Policy Research Media Morhamburn

I was at a seminar the other week organised by NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts) entitled ‘Creative Reductions’ – basically it was launching a report that showcased lots of innovative ideas for making public sector savings – a sort of necessity as the mother of invention type argument.

It was all pretty inspiring stuff, but an issue that kept being raised was the problem of politics. Basically for various political reasons, such innovation was difficult if not impossible in most cases.

But that supposes there is even the appetite for it in the first place.

Like them or not (and obviously most people in Scotland do not) the Tory-Lib Dem government is bringing forward some fairly radical plans, for example with healthcare. Yet in Scotland we seem to be quite conservative when it comes to new ideas.

The proposals made by the Scottish Future’s Trust on Scottish Water have met with a lukewarm response, except from the Unions who are vociferously hostile. The Curriculum for Excellence is roundly derided (perhaps with good reason, perhaps not), successive governments will shy way from anything that looks like it might be a ‘market-led’ reform of the NHS, and everyone and their dog is against projects such as the Edinburgh trams.

Now I am not arguing for or against any of these plans and their particular merits per se, just asking the question; when was the last time some new, innovative or dare I say, even radical idea was forwarded in Scotland, and roundly championed by the various powers that be? And by radical I mean world-leading, you know, like we used to be.

As the Policy Exchange think-tank posed in its report on devolution last week, has Scotland actually done very much with its hard-won devolved powers? Yes free personal-care (which it seems is under threat) and yes the smoking-ban, but is this enough for ten years? Does this equate to Scottish solutions to Scottish problems?

The irony around all of this is that in emphatically rejecting the Conservatives in May’s election, Scotland will still cling to the belief that its left-leaning convictions automatically equate to it being ‘progressive’. And an important part of our national identity revolves around our great inventors and innovators, both in science and technology and in philosophy.

But in being so wedded to our history of innovation actually turned us into a horrible parody of ourselves? We may have rejected the Conservative party, but with our apparently inherent distrust of innovation and change and our tendency to indulge in the national pastime of whingeing, are we not proving ourselves to be a deeply conservative nation?

A great lesson that I took away from the NESTA seminar was that if you keep doing what you have always done, you will keep getting what you have always got. But then maybe that’s just the way we like it.

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