Small can be beautiful if we start to think big By KATIE GRANT Scotsman.Com | Feb 7, 2005 http://news.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=142282005 JACK McConnell's ambition to make Scotland "the best small country in the world" is laudable. Rich in history, with a real sense of her own identity, subsidised by an occasionally exasperated but, on the whole, kindly neighbour, despite the rain and the midges Scotland could hardly be better placed. Abroad, Scots are respected for not being English, but are still part of a Great Britain with more friends across the globe than enemies. And people like us better. Where the English are unattractively soft, the Scots are endearingly tender. Where the English are yobbish and aggressive, the Scots are manly and tough. Where the English are insufferably arrogant, the Scots are grittily stubborn. All in all, even if the benefits of devolution are a mystery to almost all foreigners, most people are willing Scotland to succeed at whatever it is she thought devolution would help her succeed in. But, despite the breathless statements posted on the Scottish Executive website, and the Pollyanna rhetoric beloved of those crawling up the devolved greasy pole, Scotland is not succeeding. That her economy has ground to a halt is well known. In the land that produced Andrew Carnegie, there are only 12 large firms of any globally significant value; net increase in the country's business stock since 1997 is minimal; business growth is piddling. Worrying though this is, social stagnation is an even more obvious ill, from the tiny pool which provides our MSPs, to the immovable statistics involving life expectancy and ill health, particularly in the west. Yet even though she is in desperate need, Scottish politicians are still too insecure to welcome people with the will and the energy to change things. Though MSPs meet, every day, people whose lives are desperate, they still turn away those, for example Lord Laidlaw, who volunteer to help alleviate things. Politicians are like people stuck in a bog. Tractor drivers arrive and offer a helping hand, but because the politicians don't like the driver's accent, or the clothes he is wearing, or his leisure-time pursuits, they send him away, thus condemning the country to carry on sinking deeper and deeper into the mire. And what a mire it is. Sixty years after the introduction of the welfare state and six years after devolution, one in 20 Scottish children is born to fail; a quarter of Scots are illiterate; drop-out rates in education are at an all-time high; violent crime is rising; we are fat, our teeth are rotten and we can't even build a parliament building on time and within budget. This may make uncomfortable reading on a Monday morning, but what's the point of writing if you don't write the truth? There is another truth, however. It does not have to be like this. As an author, I visit lots of schools and I always return home in a good mood. Scottish children are neither natural failures nor congenitally illiterate. Dropping out, criminality and obesity are, in most cases, remediable. Rotten teeth and misguided building projects may be more difficult to salvage, but I am old-fashioned enough to believe in miracles. The trouble is that the only solution offered by the current consensus - state intervention and direction at every level, with an almost religious belief in the merry-go-round of committees, quangos, government initiatives, projects, strategies and action plans - has failed. Worse, those at Holyrood who, through overseeing this failure, have the opportunity to learn from it and set Scotland off down a new path, refuse, with a doggedness that would be admirable in other contexts, to acknowledge this. Thus we get nowhere. Does anybody believe the domestic headlines in 2006 will be any more uplifting than the ones of 2005? How could they be? For a change of result, you need a change of approach. Here we come to the most disappointing thing about devolution, which is not the ineptitude of the Lib/Lab coalition, which might have been expected, but the deliberate, conscious and calculated blindness of the SNP, from whom we might have expected better. It is ironic that the political party which has failed and continues to fail Scotland most conspicuously is the one which claims to offer her salvation. Through its absolute refusal to position itself anywhere other than squashed against the SSP, just when the SNP might have come of age, it has chosen instead to indulge in a second childhood. Had the SNP, at the dawn of devolution, embraced adult fiscal policies, inspired by both Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and his Theory of Moral Sentiments, it would have swept into its fold the millions of Scots who were longing, as many still are, to live in a place where businesses thrive and children reap the economic and social benefits. By now, instead of aspiring to be "the best small country in the world", we might almost be there. But the SNP prefers socialism to Scotland and is too terrified of being branded "friends of the Tories" to think out of the sealed box into which it has locked itself. I think that rather a tragedy. PERHAPS another tragedy is that, despite the country's many malaises, many of her more able citizens prefer to throw things at the politicians plodding slowly through their pre-rehearsed answers on Newsnight Scotland, than to getting stuck into politics themselves. I am always meeting talented people who tell me that they don't want to go to Holyrood because, despite the parliament's translation from the top of the Royal Mile to the bottom, the place still seems to drain everybody linked with it of any colour. It's not just villa-gate, or Christmas card-gate or the ridiculous row over what the First Minister said about drinking, there seems to be something about devolved Scottish politics itself which is so joyless, so smug and so utterly unnecessary that even Miralles' upturned boats cannot save it. Take Jack McConnell's urging of the MSPs to raise their game as they took their places in the new chamber. A fine sentiment. But what did he really mean? It is sadly obvious. At Holyrood, "raising your game" means conforming obediently to the "consensus" or face charges of being anti-Scottish; it means that even if policies are clearly failing - the NHS and education spring easily to mind - nobody should question them; and it means that MSPs should see themselves not as political leaders but as social workers; not as thinking beings, but as sheep. How glorious it would have been had the First Minister raised his own game enough to admit that the state has failed, and will always fail, to get Scotland moving with her best foot forward. If he had, we could now be a nation poised to free ourselves from the deathly shackles of state-sponsored stagnation and strangulation, ready instead to embrace the state as a facilitator and benign arbiter of conflicting interests. Five years of that and Scotland really could be "the best small country in the world". But where is the person determined and charismatic enough to turn our miserable present into this magnificent future? I see nobody at Holyrood who fits the bill. However, if there is somebody there, who has perhaps been hiding their light under a bushel, can I just say this? Now is the time to stop being bashful. Put on your best Churchillian hat, grab that microphone and blow us away. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Meet the McDonald�s� Lincoln Fry get free digital souvenirs, Web-only video and bid on the Lincoln Fry prop charity auction. http://us.click.yahoo.com/RUJaMB/fV0JAA/Zx0JAA/uTGrlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> �������������������������������������������������������� This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! 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