After my little stint on camera, I chatted to my interrogators. The politician representing the Irish nationalist community told me how closely Scotland’s referendum debate was being followed across the Irish sea. A Yes vote, I was informed, would do more for Irish unification than any bombing campaign during the troubles, or any politics since. If Scotland were to go, Northern Ireland would be next.

A decade on, UK constitutional politics is still obsessed with the Scotland question, yet events in Northern Ireland remain relatively underreported. The Stormont Assembly was suspended for nearly three years, from 2017 to 2020: a significant piece of our country’s political apparatus was broken. And barely disturbed the bulletins. Had MPs all been sent home from the Commons on full pay for three years, had Nicola Sturgeon sat around in Bute House while civil servants ran Scotland without political direction or control, news editors would have got hours of content out of it.

The almost complete silence on Northern Ireland ahead of the Brexit vote was a disgrace. All those 1.8 million lives, hundreds of businesses and millions of pounds worth of trade upturned — without discussion, dissection or negotiation, until after the fact. The imperfect patching currently underway won’t mend this constitutional tear.

A mega poll of more than 3,000 voters by Lord Ashcroft, published last week, shows the Irish Nationalists, Sinn Fein, winning the next Northern Irish election at a canter — and most people in Ulster believing that a border poll in 10 years’ time would deliver a united Ireland. It is not an outlier.

Perhaps our gaze needs to shift from Scotland — where even the sustained, bellicose sabre-rattling of our First Minister has seen her move not an inch closer to securing a second referendum in her seven years of leadership — to our neighbours across the Irish Sea. New and resurgent political parties and movements, along with the great disruptor of Brexit, mixed with some good old-fashioned political regicide, has created all the ingredients for a generational shift.

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By Carlo Gebler

Many Brits don’t realise that the power-sharing requirement of the Good Friday agreement means that both the leading Unionist and Nationalist parties must be represented in Northern Ireland’s government, with the offices of First Minister and Deputy First Minister occupied by a member of each. The DUP has been the major Unionist force in the region for almost two decades, recording between a quarter and a third of overall votes at Assembly elections, in a five, six or even seven-party system.

The pro-Brexit party was instrumental in sinking Theresa May’s proposed EU deal, which would have avoided extra checks and red tape for goods travelling between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and minimised disruption between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The protocols agreed following Boris Johnson’s deal gave no such protection, and are currently being renegotiated. But the anger in Ulster contributed, in no small part, to the defenestration of the DUP’s leader, Arlene Foster, earlier this year. Her successor, Edwin Poots, lasted just 21 days in post. The DUP’s chaotic transition has resulted in a current party leader who does not sit in the Stormont Assembly and therefore cannot be the First Minister of Northern Ireland.

To me, there is a sour, bleak, almost Old Testament defensiveness to the DUP’s unionism. And as someone who believes in the UK, and has spent all my political life espousing the positives of co-operation within wider unions (whether that is Scotland in the UK or the UK in the EU), I worry that defensive unionism does nothing but harm its own cause.

But the DUP are not the only pro-UK force in Northern Ireland.

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Sturgeon's drugs shame

By Ruth Davidson

Enter the most popular leader in the province, who has a Boys’ Own backstory to send any spin doctor into raptures. Born in barracks, the son of a soldier, he suffered childhood trauma when he accidentally shot a friend in the head with his father’s service weapon. At 16, he joined up as a boy soldier, rising through the ranks to become regimental sergeant major, and later commissioned as an officer. In Afghanistan, he was awarded the Military Cross for retaking a town from the Taliban.

There is an earthiness about the man, and a wicked humour. He passes the “pub test”, of whether voters would want to go for a drink with him, with ease — not least because he sends out plenty of pictures of himself on social media enjoying a pint of Guinness or large dram of good malt whisky. Commenting on an internal squabble between DUP MP Sammy Wilson and party leader Jeffrey Donaldson last week, he suggested a “bare belly fight to sort it out”. He has the highest approval ratings of any political leader in the country. And yet he is practically ignored by a UK political press happy to dissect every word, action, belief or motivation if the source is Keir Starmer or Boris Johnson.

But, still, Doug Beattie is the man, quite probably, who will save the Union.

Beattie took over as leader of the moderate Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in May. In making his pitch, he said he was “able to reach out to all people in Northern Ireland regardless of what your religion is, sexual orientation or ethnicity”. In the last six months he has done just that, convincing Cllr Julie-Anne Corr-Johnston, NI’s first openly lesbian elected Unionist, to quit the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) and join his party. In Autumn, Beattie was pictured smiling next to Stephen McCarthy, introducing him as the UUP’s first working-class Catholic candidate for an Assembly election. Mr McCarthy, who grew up in a nationalist household and whose grandfather was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries, says there are many “de facto unionists within the Catholic community”, and that the only way that Unionism would win a future border poll was through “reaching out to people like me”.

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Beattie’s unionism is expansive, seeking to embrace groups that have often felt excluded. He also wears his unionism lightly, knowing that not everyone is as passionately entrenched as some of the representatives sent to Stormont. He seems to instinctively understand that his impeccable unionist credentials — military service for the crown, his uncle’s death at the hands of the IRA, the fact that he grew up on Union Street in Portadown — give him much greater licence to talk freely and generously about Irish identity.

He can face down hardline unionist critics by declaring, “I always viewed myself as Irish … clearly I’m British as well but my whole life I’ve identified as Irish”. On talk radio in Dublin, he’s confident enough to dive into that identity:

“I’m Irish. I’m an Irishman. .. I’m also an Ulsterman. You know, I’m British, I’m a European. I’m all of these things and I’m multilayered … God Save the Queen represents me, as does The Sash My Father Wore, Ulster rugby. But so does the shamrock, so does Gaelic games. So does Guinness. So does St Patrick’s Day. All of these things are part of my identity.”

He talks about “the union” not as an immutable object, preserved in aspic, but as a “Union of People” with all the scope and contradiction that entails. He wants little short of a complete transformation of Northern Irish politics — reshaping the devolution architecture to allow for what he calls “working power-sharing” and “power-sharing opposition” — coalitions that bring unionists and nationalists together in order to get things done, rather than (as he sees it) forcing them together in a way that means mutual vetoes often result in stasis. He wants what the rest of us in the UK take for granted: the ability to vote politicians and parties out of office, which he believes will make them work harder and concentrate on voters’ priorities over their own constitutional posturing.

