I AM angry at the failure of our political class to rise to the challenge of the climate emergency. I understand why they can’t – because they are, with a few honourable exceptions, wedded to an out-of-date and exhausted cosmology and world-view, which belongs firmly in the old century.

The 21st century represents a new aeon, a new reality, full of “unprecedented” challenges and “wicked problems”, for which capitalism, liberalism, conservatism, billionaires and political parties have no answers.

I am angry that we find ourselves with a mere decade to effect a transformation, a revolution in our mode of life. We in the “developed” West are largely responsible for the scale of this challenge; the “less-developed” world is already paying a grossly inequitable penalty for our excesses, and a new moral imperative demands that we wake up to our responsibilities and listen to the wisdom of those we have marginalised.

I am privileged to live in a beautiful country, and in a tranquil, green place, in a comfortable house, with an adequate income. I am complicit in the rape of the living world; I am complicit in the moral failure to look up beyond the immediate horizon of my comfortable class. As such I hold the more responsibility for failure to take action to effect change throughout the latter part of the last century through which I have lived, until we (all) find ourselves in this precipitous danger.

I feel at times like the one-eyed man in the country of the blind, groping at the nearest surface of an elephant. Covid-19 is the near surface, but the whole elephant is the global emergency, the mortal danger that is our determination to turn the once-rich and diverse living world into a vast intensive monoculture which is a kind of living death for all, leading to our certain extinction as a species. The world itself may, over millions of years, recover its former, or a new, equilibrium. But we won’t be here to see it. Unless, we wake up.

That’s the scale of the challenge. But here, in our own back yard of Scotland, what can we do?

Well, the only place to start is with independence – “taking back control”, escaping from the clutches of a separatist, English nationalism that we did not vote for and is of no benefit to Scotland.

Brexit has profoundly changed the game. The vision of independence which Scotland narrowly declined in 2014 was of “Scotland in Europe”, but also included a continuing relationship with the other three “nations” of the United Kingdom. As soon as the result was in, Cameron betrayed that relationship along with The Vow that had very likely persuaded a number of “don’t knows”; this merely continued a pattern of English behaviour in relation to Scotland that goes back, arguably, to the aftermath of 1707 itself.

So while the leadership of the Scottish National Party hesitates and equivocates, there is a groundswell of impatience to be off, to initiate a fresh start, a new country, one that recognises a moral underpinning that can and must inform new, creative, green policies to put the wellbeing of the people of Scotland and of the planet at the heart of its vision and ambition. More democracy has already been tasted in the form of a Citizens’ Assembly with 60 powerfully democratic recommendations for a new Scotland, and a further climate assembly is currently exploring this larger challenge.

The popular independence movement in Scotland (outwith established political parties) demonstrates a strongly social ethos that may or may not be socialist. Scotland faces many social challenges that are rooted in its history, geography and culture – the Scottish cringe is still alive and kicking. But we can also have faith in our history, in our incomparable geography, and in the moral roots of our culture. If we can but hold fast to that faith in ourselves, and lift our eyes above the near horizon, we will build a better, more just, independent Scotland, starting in May 2021.

Mary MacCallum Sullivan
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