Scotland 2050: The first step towards creating the future is imagining it

This is implicit in all successful political movements and inherent in the politics of independence. Yet, paradoxically, since the SNP won office in 2007 the politics of thinking about Scotland’s future explicitly has been missing, with the party believing it can articulate this implicitly through the idea of independence. Previous thinking of the potential of Scotland’s future has brought far-reaching change.

The rise of Labour in the 1920s and the moral impulse of socialism brought the scandal of poverty and hardship centre stage to Westminster. Then in 1945 came the belief that government had the capacity and tools to do big things – from slum clearance to house building, public health campaigns and hydro-electric schemes – making Scotland a better place for millions.

Cometh devolution and the Scottish Parliament – under Labour and then the SNP – and there has been a distinct futures void for more than 20 years. Indeed, one could even argue this situation became worse under New Labour.

READ MORE: SNP reject 'wholly inaccurate' report that 30,000 members have quit party

Across the UK the party embraced a problematic prospectus of the future around globalisation, called “linear optimism” where the vision of tomorrow was just a bigger version of today.

Several years into the new Parliament, I noted this futures vacuum and created two futures projects – Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020 –hosted by the UK think-tank Demos, which lasted four years, had extensive public engagement and a legacy lasting long after their existence, particularly internationally.

The Scotland 2020 project began when Labour still ran Scotland and addressed the absence of hopeful collective stories about devolution and the missing aspirations of the political classes, attempting to offer a set of suggestions about what our future stories as a nation could be.

One component was Nairn Day, where people from a cross-section of the Highland town were invited to create stories of the future for themselves and beyond. In so doing, Nairn was briefly made capital of a future Scotland so we could talk about the entire country.

The Scotland-wide project led on to a more ambitious project – Glasgow 2020 – which involved dozens of events and thousands of Glaswegians, engaged with cities at the same longitude across the globe, and even had a conversation with the other Glasgows in the world – 26 in total.

The Glasgow project ran events involving a representative cross-section of the city, from creatives and businesses to those living in social housing, from taxi drivers to hairdressers and from young people to commuters. It engaged with those with power and influence in the city, and with those often missing from official engagement processes.

The project’s advantage – it sat outside the council and other bodies and was not controlled by them – meant its deliberations were independent and could be presented to them. People liked and got this difference, feeling jaded by years of endless consultation.

This kind of “intermediate space” is something which government and public bodies should value and encourage. It meant the ethos of our events had a good backstory and sense of fun, while also mattering, bringing myriad voices to the fore – potentially to make a difference.

What kind of future did people want for their city? One simple point makes the wider case. The “official” version of the city was about sectors such as tourism, shopping and culture; it was not first and foremost about the people – often being promoted by glossy documents of parts of the city with public spaces devoid of people.

The version of the city people talked about was not sectoral. Rather, it was about their values and those of their friends and neighbours. People had a suspicion that the values of those who ran the city and public agencies were based on different criteria from their own.

The thousands of people who contributed these thoughts created collective stories of the future which involved hope, agency and change, and which they saw as involving choices and trade-offs about the difficult challenges facing the city. People understand that the world and the future are complex.

There are explicit lessons in this for present-day Scotland and thinking of the future. People have an innate capacity to be curious and understand the choices they and societies face.

WHILE the conventional way of conceptualising the future at both government and corporate level is to create a set of scenarios and different possible worlds, this only gets you so far.

A much richer, complementary approach is to embrace storytelling, explicitly asking “who is telling the story?” and “who is missing from the stories?”. Not only that, any imaginative futures project should start with identifying “the official story” about now and the future and critique it.

Scotland desperately needs a thorough futures exercise in the here and now; one which addresses the futures void we currently have, and which draws on the examples of Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020 and other innovative examples around the world.

There is, for example, the Finnish Parliament’s Committee for the Future. The Scottish Parliament established a Futures Forum in 2004 inspired by then presiding officer George Reid and the work of Scotland 2020 but as a creature of Holyrood it has refrained from nationwide ambitious projects.

More innovative is the likes of Finland 2030 which took the Glasgow project’s independence as a model and achieved both Finnish authority buy-in and maintained independence, formally sitting outside the system.

Such an endeavour would inform and make richer our independence debate. In the words of Pat Kane, the current SNP believes questions about the future should be left til the other side of independence – “we’ll worry about the future when it comes” – when many forces of the future are here already.

The SNP and Scottish Government should have the insight to enable and encourage others to take the lead on such an initiative. In previous years, the likes of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, Scottish Trades Union Congress or a prominent newspaper would champion or take on such a task, but they are now stretched or under-resourced.

So, who could champion a Scotland 2050? The BBC, which just over 25 years ago created a Scotland 2000 – or maybe STV? Or one of our universities in partnership with others?

Exploring Scotland’s future would involve creatively challenging the narrow bandwidth of our politics and public debate. It would entail identifying and dissecting the official story of Scotland.

This version – embodied by enlightened institutional Scotland – pretends we are fair and progressive and believe in social justice, against the reality of living in a land plagued by poverty, inequality and self-perpetuating elites. Any change and futures thinking have to start with throwing out such illusions.

The futures thinker Hillary Sillitto, co-author of the book Scotland 2070, summarises his credo as: “Telling new stories about Scotland’s future. Scotland can succeed in the new world if we act decisively and ambitiously to take advantage of new opportunities that we can see emerging.”

READ MORE: Unionists launch billboard campaign demanding Nicola Sturgeon's resignation

A Scotland 2050 would look beyond complacent, self-regarding accounts and ask “who are we really?”, “who and what do we want to be?” and “how far do we fall short from our ambitions at the present?”

Such an approach would offer a rich contribution to the independence debate and provide the opportunity to have a genuine future focus.

Scotland needs future stories, and independence needs a fresh, vibrant and dynamic future set of stories. All have to challenge the current official story and any notion of a monocultural, singular Scotland. It should understand the persuasive words of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie when she says all humanity had to escape the tyranny of “a single story” and that doing so is “a kind of liberation”.

Imagine what that could feel like and look like for Scotland? Our future nation is already here in places; it just needs championing and nurtured for us to begin our collective future creating it.