WHEN I wrote a column last week saying no country had ever done well out of socialism, it had a result I was not expecting.

I do know Scotland houses a lot of people who call themselves socialists, and I have often challenged them to say exactly what they might mean by this description if they applied it to our homeland in the present day.

I have not received many replies. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it much of a compliment to bonny Scotland to compare it with the socialist countries that have actually existed, such as contemporary Venezuela, or Cuba of 1959, or China of 1949 or Russia of 1917.

All these nations did try something recognisable as socialism, but our own nation resembles none of them. They had sunk into misery ripe for transformation, which they duly got. But Scotland is on the whole a happy wee place, the 18th-richest country in the world, no less, and in the 21st century enjoying near-full employment (till coronavirus struck, at any rate).

By contrast, nations that undergo socialist revolution are in general already suffering social breakdown. People calculate that things have got so bad they can hardly get worse, even if they take to arms, go on the streets, fire at the forces of law and order and in general create such mayhem that a socialist revolution seems a sort of rescue operation.

All this besides entails risks that few people in advanced, industrialised societies are ready to face, risks not least to their generally high standard of living. There is no longer much of a stark contrast between plutocrats and proletarians.

A revisionist, the French Marxist scholar Pierre Bourdieu identified six social classes in modern western countries, from a wealthy elite down to an underclass of wretches, but none of them having interests that can be fully aligned with others.

For the sake of equality, there would need to be the improbable prospect of a huge redistribution among various social groups often not really all that different from one another in material terms. Glasgow would have to make common cause with Kelso or Kinross or Kintore. Many Scots might say it was hardly possible, and anyway scarcely worth the risk.

Even so, The National’s columnists or letter writers often get pieces published in its pages adopting the opposite point of view. They falsely offer hope that, after independence, we will somehow be able to join, or even invent, a new system avoiding the faults and flaws of the present one. In other words, we are capable, if we try hard enough, of constructing a system so perfect as to put to shame all previous efforts at any such thing.

My doubts about this project arise from the fact that it has already been on the go, without reaching a successful conclusion, for a long time. It originated in 1516 with the publication of a book, Utopia, by the English philosopher and statesman Sir Thomas More. He eventually had his head chopped off by his king, Henry VIII. This, however, did not deter further thinkers over the next 500 years from trying to match his example with better (of course) schemes of their own. Still, however, none has reached a successful conclusion.

That does not seem to put off the unusually large quota of utopians among The National’s columnists and letter writers. They apparently take it for granted that Scotland, once we become an independent nation, will not labour under the same disadvantages in aiming for its utopian goal as other countries, especially England. This is because Scotland will accept and follow the values and virtues of its people. These are many, but the most important from the political point of view is equality.

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The columnists and letter writers favour socialism as the means to realise these inborn values and virtues. I confess I find this a little difficult to understand seeing that in the real world nearly all the existing forms of socialism in the government of nations suffered collapse from 1989 onwards, leaving behind them only perverse remnants of the system. These are what the socialist of 2020 can offer the eager enquirer after practical examples of what he wants to achieve and establish.

IN this context, Scotland is as good a hypothetical example as any other country. But if we wanted to become a socialist society, what would we actually do? Nationalisation of big corporations is hardly a good starting point. We have not many of such corporations in any case, and they could all with little trouble move their headquarters to London if need be, so avoiding the tender mercies of the socialist Scots.

The oil companies might just abandon the North Sea altogether, leaving behind only a collection of ramshackle rigs for us to clear away at our own expense.

An alternative experience of socialist enterprise is almost entirely lacking. The Scottish Government has been looking for substitutes, but not got far.

The best it has been able to do by way of establishing business credibility is entrust the quest for enterprise to, say, conservative bankers who prefer for some reason to work in the public as well as in the private sector – notably the chief executive officer of Buccleuch Estates. It is easy for gurus of the 21st century to bandy about and even wax emotional over a term so abstract as equality. Somewhat harder is the generation of practical political and economic programmes out of it.

I would be the first to admit that present-day Scotland allows a lot of inequality. Some of it may be the result of injustice or misfortune. But I am sure that more of it is due to actions by citizens who exploit their own talents in enterprises of their own – and still come a cropper.

Clever people tend to earn more than stupid people. Hard-working people tend to earn more than idle people. Those who have taken the trouble to acquire professional experience and qualifications tend to earn more than those who have not. People who have laboured for a long time at a particular job tend to earn more than those just taken on.

It is more exciting to be a world-class innovator but not always so lucrative. I find these differences to be quite rational, and I doubt if they should really be regarded as examples of inequality. They merely reflect human difference and human diversity. They are therefore the opposite of equality, and thank heaven for them.

The independent Scotland of the future is bound to be a capitalist nation. There is, after all, no alternative of a socialist league of nations to turn to even if it wanted to, since every foreign regime that might have joined one collapsed in confusion long ago.

We will operate within the existing international system just like all others of the same kind. It would help at least a bit, though, if we accepted this was our destiny and started to work out how we can fulfil it.