How a nation sedated by spin and slogans must rediscover truth, virtue and courage
DELUSION is the last comfort of a collapsing regime. It turns decline into dignity, dependency into policy. But no nation can live on illusion forever. There comes a moment in every tired farce when the house lights rise, the illusion dies, and the audience finally sees that the “progressive drama” they’ve been watching is, in fact, a state-subsidised tragedy directed by people who mistake moral posturing for public service.
Welcome to Scotland, 2025. The actors have forgotten their lines, the stagehands have unionised against the script, and the audience is slipping out the side doors in disgust.
We are a nation now governed not by statesmen but by amateur dramatists with egos inflated by applause from civil service diversity workshops. People with the gravitas of a vegan meringue, clinging to the soggy wreckage of failed ideologies like Kate Winslet on the Titanic’s door, though with less grace, more hashtags, and a golden public pension.
Wellbeing while we rot
Scotland is not in crisis. A crisis implies urgency, consequence, the possibility of change. What we face is worse – a slow, syrupy decline disguised by slogans and sustained by subsidy. A publicly funded decay where failure is not punished but process-mapped. Our institutions no longer collapse, they quietly expire in committee rooms. The NHS is now a bureaucratic hospice [1], our schools manufacture activists who can’t spell [2], and councils are pawning office furniture to fund bin collections.
We are governed by people who would rather commission an inquiry into the colour palette of decline than pick up a broom.
Meanwhile, the ministers most of whom couldn’t survive a week in the real economy assure us that Scotland is a “world leader” in wellbeing [3]. Like all slogans, it’s a substitute for evidence. In reality, we lead the developed world in drug deaths [4], in illiteracy among the poor [2], in adolescent gender confusion, and in the weaponisation of euphemism.
And now the grim crown: Scotland is the only high-income country where mortality among young men is rising.[12] Let that sink in. Across the developed world, men under 50 are living longer except here. In Scotland, despair is a death sentence, and the State calls it “inclusion.”
The lived experience in working-class communities? You can’t see a GP. You can’t get housed. And you can’t speak the truth about it without being branded a bigot by someone with a rainbow lanyard and a postgraduate diploma in unconscious bias.
Progress Pride flags flap above closed libraries and broken lifts. It is the Potemkin Nation.
Decolonise this
Education in Scotland has become a sort of reverse alchemy where gold is transmuted into grievance. Children leave school with no knowledge of their own history, but fully equipped to deconstruct Shakespeare as a colonial oppressor and to explain why ambition is a tool of patriarchal violence.
Instead of reading books, they’re taught to “centre their feelings.” Instead of learning to think, they learn to emote. The curriculum has become an emotional colouring-in book, scribbled over by TikTok influencers and civil servants with a fetish for victimhood.
This is not equity. It is infantilism with a Twitter feed.
Inclusion without truth
In rural Scotland, you’re more likely to find NHS leaflets on unconscious bias than to be able to catch a reliable bus. Our roads resemble WWI battlegrounds, our railways take weekends off, and our high streets look like the opening scene of a zombie film stinking of high potency cannabis. But fear not, every department has a Director of EDI a sort of high priest in the new faith of bureaucratic redemption.
Glasgow is now pioneering a new form of state-enabled destruction, rebranded as “progressive compassion” with the opening of its first Drug Consumption Room [5].
Just down the road, a mother walks her son to school through Calton. He sees a woman injecting in the street and asks why. She tells him the woman’s meant to use the official facility a copule of hundred yards away, but she’s too desperate to get there. He thinks for a moment, then asks, “Why do we help people use drugs, but not help them stop?”
She doesn’t know how to answer.
This is what happens when compassion is severed from courage. Harm reduction without recovery is not healthcare, it’s a slow-motion euthanasia programme, sanitised by policy consultants and subsidised by pharmaceutical firms.
Catholic social teaching, and indeed any functioning moral compass, tells us that to love someone is to will their good. As Pope Benedict taught, the state must never absorb the person, but must serve their dignity. Here, we have structures of enabled self destruction decorated in therapeutic language, where failure is reframed as “non-linearity” and nihilism masquerades as inclusion.
The scented candle budget
We are governed by people who speak fluent buzzword, but couldn’t balance a chequebook if their pensions depended on it. The Finance Secretary talks about “values-based budgeting”[3] while presiding over a fiscal sinkhole large enough to swallow an ideology. The First Minister tweets like a teenager running a fan account, mouthing pieties about justice while dodging accountability.
They tax the productive to subsidise the performative and when insolvency arrives, as it always does, they blame Westminster. Or the Tories. Or any other convenient phantom. This, despite the fact the Conservatives have never governed Scotland under devolution.
Like arsonists blaming the fire brigade, they set the roof on fire then demand more public money for sprinkler systems… and a DEI audit of the flames.