And his confident, positive vision is transatlantic. In Washington DC, recently, he spoke to members of Congress, who are more used to seeing Sinn Fein and the Irish-American organisation Noraid making their nationalist case before passing round the hat. In seeking to address this one-sided view of Northern Ireland, he said: “Unless we engage, they will only hear one story. And it will not be our story.”

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Beattie’s mix of statesman and soldier, parliamentary chamber and sergeant’s mess hall has struck a chord. In August, a LucidTalk poll for the Belfast Telegraph saw the UUP overtake the DUP in voting intentions for the first time in more than 20 years. Of all the party leaders in Northern Ireland, Doug Beattie was the only one to record a net positive rating of +20%. Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill recorded -16%, while the DUP’s Jeffrey Donaldson recorded -20%. For context, Boris Johnson recorded -70%: even if most people in Northern Ireland want to remain in the UK, they don’t think much of the person leading it right now.

With the DUP regularly dropping in the polls to half of their 2019 general election high of 31%, it’s clear that there are thousands of Northern Ireland Unionists feeling politically homeless right now. Doug Beattie’s message to them at party conference was clear: “We have self-belief. And that self-belief is contagious. The public are picking up on it and tuning back into the Ulster Unionist Party … We are confident unionists, we are positive unionists, we are inclusive unionists, we are welcoming unionists. We are the Ulster Unionist Party and we are back.”

And, as someone who believes in our union, I breathe a sigh of relief to see a modern, moderate voice making its case across the Irish Sea.

For me, the fabric of the UK is always in tension. And the “otherness” of my part of it, is, in part, offset by the “otherness” of Northern Ireland. What I couldn’t say, all those years ago, to the nationalist politician impressing upon me Scotland’s potential role in Irish reunification, was that they were probably right. I see the counterbalance that one province provides the other and can accept that Scottish secession, had it occurred, may well have helped tip majority opinion in Northern Ireland towards Irish reunification.

And if I accept that, I must push myself to acknowledge the counter may also be true. That were Northern Ireland to go, and part of that fabric in tension rip, desire in Scotland to be a northern outpost of an English and Welsh block would be less strong than desire to remain part of a four nation union.

So those who believe in the union must turn their gaze west. Scotland is no nearer another referendum than it was the morning after the votes were counted in 2014; but Northern Ireland is probably less than six months away from having its first ever nationalist First Minister. And if the Scottish example is anything to go by, a Sinn Fein victory would give the party a platform to campaign relentlessly to end the UK, just as the SNP have done.

The fight for the future of the UK is about to enter a new phase.

This week, the roll call of substance abuse fatalities during the SNP’s period of government is set to hit 10,000. That’s more than the number of people killed in Hurricane Katrina, or who perished as the Titanic went down. More than those killed at Pearl Harbor, in 9/11 or during the 7/7 London or Manchester arena attacks — more than British troops killed at the charge of the Light Brigade. It is more than the number of people killed in the Blantyre mining disaster or the Dunblane Massacre or the Lockerbie bombing. In fact, it is more than all ten of these events combined. And yet, while each of these losses of life have been faithfully recorded in our history books, there has been no equivalent recognition or examination of the current unfolding tragedy.

Why? Because of the people who are dying. According to the national figures, people in the most deprived parts of the country were 18 times more likely to have a drug-related death than those in the least deprived. The poor. The marginalised. The people who don’t vote.

But these people aren’t just statistics. Every death is a person with a story and loved ones mourning their loss. Bryan Hogg died in 2019 from street valium abuse. He was 29 years old and not long out of prison. His mum, Sandra Mackin, says the system failed him. “The politicians don’t care — it’s just another number to them. I think my boy was failed. After he died nothing was done — there was supposed to be an investigation. He had a wee boy and now he has to live without his dad.”

During May’s Scottish elections, Nicola Sturgeon was tackled on the issue and admitted her government had “taken its eye off the ball”. Public Health Scotland says that “every drugs-related death is preventable” and “quality treatment options” are “essential”. But as deaths have spiralled, funding has been cut and treatment options have narrowed. Over the first 12 years of the SNP’s time in office, funding to Scotland’s drug and alcohol services was cut by more than half. For those trying to pull themselves out of their addiction and get better, it’s had a devastating effect.

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Scotland has some of the best residential rehabilitation facilities in Europe. So good, in fact, that Dutch authorities and insurers pay to place patients in facilities such as the Castle Craig hospital in the Scottish Borders. In 2002, Castle Craig admitted 257 patients funded by the NHS; in 2019, the number dropped to just five. There’s no shortage of demand for services, but they aren’t accessible to the Scots most in need. Currently a quarter of Castle Craig’s places are being filled by Dutch patients, with most of the remainder being funded privately or via health insurance.

Meanwhile Glasgow’s largest residential rehab centre, Phoenix Futures, was forced to abruptly cut its number of beds from 54 to just 14 in 2019, after a Government tender was revoked. The Mungo Foundation’s Cothrom Eile service — in Nicola Sturgeon’s own Glasgow constituency — was forced to close its doors completely in 2019 due to funding cuts.

Those who have benefitted from such services are concerned at their closure. When Bruce Munro started at Phoenix Futures he was “eight stone and taking food from bins and begging to fund a drug habit — I didn’t feel part of society”. He had been abusing substances for more than 20 years, becoming homeless and suffering mental health problems. After five months of rehab, he was ready to move into supported accommodation. “To have only 14 beds for a city the size of Glasgow is disgraceful. I think this model works for me because it’s not just about putting down the drugs. You are getting therapy, bereavement and trauma counselling rather than just putting the drugs down, because that’s the easy part.”

The outcry over these cuts — and the spiralling death toll which has accompanied them — forced the Scottish government into action in January. As well as reversing some of the funding cuts, Nicola Sturgeon established a Drugs Death Task Force and appointed a minister to directly oversee the issue. But huge question marks remain: there has been little change of direction in policy that has spectacularly failed over the last 14 years.

