WHAT really struck me filming in the Faroes, Iceland and Norway was how very relaxed people are. We filmed academics, campaigners, MPs and high-ranking company executives – not one of them asked us to change a single frame of film.
That suggests to me that these are societies where people are not micromanaged from on high, where power is devolved to the most junior employee and most local council instead of being held centrally and folk aren’t looking over their shoulders wondering if they’ve just said something that could later be used against them. The cut and thrust, suspicion, insecurity, competition and stress that have become commonplace in British society are almost completely missing in the Nordic nations.
READ MORE: Norway: Yes groups get first look at final documentary in Nation trilogy
Take Norway, where we interviewed the senior vice president and chief economist of Equinor – the new name for the Norwegian state-owned oil company Statoil. Eirik Waerness gave an incredibly frank account of the ups and downs of Norway’s massive oil and gas wealth, pointing out that despite having the world’s largest oil fund and highest GDP, Norway is still in part economically dependent on neighbour Sweden, Brussels – though Norway is not a member of the EU – and on Britain as a trading partner. There is no smugness or complacency on display in Norway. These folk understand that happiness, security and even national identity are best safeguarded by developing trusting relationships with neighbours – not trying to get one over on them by forcing through one-off deals that benefit only one party.
Happily Scotland is on the same path, trying to find common cause whenever possible rather than confrontation. But the films also show, that this more relaxed, trusting, consensual approach to life and politics in the Nordics has been made possible by underlying conditions that are still missing in Scotland.
Of course one of them is the level of sovereignty that comes with independence, or in the case of the Faroes, having the worlds most powerfully devolved parliament. But other important building blocks of success are; widespread land ownership, powerful and ultra local councils, full proportional representation for a century and an enduring cross-party commitment to equality as the most important principle in governance — even by conservatives.
The renewables revolution gives Scotland a second chance to establish a different kind of country after Margaret Thatcher squandered our oil revenues first time around. But we must seize that chance with both hands and make Scotland the truly democratic nation our Nordic neighbours have worked for centuries to become.
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