Scotland's ambition does not end with winning independence. That is just the start. It offers us the freedom to create the country we want to live in. The issues we should prioritise include:
- healthy life expectancy,
- enhancing feelings of personal security,
- tackling the poverty which afflicts pensioners,
- low-wage workers and children, and
- ensuring our young people enjoy positive opportunities to forge fulfilling careers and happy lives.
- Our economy should have strong world links:
- We should help countries in need
- Encourage immigration to build a strong, successful and diverse Scotland.
- it should be built on Scotland's natural resources and establish it as a leader in sustainable and renewable energy
To build this new country is a challenging task. The benefits of real growth and prosperity need be more equally shared. We might not, of course, get everything perfect first time. We may make mistakes.
The debate around independence is really about competing visions of our country’s future. As we emerge from the Covid pandemic we must seize the opportunity to rebuild our economy so that it better serves the needs of our people rather than simply replicate the old, failing system that created a society riven by inequalities and social divisions. To do that we need a clear idea of what that country looks like and the actions needed to create it.
Independence provides us with the opportunity to rebuild Scotland with wellbeing at the very heart of its economy. Nicola Sturgeon recently urged us to follow the words popularised by the late Scottish writer and artist Alasdair Gray: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”
That would surely involve designing a new economic system that would work for most people living in Scotland rather than just the wealthy few.
The recovery from the pandemic offers the biggest opportunity to transform our economy into one that puts people’s health and wellbeing over profits. We can’t tweak what we’ve got when what we’ve got is so inadequate. We need another Bretton Woods style intervention; a managed and smooth transition, an evolution not a revolution. This is why our push to have another independence referendum and thereafter to become an independent country is not a distraction from the Covid recovery, but an essential component that will allow Scotland to play a full part in that economic transformation and to properly benefit from it.