At the recent SNP conference, John Swinney effectively committed his party to the dead end of Devolution.
Scotland’s Future is in our hands
In these post-literate days of smart phones and AI, when the human attention span has shrunk, it is increasingly impossible for modern politicians to keep in their minds the problems of society and at the same time to do what is expected of a party member. Who cares for one will neglect the other. If your ambition is to have a “career” then it is the party that comes first. Because of this almost everything modern political parties do runs contrary to the Public Good and supresses Truth and Justice. Instead of thinking our politicians take sides. They are by training partisan. However by instinct they are free. But as Keir Starmer so ably demonstrates, the freedom instinct has no place in party politics. As far as real political and social progress in concerned, in Scotland and the rest of the world, party politicians are useless.
An active mind requires meditation in order to express ideas. Instead of thinking that political parties prefer instruction. It is this insistence on instruction that erodes possibility. If we desire a new Scotland, then we urgently need to invent a new, bottom-up politics. The former will emerge from the latter. By plodding on, as we are doing, one issue after another, one inconclusive election after another, we will never rise up into the air above our crippling, patched-up and cowardly contradictions. To see these contradictions clearly is to be able to transcend them. Our future depends upon it. The way our political parties are constructed will make this transcendence a struggle. The conflict is between what we have and what we need and the struggle to get the politics we need will, however necessary, sometimes be ugly. But struggle, after all, is the mother of change. Without change, we are going nowhere, and the financial elites and the landlords will keep smiling.