Now that the Labour government has shown itself as disastrous as the Tories and equally incapable of getting to grips with the threats to the UK’s survival, should Scots abandon the sinking ship and line up behind John Swinney and his latest call for independence? Hugo de Burgh suggests that there is a third way: Scotland asserts itself over the failed Westminster politicians, renews Scotland’s social, cognitive and material infrastructure and shows Westminster how to revive the UK – SCOTLAND: REFORM AND REBOOT.
1. RUIN OF THE UK
When, last year, I published “WHO ARE WE – AND HOW WILL WE SURVIVE IN THE AGE OF ASIA?”[1]I did not imagine that all the UK’s fragility and fankle would become widely recognised, so starkly and so fast. Then President Trump began his second term and started to reorganise the world. Labour, after commencing with measures that could only worsen the UK’s chances of economic recovery, compounded our vassal status by crawling to President Trump and then slagged off as unpatriotic those who try to give voice to normal people’s (the normies’) urgent desire for government which gets to grips with the existential threats. Nothing Labour is doing changes the fact that today, not merely are we relatively poorer and less productive than many Asian economies, but we are becoming absolutely de-developing as the political classes continue to mire us in debt and show themselves incapable of rejuvenating our industries or dealing with the problem of up to a million would-be immigrants arriving each year[2].
2. SO, ISNT IT TIME FOR SCOTLAND TO JUMP THE SINKING SHIP?
The first discussion I had on this was with Jim Sillars. All his life Jim has been staunch for independence, yet today he says that Scots have got to put independence on the back burner. The challenges to the west, to Europe, to the UK and to Scotland are too great for us just to go our own way.
I’ll add to that that the contexts in which Scotland, and the UK, breathe, would put an independent Scotland in grave peril. They are much scarier than when I first started writing WHO ARE WE, in 2022.
First, there is the return of the undead. In 2022 a new Hitler arose in the east, saying that that Russia will not be satisfied until the whole of the evil Soviet empire is reconquered. Putin has also mused about marching to Paris. Politicians in Europe were long paralyzed by this, fearing that their creaking economies, and angry populations, would be unable to gather together the willpower to resist and had better come to some kind of accommodation with the man who believes his destiny is to crusade against the rest of Europe. Now, most of the Europeans have reluctantly agreed that they must prepare for war if they are to have a chance of avoiding it.
We shouldn’t imagine that an independent Scotland could magic itself out of this and be neutral in a coming war. In WW2 the Republic of Ireland’s politicians kept the country neutral and brown-nosed Hitler, but he planned to abolish Ireland anyway.
Today, neither the USA nor the EU would indulge an independent Scotland for a minute – only the Russian imperialists might. Scotland’s defensive facilities are closely tied to the rest of the UK. The 44 countries of Europe, including the 28 in the EU, are all finally drawing together in self-defence. They will never countenance Europe’s most advanced military power, the United Kingdom, to be broken up in this hour of danger.
Nanny goes Ape: The USA pivots away from Europe. Once upon a time, Scotland, like the rest of Europe, relied upon the USA, to defend us, to lend to us and to see our interests as America’s interests. We can no longer be sure of that. In 2009, President Obama deciding that he would not allow another country to get close to being the equal of the USA, identified China as the USA’s enemy and declared that US strategic policy would ‘pivot to Asia’.
This pivot amounted to a redeployment of 60 per cent of the US navy and air force away from the North Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific region. Then there was the TPP[3], designed to exclude China, which also excluded the UK, Hilary Clinton’s efforts to turn other Asian countries into enemies of China and later the Aukus Pact to bring UK resources into the anti-China alliance.
President Xi Jinping was happy to fall into the trap, becoming the enemy that the USA wanted him to be. He cracked down on ‘liberals’ at home, allowed anti-terrorism measures to become persecution of the Uygurs and extended the power of the party into every area of Chinese life. He refinanced the military and equipped it for intercontinental nuclear war and he seeks economic, energy and food self-sufficiency. He teamed up with Russia’s Putin only because his enemy’s enemy had to be his friend; in doing so he intensified the threat to Europe, and thus to us.
