ACCORDING to the app I now have on my phone, it is 82 days until the Scottish Parliament elections. But you don’t need an app to know that voting day is coming along soon. As soon as the candidate lists are published with all the contact details, the emails start flying in.
Interest groups and individuals, rightly, get in touch with candidates asking their views on a whole range of issues. From the threat to a local service, to preservation of buildings to climate change. And there will be more besides. All of it, part of our democratic process.
But other organisations go further and produce their own ideas and proposals for candidates and parties to consider. Common Weal is one and so too, is Engender. In September last year Engender produced their manifesto “Twenty for 2016”. It’s a manifesto endorsed by a range of organisations that work day in and day out on issues like violence against women, domestic violence, gender based budgeting and equal pay. The manifesto aims to take the next steps to tackle the impact of sexism on women and importantly, on children, men and society. It proposes practical and challenging action to whoever forms the next Scottish government; action that ranges right across most aspects of our lives. From a gender equality bill, to a gendered economic development strategy, to a women’s employment and enterprise challenge fund. And much more besides.
Common Weal has produced a "Book of Ideas" with the straightforward intent of proposing a range of measures that could be taken over the next five years to create an "all of us first" society, using the powers we do have and those we are likely to get – Westminster fiscal framework shenanigans notwithstanding. It sets out to challenge the notion that we have to keep on doing what we currently do, until a better day arrives.
Both of these are examples of folks getting together and working out how we can make life in Scotland better for the majority, now.
Up and down the country, Women for Independence is busy running a "listening exercise". Returning to the very work that began and established it back in 2013, groups of women are turning their attention to what the next Scottish Parliament could do to improve their lives. Ideas, discussion, argument and laughter – the stuff of engagement. Key ingredients for a better Scotland.
The critical importance of this is that no matter whether you agree with any or none of the ideas presented, simply engaging with them challenges each of us to think, and to think beyond the narrow confines we can be forced into when an election comes along. That matters. Because it occurs to me that in all of the email based question and answer, we’re missing something. The very nature of those emails pinging back and forward is that you are either for or against something, you either support a particular stance or you do not. And I’m wondering where the dynamic, energetic, argumentative engagement of the referendum campaign has gone and whether we can get it back.
This week, I sat on the panel for a Q&A session organised by this paper and Business for Scotland. This one was in Edinburgh, but another is coming along on February 24the 24th February in Glasgow. To be fair, it wasn’t overly argumentative. But the longer we talked the more ideas and nuances emerged. Most strikingly of all, the idea of participative democracy and how we could achieve that. From consideration of the possible size, shape and power of local government, to changes to how our Scottish Parliament works that brings in scrutiny and challenge from others than solely elected members. We didn’t have long, but it was a start and it seemed clear that there was appetite for it. If we had more of these, might we not get more ideas and proposals not only put forward, but actually discussed? With politicians willing and able to say: “I’m not sure about that, but I’d like to hear more”. Face to face discussion: neither email nor, even less satisfactory, social media.
It seems to me that if we don’t look to see how, even in a small way, we can make more discussion happen, then we are going to let the engagement legacy of the referendum slip through our fingers. And all those folks who signed up to vote for the first time and all those who went to those town meetings and then online to find out about things for themselves, will see 2014 as a golden moment in time, a "one-off" and not about to return any time soon.
If we allow that to happen, because we too easily slip back into the "aye been" way of doing politics then we have only let go of a real opportunity to give our politics a different, more participative shape. But more than that, we have taken a step backwards in winning more heads as well as hearts, to support for independence. It won’t only be the arguments we need to win next time, it has to be the belief that the business of politics in Scotland can, and will be, different and better too.
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