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Dr Neil McKeganey, Director of the Centre for Substance Use Research in Glasgow, worries ministers are intent on just doing more of the same. “We have the same people advising the same government year after year, with no evident impact on the number of drugs deaths and no real accountability.” Dr McKeganey has repeatedly advised ministers and officials to better support residential rehabilitation —

“only to be told that their preference is for methadone and now benzodiazepine prescribing. That methadone is implicated in 53% of Scottish drugs deaths and benzodiazepines in 74%, should tell even the most ardent refusenik of the importance of abstinence-based treatments that prescribing addictive drugs is part of the problem — not part of the solution.”

CEO of the charity Faces and Voices of Recovery, Anne Marie Ward is more blunt: “The Drugs Death Task Force insists on pursuing the same failed options that got us into this mess.” She insists “we need the Scottish Government to start properly funding rehabilitation and recovery programmes”. The Scottish Government currently funds just 13% of the residential rehab places in Scotland (even Universal Credit funds twice as many) and their own figures show waiting times of up to year.

Of course, the barrage of criticism which has accompanied its sustained failure has prompted the SNP to hit out, trying to switch blame. The SNP has long campaigned to introduce consumption rooms — also known as shooting galleries — where addicts can access clean needles and inject in a safe environment. But the Scottish Parliament does not have the legislative power to introduce them — that is reserved for Westminster, and the UK Government does not support the policy.

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When the record drug death figures were announced last week, SNP members were quick to point the finger south. Nicola Sturgeon tweeted that “we will continue to argue for reform of drugs law, which is not currently within our power” while Edinburgh East MP Tommy Sheppard stated that “major changes in UK law [are] required to really tackle the problem.”

Pretty shameless stuff, as well as being self-incriminating. On Tuesday, England and Wales released their drugs death figures, both now five times less than the Scottish rate. Pointing out that the laws are exactly the same on both sides of the border indicates that some other factor or combination of factors is to blame for the enormous discrepancy. As Anne Marie Ward has previously stated: “Bluntly, the obsession with drug consumption rooms (DCRs) is making it inevitable that more people in Scotland will die from addiction. DCRs are the same silver bullet trope I’ve heard for 30 years.”

A public health emergency that has built up over many years is not about to be fixed by a stroke of a legislator’s pen, and it is dishonest for those in charge to pretend otherwise. Still, even ideas with limited impact are something the UK government should be prepared to discuss with their SNP counterparts. The people being killed are UK citizens, too.

The truth is both complicated and mundane. We need better data and analysis of those who have died and the factors contributing to those deaths; we need earlier interventions, a number of different pathways, and joined-up support — so those dropping out of treatment or switching between areas or options are not lost in the system. We need to review the extent to which “stabilising” drugs such as methadone and benzodiazepines are prescribed and what the patient journey looks like once a more stable living situation is achieved.

Yes, replacing the funding that the Scottish Government has cut over the years is important — but only if it is directed well. Residential rehab will not be the best option for everyone, but it needs to be available and attainable for those who would benefit from it.

The hard work of policy development and service delivery is the only thing that will start to unpick the thousands of individual human tragedies that led us here. Unfortunately, this work is unglamorous. Until now, there hasn’t been much incentive for the SNP to do it. It has taken 14 years and nearly ten thousand deaths for the Scottish Government to be shamed into acting on drugs deaths. And now the party is wasting time and energy on glib finger-pointing. The country is watching, and waiting.

Putin aside, Scottish voters are now having to contend with the return of two Scottish political heavyweights of yesteryear: Galloway and Alex Salmond, two RT hosts who now find themselves leading two new political parties.

Each is attempting to outflank their former tribes on the constitutional question, playing to their respective unionist and nationalist bases as strongmen who will hold the current crop of MSP’s feet to the fire. But in doing so, both risk doing more damage to the cause they claim to support. North of the border, there’s more than a lingering suspicion that both are using their creations as a vehicle for their respective egos, rather than as a genuine attempt to shake up the body politic.

The comparisons don’t end there. For while Galloway and Salmond are not quite the opposite of each other, they represent, in a phrase favoured by the former, “two cheeks of the same arse”. They are both, in effect, attempting to game the Scottish electoral system.

Unlike the House of Commons, where an MP simply has to record one more vote than their nearest challenger to win a constituency, the Scottish Parliament — as well as the Welsh Senedd — is elected using the Additional Member System. In Holyrood, there are 129 seats, of which 73 are elected using the traditional first-past-the-post system. Scotland is then divided into wider electoral regions, where 56 further MSPs are elected on a proportional basis. This “list” is designed to ensure that parties are not penalised for recording their support evenly across the country, rather than seeing it pooled geographically in a number of individual seats. Or so goes the theory.

But when the architects of devolution were deciding on this modified “d’Hont system”, there was a general assumption that the same parties competing on the list would also choose to stand candidates in the constituencies; this matters, because the number of constituencies a party wins is ratio’d out of their list returns to make the result more proportional.

Both Galloway’s party, All for Unity (also, confusingly, called Alliance4Unity), and Alex Salmond’s vehicle, Alba, are standing solely on the list. And at least in tactical terms, that may make electoral sense.

In Galloway’s plan, the SNP will likely take the overwhelming number of first-past-the-post seats, but with less than half of the vote. So if pro-UK voters simply cast their wider politics aside and vote for the leading unionist candidate in the constituency vote and the Alliance4UK candidate in the regional list vote, the SNP would be crushed. Nicola Sturgeon would be out on her ear and there would be no more talk of independence referendums.

Salmond’s offer to independence supporters is the inverse of Galloway’s claim. Because the SNP records so many first-past-the-post wins — and will likely do so again in May — they return very few MSPs from the regional list. In effect, goes the Alba narrative, thousands of true believers in independence have their list votes cast aside. But, says Salmond, if they decided to split their vote — SNP in the constituency and Alba on the list — Scottish nationalists could record what he calls a “supermajority” for independence. With so many pro-independence MSPs in Holyrood, Boris Johnson would be forced to capitulate and offer another independence referendum immediately.

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On paper, there appears to be a logic to both arguments. But in reality, they are to varying degrees a combination of sleight of hand, misdirection and utter cobblers.

