Good evening! This week's edition of the In Common newsletter comes from Megan Davidson, policy and communications officer at Common Weal
There is something slightly strange about the end of this summer.
The Scottish Parliament will return from recess on August 31. MSPs will be back in Holyrood, committees will reconvene and the machinery of Scottish politics will begin turning again.
And yet, after a fairly mundane end to the last parliamentary term and an unusually quiet summer, it is difficult to identify what exactly we are all waiting for it to get back to.
This is not simply a complaint about a lack of political drama. Politics does not need to be permanently exciting. In fact, most of us will probably benefit from less of it. But a Parliament should not simply be a place where politicians try to avoid making mistakes.
Scotland has too often been left with the sense that the Government’s primary ambition is to get through the next few months without generating another controversy. John Swinney’s government has become remarkably adept at managing the temperature of Scottish politics. The problem is that keeping things calm is not the same as giving a country a sense of direction. And Scotland needs one.
Look around the country and there is no shortage of things demanding political attention. None of these problems is going to be solved by simply keeping the political temperature down. There is a danger, particularly for a government that has been in power for a long time, of mistaking the absence of a crisis for the presence of progress.
The same applies to the opposition. Scottish Labour are not exactly giving the impression of a party about to burst to life. Its leadership contest may change its internal dynamics, but it is difficult to imagine that simply changing the person at the top will answer the larger question of what Scottish Labour thinks Scotland should become.
Meanwhile, there is at least some evidence of new energy coming from Labour elsewhere in Britain. Andy Burnham has brought a different sort of political presence to the UK Labour conversation: One that is at least willing to talk about ambition, regional inequality, public services and what the government can actually do.
Scotland should not need to wait for Westminster to demonstrate that politics can still be about doing things. The question for Holyrood when it returns should therefore be a much bigger one than who has made the latest political mistake. What is Scotland for?
That sounds like an unnecessarily grand question until you consider how many of the country’s political arguments have become arguments about administration rather than direction. We debate how to manage existing budgets rather than what we want those budgets to achieve. We argue about the immediate pressures on public services without asking what sort of public services we want Scotland to have in 10 or 20 years. We talk about supporting businesses while rarely articulating what kind of economy we actually want to build.
There is nothing wrong with governing competently. But competence is supposed to be the means by which you achieve something, not the thing itself.
A government should have a sense of national ambition. That does not have to mean grandiose promises or another list of targets and strategies. It could be something much more basic: Deciding that Scotland should be a country in which young people can afford to build a life; in which businesses can grow without being strangled by short-termism; in which artists and cultural organisations are treated as part of the country’s infrastructure rather than decorative extras; in which public services are designed around what people need rather than what the budgets currently permit.
These are political choices. And they require politicians willing to make choices. The danger otherwise is that Holyrood becomes a machine for managing decline: keeping things moving, making incremental adjustments, responding to crises when they become unavoidable and hoping that nobody notices that there is a larger destination.
That is not unique to the SNP. It is not even particularly useful to frame it as an SNP problem. It is a problem for Scottish politics as a whole. The opposition parties should be able to look at the Government and say not merely you are doing this badly, but we would build something different. The Government should be able to look at Scotland and say not merely we have protected this service or we have mitigated that problem, but this is where we are trying to take the country.
Instead, too much of Scottish politics has become an argument over who is least responsible for things going wrong. That is a remarkably low bar for a country with a Parliament of its own.
When MSPs return at the end of August, there will inevitably be questions about polling, leadership, independence, Westminster and the next election. All of those things matter. But underneath them is a more fundamental question. What does Scottish politics actually want to achieve? Because Scotland does not lack problems. It does not lack resources, talent or ideas.
What it seems increasingly to lack is political confidence in imagining what those things could add up to. Parliament does not need to become louder. It needs to become more purposeful. For everyone’s sake, it cannot be this dull for much longer.
