Scorched earth Scotland is a stain on our history

What is true for individual peoples is true, too, for countries. We need politicians and political parties, governments and oppositions, who truly believe in the potential of the country and its people, and have ideas to realise that potential.

There are reasons for us, in Scotland, to be optimistic about what we might achieve during the remainder of the 21st century. Chief amongst them is probably our geographic position in the world. This confers on us a range of advantages which, taken together, are probably unsurpassed anywhere in the world.

Our potential to create energy, for instance, is likely to be of almost immeasurable benefit for many decades, indeed perhaps centuries, to come. Not only do we retain another few decades’ worth of oil and gas, we also have the technology and expertise to capture and store the carbon it creates and use it sustainably.

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Much more importantly, our geography has presented us with an almost infinite ability to create energy from onshore and offshore wind, and from tidal power. That can not only create affordable energy for our own people; it can lead the drive to net zero and create an extremely lucrative global asset. Who wouldn’t rather buy hydrogen from Scotland than gas from Russia?

Speaking of Russia, Scotland also occupies a tactical and critical position in the North Atlantic, which will be able to be exploited for many decades to come as we find ourselves, literally, in the middle of a long and protracted power struggle between the east and the west.

World-leading entrepreneurialism and innovation in Scotland’s future would be a mirror-image of Scotland’s past. It is often said, but should not be forgotten, that Scotland has, pound for pound, probably given more to the world than any other country, ever.

From television and the telephone to the MRI scanner and the ATM; from the pneumatic tyre and Tarmac to penicillin and the general anaesthetic; from cycling and golf to modern economics and modern sociology. This is all in our past, and we have the potential to add to the list in future.

But you can’t make a living on potential. And the unfortunate truth is that, today, Scotland is not nearly the global leader that we might wish it to be, or that we tell ourselves that it is. We are pessimistic. Drifting. Stagnant. Rendered rather hopeless, in truth, by a combination of our political and constitutional impasse, and a troubling psychological movement away from excellence and high achievement and towards an almost institutionalised mediocrity.

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This is manifesting itself in worrying outcomes. We are talking, almost constantly, about one of those – the National Health Service. We are told that it is in a winter crisis, but in truth this is an eternal winter. The NHS is in a permanent capacity crisis because of its highly centralised structure; we have fewer doctors and nurses, fewer beds and fewer machines than other western countries, and as a result far poorer outcomes in terms of waiting times and survival rates from the key killers.

The popular trope is that this is a money problem, but that is the sort of lazy, unthinking logic which is unbecoming of a country with Scotland’s history. The NHS has had constant, substantial increases in investment for decades, with inputs comparable to other rich countries, yet it has had little to no effect on outcomes.

This is a structural issue, not a financial one. The NHS, structurally, is finished. The Scotland of old would have admitted that and built something better; modern Scotland can’t bring itself to discuss it.

The health service is a problem which can only become worse as a result of our uniquely challenging demographics. Far more so than the rest of the UK, Scotland is ageing, with proportionately fewer working-age people paying for proportionately more non-working people. We are not keeping enough of our own young people, and we are not attracting enough new young people from elsewhere in the world.

But we can’t blame them. We need to blame ourselves. Are we offering enough of a reason to make a life in Scotland? You wouldn’t want to get ill here. Would you see economic opportunity here, when one of the parties of government openly opposes capitalism and economic growth?

Would you worry about your ability to speak and act freely in a country which increasingly seeks to "cancel" those who depart from the fashionable views of the day, and in which the police last year recorded almost a thousand “non-crimes” of “malice and ill will” (in other words, hurting somebody’s feelings)?

Would you feel confident going about your daily life in a country with slow and unreliable rail connections and 20th century road connections? There is no political party in Scotland with a truly radical plan to improve the nation's physical infrastructure.

The most important driver of future prosperity in any country is its education system, but again here there are huge question marks over Scotland’s performance. As someone with four children in the state sector, I have been left genuinely shocked by what I can only describe as an institutionalised ambitionlessness.

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Looking at the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) – the only international comparator from which we have not already withdrawn ourselves – and the OECD’s recent report renders this more than merely anecdotal.

This is not who we should want to be. It is not who we are. But neither the Government nor the opposition is addressing our deficiencies, because addressing them inevitably involves rocking boats which could lead to the loss of votes for their constitutional tribe.

It is a political choice, it amounts to a scorched earth approach, and our forefathers would view it very dimly indeed.

Whatever the outcomes of our constitutional debate, we need a country we can build upon at the end of the process. In this new year, let’s do better.