What would indy feel like with a border between Scotland and rest of UK?

Of course, the answer might come back: don’t you think, compared to the mendacious, hypocritical and corrupt farrago of Westminster government, that trying to be “competent” in the face of Covid, Brexit and climate crisis is to indy’s advantage?

I wouldn’t deny that. Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that it’s those nations and administrators that deliver, but also project, a feeling of safety, care and security for their populations, which will increase their legitimacy over these coming decades. The mistake would be to regard this as a status-quo-ante exercise. There’s a dynamism and unpredictability to these challenges to our stability, which means that “safe hands” will have to be agile hands too.

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The mood of indy as equalling security – our viable future, depending on our well-exercised sovereignty – is already abroad. No-one who goes over the border with regularity would deny that something has been baked into Scottish behaviour during Covid –some conjunction of culture, society and governance, which manifests itself around mask-wearing in particular.

“Don’t people bother about it down here any more?” said a Scots musical colleague to me the other day. He’s used to being asked to flip a mask on in his hometown shops, and he gawks at the insouciance and Covid carelessness of Northern Englanders on our tour.

There’s no southern comparator to the blokey wisdom dispensed by Chief Medical Advisor Jason Leitch, through tabloids and fitba talk shows. Scotland also has produced a range of medico-intellectuals, like Devi Shridar, Stephen Reicher and Linda Bauld. They maintain the discourse of informed solidarity that is marking our national response to the pandemic.

What would an independent Scotland feel like, even with a border between us and the famous elephant? A bit like this, I think – where there are policy and attitudinal differences to shared global challenges. This is a difference worth cultivating, even if only to learn from divergence. The American judge Louis Brandeis’ described neighbouring US states as “laboratories of democracy”, keeping us all alive to possibilities.

I found a great example of this in Ben Macpherson’s piece in these pages, outlining how the Scottish Government would administer Adult Disability Payment, as a newly attained welfare power. The emphasis is on the dignity and credibility of the applicant, their right to challenge assessments, with funds available to cover gaps between assessments – which themselves will be light-touch and less regular. The changes have been made in consultations with users, aimed at removing the “traumatising” experience of applying under the UK’s rules.

That’s it! That’s the kind of tangible change in people’s lives you want an independent government to make. Yet the point of an indy politics is that social expenditure in one area is fully connected with revenue gathered in another. There needs to be an equal emphasis on acting on your values, as much with the latter as the former.

That why the recent auction of Scottish coastal wind-farm licenses to a range of fossil-era enterprises owned across the world, and with the notable absence of a state-owned Scottish public energy company among them, had to be criticised. Common Weal (disclosure: I’m on their advisory board) was compelled to note that the overall revenue from the private licensees would cumulatively amount to £3.5 to £5.5 billion a year – compared to £50-80 million annual income under the current licenses, and a total of £700m from the current license sales. No Scottish public energy company involved in these bids means a very significant shortfall in overall revenue – and such a company has been agreed by party conferences of both the SNP and Greens. Do you really “secure” Scotland’s future by selling natural assets so cheaply? Especially when other parts of government, like the welfare ambitions that underlie Macpherson’s reforms, will require as much spending power as possible?

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Yet what should be the deep story here? Common Weal’s underlying thinking for independence is that we should push the institution-creating powers of a devolved Parliament to the max. If we keep building plausible bridges to a sovereign Scottish future, but which only go so far under current restrictions (40% of spending in Scottish hands, 70% of revenue in UK hands), then the shortfall can at least be shown to Scottish citizens.

The effect is one of frustration of potential – here is a shadow Scotland, in chrysalis, waiting to fly free. Yet to this must be added two recent instabilities coming from the wider world system – both of which reinforce how confident and directive a new Scottish state should be. The first is the degree of biosphere disruption that we should expect to come into our lives in the next few decades – requiring what some in the climate movement call “Deep Adaptation”.

How resilient and self-sustaining does your society need to be? What if it faces (for example) forms of rationing produced from energy gaps, or agriculture failures, or migration pressures from unliveable zones, or extreme weather events, and more? How can we be supported to make fruitful, constructive responses to such crises?

I’ve been sampling much the expert analysis that’s rising its head around indy again – like the recent essays from the Economics Observatory website, featuring John Curtice and others. They assume standard measures of “growth”, required to make up any budgetary “shortfall” in the social expenditure of indy. But what about a future that’s like our recent pandemic experience, except even more intense? Where “growth” (apart from those platforms that profit from our spatial quarantine) is snipped off, as the planet shudders again? A state which can act with full sovereignty across sectors that require assistance – and yes, including the currency capacity to create its own money – is what we’ll need.

However, we’ll have to start a new level of thinking about how government can help communities adjust to such circumstances. This, I’d have thought, was the role of the Greens in our current Holyrood.

The second major instability – which may be a more unreliable clarion call – could come from computation and AI. What is called “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) – that is, artilects indistinguishable in their presence from full humans, at least as they provide services and labour – may well burst upon us, towards the middle-to-end of the 20s (or early 30s).

Advances in network-oriented neuroscience, and in the hugely expanded processing power of quantum computing, may be birthing something akin to a new life form among us. But one which will present us with yet another profound challenge to “growth”. What if nearly all routinised human labour becomes executable by machines, and to our satisfaction?

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Facing this arrow of the future, the role of a new, smart state – particularly a culture-defined and communitarian state like an independent Scotland – is to establish the forms of society that serve human uniqueness.

What isn’t computable? What forms of art, conviviality, care, craft and making do we need to cultivate? We could be about to be released into Maynard Keynes’s challenge from the 30s – how to “live wisely, agreeably and well”, when the question of wage labour is unravelled by technology. How will we cope?

The indy majority in the Scottish Government may well be currently formulating a prospectus around an indy Scotland as the “security” option. Faced with the Tories’ Caligularity, it’s understandable.

But they should realise the profound nature of what needs to be “secured”, faced with these momentous trends and challenges: the living planet, and the distinctly human. I hope there’s one file taking this perspective in the civil servants’ indy portfolio.