Nicola Sturgeon has admitted she and other politicians cause divisions in society, dumb down public debate and push people into taking sides.
The First Minister also described the world as often a dark and “worrying place” at present.
Ms Sturgeon made the comments at the Edinburgh International Book Festival while hosting a talk with the novelist Ali Smith, whom she called “Scotland’s greatest living writer”.
The First Minister was reflecting after reading a passage from Ms Smith’s recent novel Autumn about the divisions in society left by the EU referendum and Brexit.
Ms Sturgeon, who is due to make an announcement on a second independence referendum in October, said: “As a politician, I’m acutely aware – and it’s something I think about a lot – that politicians, by definition, [are] opinionated. We put forward strong views and policies.
“We’re sometimes the cause, or a cause, of the division. Also, how we communicate now seems to reinforce those divisions. It pushes people to take sides and simplifies things.”
Although Ms Sturgeon mostly put the questions to Ms Smith, the author also asked the First Minister, a voracious reader, what happened when she read a book.
Ms Sturgeon said: “A whole variety of different things. Sometimes the ability to escape and switch off from whatever it is that’s worrying me at the time.
“If there was one thing I could make compulsory for leaders across the world it would be to read fiction. For me fiction, much more than non-fiction, allows situations that I have no direct experience of to be really conjured up and for me to develop an understanding in a way that is different to reading non-fiction.”
After Ms Smith referred to President Trump and political lying, Ms Sturgeon said most people would recognise the world “to some extent [as] a dark place just now, a worrying place”.
Ms Smith also told Ms Sturgeon that art is needed now more than ever to breach the political divides of Brexit.The author of the acclaimed Autumn and Winter - two books from a planned quartet of contemporary novels - told Nicola Sturgeon that the art form could be a “unifying force” in the face of division.
The two were speaking in conversation at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where Ms Sturgeon acknowledged that politicians were often the cause of such division.
She said: “As a politician I’m acutely aware, and it’s something I think about a lot, that politicians by definition we’re opinionated, we put forward strong views on policies, we’re sometimes the cause or a cause of the division.
“Also how we communicate now seems to reinforce those divisions, it pushes people to take sides and simplify things.
“Is there a case right now that either through the form of the novel or the perspective of the writer, that perspective is actually much much more needed than perhaps has been in our lifetimes?”
Ms Smith responded: “The novel is a unifying force. All art reminds us to engage and it reminds us to enter – even just with itself – dialogue. Dialogue is the source of life.
“The point at which you actually talk to somebody, rather than block a story... that’s coming from someone else, the point at which the stories meet and become one story instead of separate stories on competing sides of the walls and fences – which politics across the world at the moment is not just threatening us with, but building.”
Ms Smith said this was “the darkest time that I’ve ever lived in”, adding: “In our lives, across the world from this country outwards, from the UK outwards it’s a dark, dark premise.
“With nobody interested in the UK Government in those splits... to try to heal the thing that is revealed by Brexit. Everybody vying for power in a way that is absolutely terrifying.”
But she told the First Minister, who said most would recognise to some extent the current time as “a dark place, a worrying place” that the novel was ultimately a form that gave hope for the future.
Nick Barley, Book Festival director, provoked laughter when he thanked Ms Sturgeon for being a “prime minister” who reads, before correcting it to First Minister.
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