This drive of China’s has raised US hackles even further. In his second term, President Trump has made it ever clearer that he wants Europe to look after itself while he concentrates on Asia, and, if he cannot get out of it, the Middle East. Our interests here differ from those of the USA: we need China to detach from Russia, but the USA could prevent any attempts to prise them apart[4].
For the moment, the UK – and Scotland especially – are in the USA’s good books. For the moment.
The weaponising of economies. Although the whisky industry has been hit, Scotland has not suffered as much as have several other countries from President Trump‘s reordering of the world. Maybe just because his mother was born on Skye in 1912. My grannie’s siblings left Tullynessie for Tennessee that year, and the descendants are sentimental enough that they keep in touch. But we can’t rely on sentimentality to stop the United States weaponizing its economic power over us in the future[5]. Which is why it is so crazy that our politicians have permitted the transfer of a vast proportion of our economy to unaccountable US owners, diminishing our tax take, making the UK very vulnerable if US and UK interests diverge.[6]
From the start of this year dependence on the USA can be seen to be a security issue. 17 per cent of Scotland’s exports go to the USA. There are 735 US corporations operating in Scotland, employing 7.5 per cent of the workforce. Our high streets and shopping centres are dominated by US owned chains.[7] ‘Our’ nuclear weapons are leased from the US, and many weapons are sourced from US and depend on the US for servicing. Military bases are under US control.
Sir Keir Starmer seems to have inveigled President Trump into being relatively nice to us, but this can only be a stop gap. Our position is precarious, and he has no plan for us in a world in which the rich do what they can, and the poor do what they are told.
Those are the geopolitical contexts within which Scotland now exists.
3. A SHORT SUMMARY OF THE STATE WE’RE IN
From the discussions on Scots politics on TV, radio and mainstream media you’d think that Scotland’s issues are immigration, the NHS and cost of living. And independence. Of course, all these are absolutely at the forefront of peoples’ minds and the topics that party candidates argue over on the streets daily as we head towards next year’s parliamentary elections, but I’d suggest to you that they are also symptoms of the collapse of good governance, a failure, similar to England’s, of politicians stuck in their kailyards, unable to confront, or even see, the big picture. They have forgotten, if ever they knew, that the UK became a humane country, able to redistribute wealth, to provide health and welfare at home and aid abroad, because, from the Act of Union onwards, it became a rich commercial, later rich industrial, country.
Over the past 20 years, the UK’s home countries have, in similar ways, de-developed, impoverishing us and crashing our young generations’ future. Our economy is in sharp decline and, in Scotland, our education system, which ought to be the motor of rejuvenation, has been fatally undermined.
The economy today [8]
Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General for Scotland, recently repeated his call for ‘urgent reform of Scotland’s public services to address the public sector’s unsustainable finances and the threats these pose to services………’
But Mr Boyle – doubtless because he knows that the politicians won’t listen to him – has not raised the full scale of the threats to our nation’s future. In brief, our economic situation can be summarised as follows:
- De-industrialisation: Low productivity, poor business birth rate and lack of success with scale-ups help to explain why Scotland’s GDP per head is a mere 44 per cent of Singapore’s level, 48 per cent of Ireland’s and 68 per cent of Norway’s. (Tom Hunter)
- State obesity: ‘The Scottish state now accounts for a staggering 55.4 per cent of GDP before oil and 52 per cent including oil revenues. In other words, the private sector is far less than half the economy… These numbers are by a margin the worst in all Europe.’ (Ewen Stewart)
- High tax and political profligacy: Public expenditure in 2024–2025 was nearly £2,700 higher per person in Scotland than across the UK and taxes are substantially higher than the rest of the UK, but services are worse.
- A widening deficit: Scotland’s notional deficit grew to £26.2 billion, or 11.6 per cent of its GDP. This is more than double the UK’s deficit of 5.1 per cent of GDP.
- Dependency: Our economic outlook is also precarious because of our dependency upon outsiders, who may have priorities other than sustaining Scotland.
The disaster of education[9]
In the 21st century, success in feeding, clothing and keeping a population in good health depends upon a flexible industrial base, which in turn depends upon an enterprising and educated population.
