EXCLUSIVE: The Annemarie Ward Column

Scotland Doesn't Need Another Conversation, It Needs A Recovery

EXCLUSIVE by Annemarie Ward

In Scotland, we have turned national decline into an art form.

Not for us the noisy self-destruction of banana republics or the operatic collapse of empires.

No, we prefer our demise slow-cooked, garnished with strategy documents, laced with stakeholder engagement, and served on recycled paper.

We are drowning in “conversations.” Public dialogues.

National listening exercises. Strategy frameworks written in the dulcet tones of state-funded consultants with double-barrelled surnames and no skin in the game.

It’s all very civil. Very curated. And completely useless.

I’ve said this before in The Splash, whether calling out the moral cowardice of £48 million spent on enabling drug use, or warning that Glasgow risks becoming a Disneyland of managed decline for global technocrats.

But let me say it again, louder for the folk in the back: if the best we can muster in the face of record deaths, spiralling poverty, and political decay is another “roundtable,” then Scotland doesn’t need a government, it needs group therapy. With a court order.

Pluralism is a beautiful thing, but let’s be honest: not every opinion deserves the same reverence.

Some ideas are not courageous. They are captured.

Some voices are not marginalised, they’re malignant.

And yet we persist in pretending that if we just keep listening to everyone, including the professional equivocators, something miraculous will happen. Spoiler: it won’t.

And here’s the real kicker. Many of Scotland’s most celebrated commentators, the mirror-holders, the conversation-starters, have been part of the furniture for so long, they’ve grown upholstery.

After 20 years of writing about our “unfinished democracy,” if the nation is still stuck in existential adolescence, maybe, just maybe, the mirror isn’t the problem. Maybe it's the people holding it that is.

Chronicling the decline is no longer brave. It’s a cottage industry.

That’s why I’ve written Twelve Steps to National Recovery, not to join the chorus of managed despair, but to offer something bracing, uncomfortable, and necessary.

Inspired by the moral realism of the recovery tradition, this series applies the same principles we use to save lives in addiction to the equally numbing paralysis of national decline.

We start with honesty, that dangerous thing our institutions fear most.

We admit we’ve lost our way. We examine the wreckage of our pride, our ideological fixations, our bureaucratic dependencies.

We call time on the slogans, the safetyism, the endless hiding behind “lived experience” while actual lived experience rots on a waiting list.

Each essay in the series is a challenge: to the political class, to the commentariat, and yes, to ourselves.

Because Scotland doesn’t need more therapy. It needs recovery, the real kind. Humbling, principled, and fierce.

You can keep polishing the mirror. Or you can pick up the scalpel.

Read the essays. Share them. Argue with them if you must. But don’t pretend you haven’t heard the call. The time for conversation has passed.

It's time for repentance.

Link here to the first essay in the series

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