The lexicon of control
We used to have blasphemy laws to protect sacred truths. Now we have hate crime legislation to protect sacred lies [6]. Language, once the tool of truth, is now a bureaucratic cudgel. “Addict” is verboten [7], “Recovery” is too judgemental. “Woman” is conditional. “Violence” is “distress-related behaviour.” Euphemism has become the official language of cowardice.
This is not inclusive. It’s Orwell in pastel colours. It’s the politics of the nursery, with none of the innocence.
In government documents, women are “bodies with cervixes,” and truth is whatever a civil servant with a rainbow lanyard says it is this week [8]. The state has become a linguistic magician pulling identity rabbits out of empirical hats and demanding that the audience applaud or be criminalised.
The Scottish Government’s submission to the EHRC treats sex as a colonial construct and female biology as a clerical error [9]. This isn’t policy, it’s theology. Only instead of God, they worship the gender unicorn and take their catechism from Stonewall.
And when the Supreme Court hands down a judgment reaffirming biological reality [10], the Government responds not with humility, but with semantic loopholes and taxpayer-funded evasion [11]. This is not politics. It’s a very dangerous parlour game played with people’s rights.
Moral hazards, ethical vacuums
Underneath the decay lies not just economic mismanagement, but moral malnutrition. We have forgotten subsidiarity, that power should reside as close to the people as possible. We’ve abandoned solidarity, that society exists to bind the weak and the strong together in shared purpose.
Instead, we have created a bloated bureaucracy whose only currency is control. The state manages you, monitors you, and medicates you. But it no longer serves you.
The result is a society that feels more like a holding pen than a home. A culture that flatters delusion, punishes dissent, and wraps dysfunction in the language of inclusion.
Rebuilding from the rubble
The regime is running on empty. It has no plan, no integrity, and no mandate beyond the inertia of the past. Like all failed empires, it survives by projection and distraction. If the NHS is collapsing, shout about climate justice. If crime is soaring, host a diversity seminar. If the public complains, accuse them of phobia.
But here is the crack in the wall: reality bites. Delusion can only be maintained until the lights go out and the shelves are empty. You cannot eat a slogan. You cannot live in a hashtag.
And so, painfully, awkwardly, inevitably, the people are waking up. They’re tired of the theatre. Tired of the lies. Tired of being told they are hateful for seeing clearly.
Because once you hit bottom and Scotland has punched through the floorboards, the only way left is up.
But let us not aim for the surface just to breathe the same stale air. The next chapter must be written not by consultants or committees, but by the people armed with memory, faith, and backbone. No more therapy-state. No more pastel tyranny. Rebuild Scotland in the image of its people, not its quangos.
Let the recovery be real, not performative. And let it begin not in Holyrood, but in the hearts and minds of the people who’ve had enough.
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Empty desks, empty minds? Photo of Holyrood debating chamber by By Fotokon courtesy of Adobe Stock
[1] Public Health Scotland, Drug-Related Hospital Statistics Scotland, 2023 to 2024, https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/drug-related-hospital-statistics/drug-related-hospital-statistics-scotland-2023-to-2024
[2] Audit Scotland, Improving Outcomes for Young People Through School Education, https://www.audit-scotland.gov.uk/publications/improving-outcomes-for-young-people-through-school-education
[3] Scottish Government, Wellbeing Economy Monitor, https://www.gov.scot/publications/wellbeing-economy-monitor
[4] National Records of Scotland, Drug Misuse Deaths in Scotland, 2023, https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/vital-events/deaths/drug-related-deaths-in-scotland/2023
[5] The Times, “Drug Consumption Room to Open in Glasgow,” https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scotland-first-drug-consumption-room-glasgow-2024
[6] BBC News, “Police Scotland Records Male Rape Suspects as Female,” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-60224335
[7] Scottish Government, Drugs Policy Division Language Guidance, https://www.gov.scot/publications/national-drugs-mission-language-guide/
[8] Equality and Human Rights Commission, “Interim Update: Practical Implications of the UK Supreme Court Judgment,” https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/media-centre/interim-update-practical-implications-uk-supreme-court-judgment
[9] The Times, “Ministers ‘Delaying’ Implementing Gender Ruling Till After Election,” https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/snp-delay-supreme-court-trans-qxctnmkqn
[10] UK Supreme Court, For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2023-0099-judgment.pdf
[11] House of Commons Library, Definition of “Sex” in the Equality Act 2010, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10259/
[12] “Analysis of Scottish mortality data published in International Journal for Equity in Health shows that, unlike in other high‑income nations, all‑cause mortality among men aged 15–44 in Scotland has increased since 1980, largely due to drug, alcohol‑related and suicide deaths. Absolute and relative inequalities in these causes have worsened over time and now dominate mortality in this demographic https://equityhealthj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12939-020-01329-7