The level of basic numeracy and literacy in late-19th and early-20th century Scotland was “far ahead of what we expect now”. Scotland was the nation in Europe with the highest standards of education. Now, though, the average citizen has a level of numeracy and literacy formerly expected of an eleven year old. The PISA tables show how standards have declined over the past 20 years[10].
Why? That decline started to become noticeable from 2010, when the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) began to impact on children’s learning (Lindsay Paterson). CfE is underpinned by a belief that “we should stop trying to pass on the great ideas of human achievement” and have children enjoy stories which reflect current prejudices. Our schools have been encouraged to junk literature, eschew learning languages to understand different cultures, avoid the rigour of proper science and – in mathematics – omit the core idea of logical deductive proof.
The absurdly named CfE was not the only nail in the coffin of serious education. Stuart Waiton of Abertay University and Catriona Taylor, an ex-headteacher, have drawn our attention to the purloining of the curriculum by ideologists, morphing it into a form of indoctrination. The core of education has become magical dogmas about gender, sex and race. [11]
As Lindsay Paterson has said, this is a disaster, most of all for those children who do not have parents with much cultural capital, networks or the money to buy a real education. It’s a disaster for the nation, too: Ill-educated people are no use to the modern economy, rarely become entrepreneurs and alienate foreign and domestic investment. The East Asian tigers’ renaissance has been built on educating workforces fit for both personal advancement and contribution to the community.
4. SCOPING SCOTLAND’S REFORM & REBOOT
At the present time, nobody – not the UK, not the EU, not the US – has the wealth or will to be our carer during a transition to independence, still less help us get out of our sickbed and recuperate. In our present condition, and with the contexts we’re in, independence is a fantasy. So, instead of driving us apart again by fomenting anew the independence stramash, we must coalesce around a vision of Scotland rejuvenated. That means pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. A reboot, which should be the priority both to those who still aspire to eventual independence, and those who are dead agin.
What do people need, that they have the confidence to train themselves for demanding jobs, set up small businesses or launch start-ups in 21st century industries? What do investors or business leaders require that they will choose Scotland to invest in? What do the successful members of the Scots diaspora want if they are to return home to take part in the Scotland Reboot?
Of the Asian tigers – South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, HK – only Singapore’s population is as small as Scotland’s. None had Scotland’s historic advantages – major industry, highest level of education in Europe, open society: The Asian tigers erupted from situations much worse than Scotland’s now. What they did have, which we don’t, is political leadership which puts survival of their communities before ideology, status seeking or virtue signalling; with a one-track mind: survival.
In proposing some first steps for Scotland’s reboot, I have drawn upon what we know of the East Asian stories. Much of what I suggest is familiar, because think tanks, economists and the Scottish government itself have been pronouncing on what needs to be done for a long time[12]. I wrap their prescriptions, from fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, targeting support for high-growth sectors, leveraging academic strengths, attracting foreign direct investment, investment zones, developing a skilled workforce and removing barriers to growth such as de-regulation and high taxes, in a different package.
For what is lacking is what the tigers’ political leadership had: the packaging, the overall vision, from which should derive the motivation and the drive, and the competence to execute, rather than just yammer and yatter.
Governments cannot make people industrious; they can make them poorer; what they ought to do is to set the framework within which people will be industrious. In today’s world, with the threatened loss of jobs through global competition for markets and for talent, innovation and enterprise are essential[13]. To bring them about we need to set up our innovation ecosystem for the years ahead. Our Enlightenment thinkers fructified because they built upon a supportive infrastructure of social relations, cognitive standards and adequate material support. That’s what Scotland’s Reboot needs today.
5. THE INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM AND THE INFRASTRUCTURE IT NEEDS
Social infrastructure: DEMOCRACY
You could call it democracy, not in the sense of electoral democracy but in the sense that government doesn’t take over, it provides the conditions in which people can do things themselves, unhampered by ruinous regulation or taxation.
