of this lethargy, this despair. We need to act urgently to do so. You know there is more capability in this nation than can be seen in all the failures I document above. It is time to place the search for that capability at the top of our national agenda, because we have not elected that capability into our parliament.
You can’t not see it. You can’t look at Scotland and not see it. You can’t not see this nation smaller in its sense of itself than it was yesterday. Unless we wake up, we’ll disappear.