Both Salmond and Galloway fail to appreciate that Scottish voters are unlikely to put all other considerations to one side when they cast their ballot. Yes, there is tactical voting between Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem voters — Conservatives sweep up thousands of Lib Dem votes in the borders, many Tory voters in West Dunbartonshire are happy to vote for their local Labour MSP to keep the nationalists out and a fair whack of both Labour and Conservatives will cheerily vote for the avuncular Scottish Lib Dem leader in his NE Fife constituency.

But there is no wholesale transfer, nor would you expect there to be from such diverse political traditions. Indeed, because Scottish councils are decided on multi-member wards and with a single transferrable vote, where voters rank their choices, it is easy to track their second and third preferences. In the glut of council by-elections we have seen following the lifting of Covid restrictions, it is clear that as many  — and sometimes more — Labour voters would rather give their second vote to the SNP than to the Conservatives, even if the Tories are best placed to keep a nationalist out of office.

Moreover, as the vast majority of pro-union MSPs are elected on the list system, rather than winning constituencies outright, adding another unionist party such as Galloway’s and splitting the vote four ways, rather than three, is likely to reduce each party’s share and allow more nationalists in through the middle.

I suspect that George Galloway — whose itinerant political career has taken in the Labour Party, The Respect party, the Workers Party of Britain and now All For Unity — probably knows this. This is not, after all, the first time he has stood for Holyrood; in 2011, he managed to record 3.3% on the Glasgow list.

Fast forward to today, and the most recent three Scottish polls have All For Unity failing to cut through. But while it looks unlikely that Galloway will return any MSPs, he could still gather enough votes to keep some pro-UK members out. For a man who refused to join the Better Together campaign at the 2014 independence referendum because “I hate the Union Jack”, who has previously called for a United Ireland and last week saw a clip resurface of him calling on the UK government to deliver a second independence referendum, it is almost as if his new party is just another grift to keep himself in the public eye.

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For Alex Salmond, however, even his most devout opponents accept that he believes fervently in Scottish independence. It is a cause to which he has committed almost his entire adult life. Whether, though, he is fully invested in seeing his protégé, Nicola Sturgeon, be the one to deliver it is another matter.

The fallout between the two former allies has been seismic. It centres on a complex and unedifying series of events, involving Salmond winning a civil battle over Sturgeon’s government over the way it investigated allegations of sexual assault against him, and culminating in Salmond being acquitted of multiple allegations of the same nature. Along the way, Ms Sturgeon traduced the character of her former boss, mentor and friend of 30 years — and she has carried the attacks into this campaign, highlighting his gambling habits and suggesting his new party was about putting “self-interest first”.

For his part, Salmond appears to have buried the enmity he showed throughout the investigation into the Scottish Government’s handling of the harassment complaints, during which he accused a group of Sturgeon’s allies (including her husband) of colluding to have him removed from public life and jailed. He now claims he simply wants Alba representatives to help get the SNP over the line with a majority that the UK government can’t ignore.

But is this likely? While a new nationalist party throws a spanner into some of the statistical modelling of polls and results, the general rule of thumb is that you need 5% of the regional vote to start taking seats. Get more than 5% of the vote and Alba begins doing damage to the pro-UK cause by displacing some pro-UK MSPs; receive less than 5% and the damage is mostly inflicted on the nationalist side by taking SNP and nationalist-supporting Green votes without anything to show for it.

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The most recent three polls, in which Alba has recorded between 2-3% of the vote, suggest the latter scenario is increasingly likely. Indeed, it’s hard not see Alex Salmond’s power play as anything other than a revenge mission. When he stepped down in 2014, he handed his deputy a parliamentary majority. Nicola Sturgeon promptly squandered it in the 2016 Scottish election — a setback which allowed the UK government to deny all claims that an independence referendum should be rerun.

But even if Alba does somehow manage to return the sort of “supermajority” Alex Salmond claims to be hoping for, there’s nothing to say that it will pay off. The UK Government would be well within its rights to point out that gaming the system isn’t the same as gaining support. After all, in recent polls a majority of Scots have not been in support of separation. It would also, I suspect, be easier to counter a fractured nationalist Scottish movement composed of squabbling splinter groups than an SNP majority.

Come election day, though, far more important will be the fact that voters simply don’t like the sense that they are being played; that so-called big beasts think the political stage is theirs for an encore even if there’s no applause.

The conventional part was growing up in a textbook, nuclear family of mum, dad and two kids, in a detached house in a commuter village in Fife, Scotland. We weren’t rich, but my parents — who both grew up on Glasgow council estates and left school at 15 and 16 with few qualifications — had worked hard to afford a home of their own and the ability to take a family holiday abroad each year.

We weren’t a political house, but we were a dutiful one. No protest marches or party memberships growing up, but a distinct sense of civic duty — voting, paying taxes and supporting the monarchy. A Daily Express through the week and a Sunday Times on the Sabbath, plus Sue Lawley and Nicholas Witchell on the BBC at Six o’clock, in the background while Mum made tea. Even if I hadn’t turned out to be a Conservative with a big ‘C’, I was raised in a household that was conservative with a small one.

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The unusual part was that my family were rocked by the sort of private cataclysm that utterly unpins every comforting routine parents hope to build for their children. When I was five, I was hit by a truck and severely injured. I broke my leg, smashed my pelvis, crushed my femoral artery, severed the main nerve down the front of my right leg and suffered so much internal damage my mum was told I might grow up unable to have children.

I spent weeks in a specialist children’s hospital in Edinburgh, first in traction and later in a full body cast — plaster of Paris starting under my armpits and reaching my toes on one side and my knee on the other. When it was finally removed, with me screaming in fear at the circular saw, I was put on the long road back to recovery. The surgeons had saved my life and my right leg (initially it hadn’t been clear if they could rescue either) but if I were ever going to walk again, it would be only after painful months of physio, hydrotherapy and analgesics.

It is not much fun being the only child at primary school with a zimmer frame. I hated it. I hated not being able to run as fast or for as long as my classmates. I hated being told to sit out some parts of PE. I hated not being able to bend or do gymnastics or put my ankle up to my ear as most children can with the flexibility of youth. Some kids might have retreated inside themselves, become bookish or engrossed in daily newspapers, or otherwise divorced themselves from the rough and tumble they could no longer be part of.