Among the enemies of democracy are some banshees: there are selfish capitalists who enrich themselves with no thought of their responsibilities to the societies or to the community, which made possible their success. They buy and sell companies as if they were bags of money rather than the foundations of society. I write from experience when I say that many entrepreneurs whose start-ups need capital as they develop find themselves exploited by predators disguised as investors. The answer is not to harangue the capitalists but to motivate them to be responsible[14]. Banks, investment operations and private equity must be incentivised to prime the start-ups, the new enterprises that we need to rebuild our economy and support our society. To be blood donors not bloodsuckers.
Then, there are the parasites who live off taxpayers’ money in grandiose public sector jobs. Of course, I’m not talking about those at the bottom who work hard for pittances. I’m thinking of those in local and central entities who are on large salaries, with gilded pensions and little accountability, obsessed with processes rather than product. As I know from infuriating encounters with planning departments in England, they don’t think their role is to help normal people build the economy, but to impose rules and wear jackboots.
Then there are the charities which have turned themselves into pressure groups for the latest ideological fashion. They should be designated as the political organisations they are and prohibited from receiving taxpayer funds and tax breaks. These three categories are among the anti-social elements in society, who are protected and provisioned by the political class.
We have a complicated and exploitative tax system, inimical to the interests of we normies, who exist to be milked by politicians who have no answer to the financial crises that they have created other than cutting (Tories) or taxing (SNP, Labour).[15] The simplicity of tax systems and relatively simple regulation, mean that, rather than resenting the impositions of government, people in the Asian Tigers can feel that they are being treated fairly and are even willing to pay their taxes rather than pay accountants to avoid them[16].
Asian tigers have encouraged family cohesion for its social value and because families think long-term (over generations) whereas individuals and career politicians rarely do so. Our politicians have been undermining family (and therefore social cohesion) by individualising taxation, subverting parental leadership in the home, punishing family businesses and indoctrinating schoolchildren in hyper liberal norms.
By contrast, we should find fiscal ways of supporting family interdependence and family enterprise. That’s not enough; government should curb negative influences – violence and pornography – from social media, prohibit unhealthy video games, strictly control drugs and encourage mutual responsibility among the generations. The UK should cooperate with allies – perhaps at least the Scandinavian countries and Ireland – In devising an Internet that excludes debilitating propaganda from foreign commercial or political entities.
Let’s codify some first steps:
1st the normies must be set free to make of life whatever their skills and energy can help them make. Regulation and control should be minimal.
2nd the lanyard class – officials and civil servants – should transform themselves from naysayers and bed blockers into innovators and stimulators.
3rd we need high quality, well-educated decision-makers – government ministers and industrial leaders – with a very clear idea of how an economy works. Ministers should not come from the career political class which has proved itself inept. Normies – preferably with a good smattering of those who have had responsibility in industry – should be elected to the legislature and hold ministers to account, not be ministers themselves. We need people making decisions who know life outside the professional politicians’ frolic.
4th the training and education systems need to be re-orientated so that they produce well-grounded people with the knowledge to be contributing members of the community plus the right skills, able to transform themselves again and again according to the exigencies of the market and the strategies of the government.
So, the first infrastructure is social.
Cognitive infrastructure: IDENTITY
In recent years, Scotland’s history and achievements have been rubbished in schools, universities, museums and politics as the religion of identity politics has caught hold among the lanyard class. In all corners of the UK, so called progressives want to rewrite the history books, tear down the monuments, declare that the past has been all vile.
The great Arab journalist, Amin Maalouf, has written[17] movingly of the humiliation of feeling your culture and identity worthless, and this has been the fate of many of the British. They have been made insecure: solidarity has been corroded, pitting us against each other and our story, upon which rests our self-respect and confidence to contribute to the worldwide conversation, has been pilloried.
Scotland has a great history, little of which is being celebrated. Scots’ contribution to humanity has been disproportionate to our size and population. Scots of the Enlightenment changed the world with their ideas. Two generations later Scots changed the world with their deeds. In the age of imperialism there were, of course, grasping and violent Scots in the pursuit of wealth and power, but the epitome of the Scot abroad is not Jardine Matheson, but David Livingston. He and thousands like him devoted their lives to trying to rid Africa and Asia of sickness, slavery and human sacrifice. They introduced modern medicine, education, the idea of human rights.[18] And then there was Andrew Carnegie, the billionaire who used his fortunes to help others and opined that ‘to die rich is to die disgraced’.
