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David Gilmour

Thursday 15 June 2006

Last year Demos and the Scottish Book Trust published Scotland 2020: Hopeful Stories for a Northern Nation . You can download the introductory chapter here . I was struck by the parallels between their description of a newly emerging hopeful Scotland and the Exc-el approach. See what you think - here are their definitions, from the introductory chapter:

The three Scotlands

There are two Scotlands, the traditionalist and modernist, with which
people are familiar, but a third - hopeful - has begun to emerge. The
characteristics of the three Scotlands are:

Traditionalist
This is conservative with a small ‘c’, can
be left, right, centre or not think of itself in these terms
and is opposed to the claims of modernisation.Whether
this is Old Labour fighting to retain a more collectivist
approach, traditional Nationalists seeing Scottish identity
being eroded or the Catholic Church opposing social
reforms, there is a common strand of resisting the
encroachment of the modern world. Some of them
hanker after a supposed past defined by certainty.

Modernist
This is the ‘official future’ of Scotland. This is
the world of government, public agencies, ‘the system’ and
the idea of change as ‘the machine’. The focus is on
institutional notions of change, policy delivery and levers.
Seeming truths such as ‘the knowledge economy’ and
‘growth as a policy priority’ are discussed in agendasetting,
aspirational documents such as ‘Smart, Successful
Scotland’.While modernist Scotland invokes the mantra
of ‘change’ constantly, it reinforces a deeply conventional
and orthodox view of the world.

Hopeful
This is an emerging and increasingly influential
group, the least homogeneous of the three and containing
people within ‘the system’ as well as artists, thinkers and
imagineers. It argues that ‘the machine’ way has been tried
and found wanting, and that we need to embrace a
different approach based on hope, deep change and
complexity.

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