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Not me. I have a competitive streak a mile wide; I am dogged and cussed and contrary. If I couldn’t do something, then I’d just keep trying until I could. So my early childhood wasn’t about learning or engaging with the world around me — it was spent blocking out everything that didn’t immediately help me climb trees, play football, build dams down the beach, climb out my bedroom window onto the flat roof of the conservatory below or partake in a hundred other physical labours — just to show that I could. And that I could keep up, too

The world was for other people to worry about. I wanted to play with my friends, pretend I was Roberto Baggio on the football field and teach my poor dog to jump through a raised hula hoop for treats.

The thing that made me think that — maybe — the world was worth paying attention to wasn’t a speech in the House of Commons or a public debate on the state of Britain. It wasn’t Live Aid or Band Aid or a Blue Peter appeal. It wasn’t Princess Diana holding the hand of a patient with AIDS or the Lockerbie Bombing. It was something that happened a thousand miles away in a country I’d never visited.

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On 9 November, 1989 — the night before my eleventh birthday — the communist government of East Germany announced they were opening the border and that future democratic elections would be held in the country. The people of East and West Berlin, watched by border guards, started dismantling the wall with picks, sledgehammers and even their bare hands. The pictures of crying, hugging and dancing on the hated barrier that had divided families, countries and a German-speaking people was immensely powerful.

I hadn’t paid any attention to similar unrest that had occurred previously in Poland or Hungary, but I somehow knew that Germany was different. That this — if not an end in itself — signified that an end was coming. I don’t know if I thought that the Berlin Wall was the iron curtain that kept ‘us’ from ‘them’ but it was clear in my head that ‘we’ — as in, the West — had won. The forces of freedom, democracy, property, individuality and fairness under the law had triumphed over a nameless, faceless communism designed to suppress the individual, impoverish the citizen and crush the human spirit.

I also knew it must be momentous because I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime to watch the specially extended Nine o’clock news.

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Not long after the wall came down, I found myself dragged along to a debating competition my sister had entered through school. While the judges went off to deliberate, the floor debate took place, with the chairman inviting contributions from the audience. I’d sat next to my sister’s friends so my mum didn’t have a clue my hand had snaked up, until she heard me reedily give my first public speech, off the cuff and without notes. I’ve no idea what I said, or even what the motion had been, but in my battered black chords and a hand-me-down paisley pattern shirt, I had to correct the chairman who called me “the young gentleman” before launching into my argument.

The English teacher who ran the debating society made a mental note to look out for me when I followed my sister to secondary school the next year. My newfound interest in current affairs meant there was something other than sport I could be competitive at. And I was — all through my school and university career. Debating took me to countries I would never otherwise have seen and introduced me to people I would never otherwise have met.

While I might have gone on to play tennis for my club, football for my school and squash for my university, it was debating which saw me all the way to the world championships, into my first career as a journalist and into the job I have now.

And I would never have been confident enough to stand up and make that first floor speech at 11-years old, if the fall of the Berlin Wall hadn’t ignited my interest in world events. The fall of communism liberated more than just those under its yoke.

I’ve never been good with death. Which is not to say that I am afraid of dying. In fact, I almost did when I was very young; I was run over by a truck when I was only five. Hours of surgery followed, then weeks of treatment, months of rehabilitation, and a lifetime with scars and aches and body parts that don’t match.

No. It’s not the idea of my own death I don’t like – if He came to sit beside me for a while, I like to think that I wouldn’t plead or bargain or upend my chair to get away. We would talk civilly. There would be no chummy chess match, but a bow of the head and an acceptance that every day since that first dodge all those years ago was an indulgence.

It’s other people’s deaths I’ve always struggled with.

The first one that really hit me wasn’t that of an elderly relative or a much-loved pet. There was no “he had a good innings” or “it was a blessing, really”, to comfort myself with. He was a classmate at school. We were 15 and one day he just fell down dead from a heart condition that no one knew he had.

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I went to the funeral. I had promised myself I wouldn’t – I had told myself I wouldn’t be mawkish or voyeuristic. But, at the last minute, I changed into my school uniform – to deflect any challenge that might come my way as to why I was there – and walked the two miles from my village to the church where the ceremony was held. It was my first funeral. I didn’t cry.

Or, at least, not in the church. Or by the graveside as ropes jerked the coffin into the gaping maw of a hole. It didn’t hit me till months later. The grief came mixed up in the challenge most teenagers face at some point, when the old certainties of faith fall away. When the picture-book bible stories of heaven and hell don’t work any more. It’s when you realise a belief isn’t true just because you want it to be.

Death was all over the news that year. The Labour Leader John Smith had passed away, a chinook helicopter crashed in the Mull of Kintyre killing all on board, and police started pulling bodies out of the ground at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, the home of Fred and Rosemary West.

It was also the year my English teacher started talking to us about some of the bigger questions in life. I remember answering a question on military service with total assurance that, yes, I would be prepared to die for my country. But I wasn’t sure I’d be able to kill for it, which is a much harder thing to do.

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I remembered those words over and over when I joined the territorial army and was taught several dozen ways to kill – from calling in air support, to laying down 81mm mortar fire, to finding out why bayonets need a blood channel (so a sucking wound doesn’t make it impossible to withdraw it from the enemy to use again).

I’d joined up after a journalism job took me to Kosovo to see the UK peacekeeping and nation building efforts at the end of the war there. It was the first time I’d seen brain matter: the residue of a sniper’s bullet. It smelled cloyingly sweet. I was 22.

From such a halting and uneasy beginning, my relationship with death has become much more pedestrian. I grew up in a family so rooted in its Presbyterianism and unwillingness to “make a show” that only the funerals of blood family and deep rooted friendships were acceptable (anything else risked emotional tourism). Yet I now head an organisation where it is expected of me to represent the Party, and sometimes even deliver the eulogy, at the funerals of colleagues, activists or former parliamentarians.

Each person has their own morbid path. My partner, a native of County Wexford in the south-east of Ireland, saw her first dead body when she was nine. It was her uncle. After the undertakers had taken him away to fix and to fill his body, they brought him back to be laid out on the bed he died in, to be visited by near enough the whole town for his wake.

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This cultural norm seems to have caused her no ill harm. Nor did – after losing both her parents as a teenager – taking a comb to her dead father’s hair as he lay in an open casket, because the funeral home had given him the wrong parting.