Ours is an inspiring story about how Scots did so much to liberate the world from superstition and suffering. Its denigration is demoralising, but there are wider implications. On a planet in which over half of humankind is under the cosh of retrograde dictators, we need a clear idea of what we stand for and how we distance ourselves from them.[19] This should be transmitted by the older generation to the younger, by the influencers and opinion formers, and in schools.
So schools should reinforce, not undermine, our culture.[20] Equally important, they must teach the knowledge and skills to develop the self and to contribute to society. Now that we know just how our schools are failing, we must encourage our teachers and teacher trainers to learn why schooling in other small countries – Singapore or Estonia for example – is so good, and apply the lessons. If necessary, we can bring in teachers – of maths or science, say, from successful countries to teach us how to teach. Our school inspectors should not make their key criteria health and safety but judge the schools on curriculum content and its delivery.
Vocational, technical and professional education may need the same upgrade. Its status must rise as expectations of university degrees fall. In other words, we must think in ecosystem terms; for Scotland, that means above all reinforcing our sense of purpose and raising standards in learning and teaching which are linked to the economy. We need a national movement to turn our backs on failure and reclaim our place among the most educated nations of the world. This second infrastructure is the cognitive.
Material infrastructure: DEVELOPMENT
Tackling the material infrastructure is the most obvious task because the problems are recognised by all but the most bigoted, but it is also the one which requires the greatest array of competencies and the strength to overturn the reactionary assumptions of the past. Below I advocate a few of the measures which the successful small countries – Ireland, Singapore, Norway, Denmark, Estonia – have taken in the race for development.
Contraction of the state will create space for enterprise. De-regulation will help foster the independent sector and bring in foreign investment, reassuring them that they are investing in a market economy. While around a quarter of the Scots working age population are unemployed, there should be no new importation of immigrant labour, particularly where it is used to undercut local wages and deprives poorer countries of much needed skills.
Incentives to set up technology clusters and the mandating of investment (eg of the pension funds) in Scottish enterprise will also provide the right environment. Incentives are needed to keep educated recipients of public subsidy – such as highly trained teachers, engineers, scientists and medics – from opting to go abroad. This must stop.
We have long-standing strengths in entrepreneurship and finance, so state led investments in modern deep infrastructure are likely to have big payoffs, just as investments in railroads and highways in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Infrastructure projects can stimulate demand for different technologies and create the process knowledge needed to build them, which are crucial first steps in rebuilding the manufacturing base. We have to rebuild our process knowledge because much of that knowledge has gone abroad, and we must be willing to import it.
The above will make Scotland more attractive for capital intensive sectors. Because we have high labour costs and environmental standards, we will never be able to compete with others on labour costs and should not try. Anyroad, Asian industries are increasingly robotic, making humans superfluous.
And that means that we need a plan for the employment of the victims of bad schooling; nobody must think him or herself unemployable. Incentives to service organisations to take on more staff – not shed them, as the present UK government decrees with its increase in employers’ NIC – is one way. In an ever more impersonal society where we interact with computers, virtual assistants or people who won’t give their names, there will be many opportunities for companies to make their services more humane and interpersonal by having more staff interacting with customers, but not if the incentives are all the other way. We can incentivise grandparents and parents to spend more time with children, helping to tackle a host of social problems.
Devolution, mandating local authorities of towns and cities to develop their local economies, is another essential policy. The local authorities of 19th century Britain were run by industrialists, both from management and from the shop floor, equally committed to economic development of their hometowns and cities; Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen, like Birmingham and Manchester, were hugely important, independent economic centres. Since then, local authorities have been sidelined into administrators of central government programmes; councillors elected to alter priorities and reduce local spending find that they have no power to change or initiate. Like Sweden and France, we should apply the principles of subsidiarity and small is beautiful if we want our towns and cities to flourish once again.
Achieving the material infrastructure depends upon the social and cognitive. Together, they comprise the innovation ecosystem.