We all question, we all wrestle with the unfairness of a premature visit paid to someone we love, we are all hurt and we all die. But from first encounter to final resting place, the paths themselves are very different depending on our age, our religion, our culture.

Sue Black takes us on her own journey in her new memoir, All that Remains. An anatomy professor and forensic anthropologist who lives with death every day, she walks us through the murders she had worked on as a Home Office expert: from the war crimes she pieced together from unearthed mass graves in the Balkans to holidaymakers she repatriated after helping lead the international response to the Boxing Day Tsunami in Thailand and Indonesia.

She also invites us to sit by her mother’s bedside in her final hours as she and her daughters sing: “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.” It was an extraordinarily uplifting scene. You would expect it to be bleak; but it is warm and it soars. It reduced me to tears on the red-eye shuttle to London City Airport; the besuited businessman next to me self-consciously offered me his hanky between sniffs.

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And it’s a necessary book too. Our responses to death are changing as our relationships with it change.

I’m pleased that young journalists coming up don’t have the same trauma of doing death-knocks that I had – ringing the bell of the recently bereaved to ask if they have anything they can say about the departed or a photo they can gift to the paper. The worst one I ever had to do was for a boy who was walking his dog in a graveyard in a downpour, only for some long-forgotten mineworkings to collapse and the mud to swallow him whole. Nowadays, three clicks and Facebook supplies it all.

Yes, better for work, but on a personal level, it feels like the ‘RIP’ messages on Twitter for every pop star that passes or actor that leaves the stage hollows out the meaning of grief. That flowery prose – designed to be widely read – is no substitute for the awkward handshake and “thanks for coming” at the crematorium line-up. “Well, you know, he was a good man. And a good friend.”

That’s why this book is a good and welcome friend. And Sue Black is a good guide. It’s a hug at the wake followed by that special time, weeks later, when a night time drink brings back all the old memories – and laughing stories, lightly told, start to heal old wounds.

1. Invest in education and training for young people

Changing the law so that every young person would remain in education or training until age 18 would transform the life chances of great swathes of the population, as well as benefit the Scottish economy. Currently, 20% of Scots aged between 16 and 19 are not in any form of education or structured training. More than eight in 10 business leaders in Scotland told the Open University’s Business Barometer last year that they struggled to find staff with the required skills.

Such a change, combined with a rebalancing of public opinion – to champion and value vocational education as much as academic education – would give every young person the opportunity to develop their skills and achieve their full potential. It would help employers fill the skills gaps in their sectors, increase productivity and encourage a strengthened Scottish economy to invest and support public services.

2. Build a new generation of New Towns

The current solution to the housing crisis is to continue to build groups of dwellings in similar patterns and locations as we have done over the past 25 years – but a bit more of it. We need a more radical solution. Rather than battle with local authority planning departments in order to tack hundreds of small estates onto the fringes of existing towns, and adding strain to existing services, let’s look at building whole new communities in structured way, on a large scale and with design at their heart.

The original New Towns programme in Britain saw 32 new urban developments being constructed, which today provide homes for about 2.5 million people. Developments such as Poundbury in Dorset, or Tornagrain outside Inverness, show how good design can make building new communities from scratch such an attractive proposition.

3. A clean energy revolution

Given our international climate change commitments, and with the UK having already scaled-down coal and beginning to look beyond oil and gas, there is a clear need to adapt our engineering technology to future energy supplies. A recent report into the storage of hydrogen points to an enormous opportunity: the transportation of renewable energy.

If the UK can lead the hydrogen revolution, not only would it secure our energy needs, it would allow us to lead the world in exporting renewables. We already have the inputs required – a renewables industry, engineering expertise and lots of water – we just need the vision, investment and political will to develop and champion this technology.

4. A lifelong skills guarantee

We need to think about skills the way we think about pensions – an investment for the future. The time when you could get a job at 18 and stay there until retirement is long gone. So we need to ensure workers are able to develop new skills throughout their careers – which these days is harder than ever. A skills guarantee would mean that government, helped by business, would ensure that anyone who wants to retrain or up-skill would have the opportunity to do so.

Creating personal learning accounts where workers, their employers and government can invest would give people ownership over when and how they access skills training; an expansion of lifelong apprenticeships and second chance centres for adults with no skills would help widen the provision of training, particularly for low-skilled workers.

5. Strengthen our Union

Brexit has put enormous strain on the democratic underpinnings of the nation. A nationalist government in Scotland, suspended self-government in Northern Ireland and a Labour Welsh government defining itself against a Conservative UK government have seen the devolved settlements stretched and tested. As a post-Brexit UK seeks to re-establish its position in the world, it cannot do so merely as a little England.

Twenty years on from the establishment of Holyrood, Stormont and Cardiff Bay, we need a new union delivery unit at the heart of government – ensuring that UK legislation is devolution compatible, that businesses from across the home nations are involved in helping draw up trade policy and invited on trade missions, and that civil servants and ministers have a genuine understanding of how power is shared and policy delivered.

With a raft of powers being repatriated from Brussels, and whole industries, such as agriculture or fisheries, being supported and regulated from home, ensuring that the distinct needs of Britain’s nations and regions are met will be a huge test for the UK government. It’s one it must pass if it wants citizens on board in post-Brexit Britain.

Click here to compare Ruth Davidson’s pledge card to the others in our Beyond Brexit series.

And yet, the consensus surrounding free markets and liberal democracy has never seemed so fragile. Systems of government, systems of finance, systems of trade are all under attack. If there was ever such a thing as a global world order, it is being shaken by a million raised voices.

The centre cannot hold. Or can it?

The world’s economy has many fathers; Adam Smith, the father of capitalism; Richard Arkwright, the father of the industrial revolution; John Maynard Keynes, the father of modern macroeconomic theory; David Ricardo, the father of international free trade; Henry Ford, the father of mass production.

For me, one man has done more to revolutionise trade, raise global wealth, reduce costs, bring goods to new geographic markets – and to the affordability of average households – than any other. His name is Malcolm McLean and he’s a ‘father’ too. He’s the father of the shipping container.

The son of a North Carolina farmer who grew up during the great depression, Malcolm McLean worked at a petrol station to save enough money to buy a second-hand truck. The ‘McLean Trucking Company’ was born. Waiting at docks one evening for a pickup, he realised how long and labour-intensive it was to load and unload ships. It took days for even a medium sized vessel to leave port. It was messy and dangerous – men had to take individual items from trains or trucks and put them on pallets, transfer them to the ship and pack the belly tight enough to ensure no destabilising movement at sea. Accidents and deaths were a regular occurrence. Theft or damage was commonplace.

According to McLean “a ship earns money only when she’s at sea” and he viewed those long waits on the dockside as an impediment to purpose. What if dockers didn’t need to handle, pack or unpack goods at all? What if a standard, lockable box containing those goods could smoothly transition from truck to ship to truck, from point of production to point of sale?

McLean applied for the patent for the world’s first sea container in 1956. He sold his trucking company (by then, the fifth largest in the US) and bought a tanker – the Ideal X – to start a shipping company instead. The Ideal X carried 58 containers on its maiden voyage. Today, container ships can carry over 19,000 and there are 20 million containers at sea at any one time. Before containerisation, loading cargo cost $5.86 per ton and only 1.3 tons could be loaded per hour. Today, cargo can be loaded at a rate of 10,000 tons per hour and at a cost of just $0.16 per ton.

90% of all purchased goods are now shipped inside a container and 90% of the world’s nations have at least one container port.

The container revolution means exporters can send a jumper the 3,000 sea miles from Scotland to Russia at a cost of just 2.5 American cents. When calculating international trade, economists will often assume the shipping costs to be zero. The biggest beneficiaries of this revolution have been the developing nations – their farmers, entrepreneurs and industries.

At the same time as containerisation, the world has grown far richer. Post war rebuilding, advances in health, greater literacy and, yes – cheaper and freer trade – has lifted millions out of extreme poverty. According to the World Bank, in 1981 some 42% of the world’s population were extremely poor (the definition of such being measured at a person consuming less than $1.90 a day at 2011 purchasing power parity). By 2013 – the most recent year for which reliable data is available – that figure had dropped to 10.7%. A billion people across the globe, lifted out of extreme poverty in less than a generation.

It is a huge achievement, and three-quarters of it is down to China. It is no coincidence that in recent decades China has become the largest exporter of containerised goods, shipping nearly three times more than its nearest rival, the US.

Containerisation is just one example of an innovation that has helped the world’s poor.

As market competition has driven down smartphone costs, farmers in sub-Saharan Africa have skipped the interim technologies used by their western predecessors to decide whether to go to market and can now receive pricing directly to their handset. Mobile technology is transforming the industry further, with weather forecasting, apps to chart the gestation cycle of individual cows as well as the provision of micro-insurance on a pay-as-you-plant basis. To date, there are more than 650 million mobile phone subscriptions in Sub-Saharan Africa.

So if capitalism has achieved demonstrable success, and continues to help many poorer nations grow faster than richer ones, why are people losing faith in the ability of capitalism to make their lives better?

In the UK, just 19% of people agree that “the next generation will probably be richer, safer and healthier than the last”. That figure falls to 15% of Germans and 14% of Americans. Markets might work but they aren’t seen to be working for everyone.

Speaking as a Scot, and one that grew up just a few miles from Adam Smith’s home in Fife, it’s worth returning to this particular ‘father’. Because Adam Smith wasn’t just an economist, he was also a moral philosopher. And while his famous tract, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations might have dissected the nature of self-interest in trade as led by the invisible hand, he was also the author of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. He argued that far from being purely self-interested, we care about the well-being of others, for no reason beyond the simple pleasure we take from their evident happiness.

He went further, too, advocating for the proceeds of trade to support public works and those unable to support themselves. The nature and purpose of commerce was:

“first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and second, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services”.

As the Nobel Laureate, Prof Amartya Sen argues, Smith:

“defended such public services as free education and poverty relief, while demanding greater freedom for the in­digent who receives support than the rather punitive Poor Laws of his day permitted…. he was deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might remain in an otherwise successful market economy. Even in dealing with regulations that restrain the markets, Smith additionally acknowledged the importance of interventions on behalf of the poor and the underdogs of society.”

Intervention. Market restraints. Decisions made at a macro-level by governments to ensure basic fairness for the little guy. It doesn’t sound like the buccaneering, laissez-faire hero that is lionised by so many on the right.

What Smith knew – and what we continually need reminded of – is that people are not pieces on a chess board, to be moved around by outside forces. And not for him the grand delusions of “men of systems” who seek to organise the world to their own ends.

Smith was a great Scottish humanist – he saw us for the individuals that we are. From this basic insight, flowed everything: his liberal outlook on life, his practicality, his sense of justice and his recognition that markets have to operate with consent.

In the UK, in 2017, that consent is crumbling. We stand at a moment in time suspended between what has gone before and that which is to come. The conclusion of the industrial revolution and the start of the technological one. That second when breath is caught, before we exhale.

And within those eons, we see individual currents and eddies. We are living at the tail end of a transition which started roughly 35 years ago. It’s a transition which has seen Britain gradually migrate from a manufacturing economy to a service-led one. The UK Commission on Employment and Skills shows the changes over the last 20 years in the UK workforce – fewer people in manufacturing, fewer in the skilled trades, fewer secretarial roles; but a great increase in managerial, professional and technical skills.

In many respects, this migration can be considered positive – as a country we now tend to do better-paid, cleaner and more gender-neutral work but it has undoubtedly created winners and losers. Many technically-skilled men, in particular, from declining or now uncompetitive industries, are chief amongst the losers.

The sense of injustice is fuelled by the uneven demographical and geographical impact.

For much of the 20^th century, manual and routine occupations offered progression and pay. For those leaving school to work in a factory, while it might have been hard to later switch career and become a lawyer, there was a clear path to becoming a foreman, supervisor or manager, with relatively high pay and stability of secure employment.

Similarly, in towns which sprang up because of a particular trade, industry or employer; while there might have been an insularity of ambition or even nepotism in appointment, there was evidence of available, achievable jobs. From pit villages to textile towns, whole communities profited in worth and self-worth from their industrial identities.

As the dominant occupations of the UK have migrated, such certainties have been lost. Towns have been gutted. Youngsters leaving school at 16 can no longer conceive that by the time their classmates finish sixth form and then a university degree, they’ll already be ahead of them with money in the bank and the first step on the housing ladder.

How does a teenager living in a pit town with no pit, a steel town with no steel or a factory town where the factory closed its doors a decade ago or more, see capitalism working for them? Is the route for social advancement a degree, student debt, moving to London to spend more than half their take home pay on a room in a shared flat in Zone 6 and half of what’s left commuting to their stagnant-wage job every day; knowing there is precisely zero chance of saving enough to ever own their own front door?

Or is it staying put in a community that feels like it’s being hollowed out from the inside; schoolfriends moving away for work, library and post office closures and a high street marked by the repetitive studding of charity shop, pub, bookies and empty lot – all the while watching the Rich Kids of Instagram on Channel 4 and footballers being bought and sold for more than the entire economy of a third world nation on Sky Sports News?

Not a single person familiar with this impossible choice should be surprised at the rise of the populist right and left, of Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn, with their simple, stick-it-to-the-broken-system narrative. This is what market failure piled upon social failure piled upon political failure looks like.

Business and commerce have enriched the world. We live longer, stay healthier, consume more and enjoy greater comfort than at any time in history. But corporate behemoths have forgotten about operating with consent. It is not enough simply for an Amazon to bring down the cost for consumers, the public expect it to pay a fair share of taxation and grant workers a decent wage as well.

It is not inequality that bites deepest, but injustice. People expect that the CEO of a corporation will be the highest paid person on the payroll. What they don’t accept is that FTSE 100 bosses are paid 174 times the average worker’s wage in this decade – compared to 13 to 44 times in 1980.

In 2011, YouGov found that 85% of Britons believed that income should depend on how hard someone works or on their talent. But analysis by the Institute of Policy Studies found that of 241 of the highest paid CEOs between 1993 and 2012, nearly 40% were either sacked, their company had to pay significant fraud-related fines and settlements, or their companies required some form of bail out from the state. Instead of bosses being paid for success, a significant minority were handsomely rewarded for failure.

Adam Smith’s diagnosis “when the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters” while blunt, contains a kernel of truth for the present. If business itself has flunked the opportunity to put its house in order following the 2008 crash, then it is time for governments to take the initiative. Reforms of corporate governance, the break-up of monopolies, restrictions on tax avoidance, lowering barriers of entry to market competitors – each of these actions is required and each needs governments to cooperate in order for them to be effective.

The Conservative governments since 2010 performed essential, albeit unfinished, repair work to the public finances and also began important longer-term initiatives like George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse and Greg Clark’s devolution agreements for city regions. But there is no room for even an ounce of complacency or wariness.

Debts of households and government both remain too high.

Planning law privileges those who already have property – disadvantaging the young and poor.

Beyond London many regions and regularly forgotten rural communities lack adequate physical and digital infrastructure.

Producers out-muscle consumers in the lobbying of parliament and government.

The low-waged still face disincentives as they move from benefits into work and up the pay scale.

We have not adequately considered how education and training services will need to upgrade in far-reaching ways for when automation slices through many white collar jobs, just as it sliced through so many industrial jobs in recent decades.

Boldness of the kind we don’t often see from government is going to be necessary.

We will need to be particularly bold when we see restrictive practices. Too much profit comes from tax avoidance, land speculation, financialisation and other unproductive economic activity, rather than through innovation and high performance.

Closing loopholes, increasing enforcement and overhauling regulatory frameworks can go some way to addressing the creeping cronyism that is making free market capitalism an unfree and anti-competitive capitalism, but this stick approach should only be one half of the story. Government also has the ability to set the tone and the direction of travel by using its vast array of levers and resource as a carrot, too. It should do so.

Such action is not about the Treasury picking winners or propping up failed industry, but it is about investing in genuine productive activities. Policy should also be realigned to reward firms that do the right thing – recognising investment in research and development, in workplace training, in productivity gains.

Where there is direct public sector investment, it should be to enable, not to replace or push out private sector investment. Its focus on physical and digital infrastructure, education and training; prioritising the public investment in the productivity – and therefore the earning power – of working people.

Taking the Conservatives’ recent UK manifesto as an example – policies such as a huge investment and expansion of technical education will do much more for long term wage growth than putting workers on boards. That technical education has to be focused on tomorrow’s jobs, however – particularly service jobs – and not positions that are being automated.

Similarly, policies of ‘help to build’ rather than ‘help to buy’ will do more to address the inability of young people to get on the housing ladder. The biggest ally we have in increasing housing supply is beauty – if new houses complement the local environment and avoid the disastrous design choices of the past we can help build sustainable local support for extra construction.

While Thomas Picketty’s claims of capital growing without bounds at the expense of workers has been disproved by – among others – the Brookings Institute in Washington DC, its analysis of net capital share shows that housing is the only area where capital income displacement of labour income is apparent.

This matters. If the trend continues across the western world, home ownership will become ever more unaffordable. Measurement by the gini-coefficient might tell us that inequality in the UK has fallen to its lowest level since 1986, but Britain doesn’t feel unequal when a generation’s only hope of home-ownership rests on the lottery of home-owning parents dying suddenly – and without massive care home fees.

In short, the multiple instabilities of insecure employment, opaque career progression, wage stagnation, high rental and commuting costs and growing financial barriers to home ownership clearly explain why Britain’s young adults don’t feel they have a personal stake in a system that doesn’t work for them.

The challenges policy makers face as we stand on the cusp of the next industrial revolution include how to equip our workers with the skills for the future, the road map for individual advancement and social mobility, the framework for fair marketplaces, the investment in productive economic activities, empowerment of consumers relative to producers as modelled by Margrethe Vestager within the EU, and a housebuilding programme which democratises home ownership once more.

It is not enough for government to facilitate a discussion about where next for Britain, it has to actually lead. The short-term, election cycle nimbyism of prohibitive planning laws needs to cease and there is no room for one-of-the-in-crowd Davos sycophancy either. At home and abroad we need to press the case for fairer markets.

Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty and made the world a better, safer, healthier, more comfortable place. It’s not working for everyone, however, and some people are enriching themselves through the kind of restrictive practices that Adam Smith warned us about two centuries ago. Nationally and internationally, capitalism needs a reboot.

Time to press Ctrl + Alt + Del.

> UnHerd’s ‘Reform of Capitalism’ theme page.