6. THE NEXT STEPS
Where our plans are beyond the powers devolved to Holyrood by the Westminster government, we must think through how our goals can be achieved when much of taxation and other important instruments are reserved to Westminster. We need to consider what the relationship with Westminster should look like and how we can leverage 57 seats to use the powers in Edinburgh and London to realise Scotland’s Reform and Reboot.
I like to think that the vision I have outlined will get the attention of Scots of every party and those of no party, such that once Holyrood has begun to realise it, our Westminster representatives will unite in introducing this Scottish alternative to decline to all corners of the UK.
To be realistic, Scotland’s Reform and Reboot needs first to be articulated by a credible, competent, political leadership – leading a movement with a Scottish personality rather than a branch of a UK party – which already grasps what needs doing and whom the normies trust to reflect their, the peoples’, point of view and hopes.
First, we’ll start it; then we’ll teach it to the English. Scotland’s Reform and Reboot: The Scottish Alternative.
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[1] de Burgh, Hugo (2024) Who are we – and how will we survive in the Age of Asia? Cambridge: CamRivers
[2] We have no idea how many immigrants come to the UK, legally or illegally, openly or clandestinely, since the figures we have are based only upon those seen by the authorities. See Migration Watch: https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/what-is-the-problem#why-is-the-current-level-of-immigration-a-problem, accessed 101025.
[3] The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), now known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), is a trade agreement between Pacific Rim countries. Initially, it involved 12 countries, including the United States, but the US withdrew in 2017. The CPTPP, with 11 founding members, aims to reduce trade barriers and establish common rules on various issues like labour, e-commerce, and investment. The UK recently joined as the first new member since the agreement was established in 2018.
[4] President Trump might decide he likes Xi more than Putin, in which case his hostility to China may lessen. Let’s see.
[5] For example, by obliging us to take part in a war – such as the Vietnam or Iraq wars – which are irrelevant to us. The Labour government of Harold Wilson refused to join up in Vietnam, but Tony Blair’s ignorance, arrogance and vanity got us into Iraq. Would Starmer resist US pressure to commit to a war in Asia?
[6] Hanton, Angus (2024) Vassal State, London: Swift Press, passim
[7] The biggest ones are (with number of branches in brackets): Boots (250), Subway (194), Costa (187), Starbucks (127), McDonalds (113), Dominos (109), plus KFC, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Papa Johns. From Hanton, Angus (author of Vassal State) in a personal communication of 13 September 2025
[8] Sources include: Stewart, Ewen (2025) Scotland’s national disgrace is enlightening in Think Scotland, August 18, 2025; https://audit.scot/news/short-term-approaches-dont-address-scotlands-unsustainable-public-finances (accessed 270925); Hanton, Angus (author of Vassal State) in a personal communication of 13 September 2025; The Hunter Foundation, https://www.thehunterfoundation.co.uk/raisingscotlandseconomicgrowthrate/ (accessed 270925).
[9] There are two main sources for my assertions and proposals. One is the SUE website and especially the work of Dr Stuart Waiton of Abertay University. The other is the writings of Professor Lindsay Paterson of Edinburgh University. The latter were very well summarised in a long interview by Neil Mackay in The Herald of 120125, Scottish school curriculum accused of ‘permanently’ harming pupils, from which the Paterson quotes in inverted commas are all derived.
[10] https://datamap-scotland.co.uk/2024/08/scotland-declining-education-attainment-pisa-2022/ accessed 290925
[11] info@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk
[12] E.g. National Strategy for Economic Transformation (NSET)
[13] If the reader doubt this, let the reader see Schmidt, Eric (2023) Innovation Power: Why Technology Will Define the Future of Geopolitics in Foreign Affairs, March April 2023
[14] There are of course many business leaders who are conscious of their debt to society and the needs of their communities. The archetype is Andrew Carnegie, today we have heroes such as Tom Hunter and Jim Ratcliffe (with whom Ed Miliband refused to discuss the future of North Sea Oil), Douglas Craig, JK Rowling, Ann Gloag and Brian Souter, Ian Wood, Alastair Salvesen, James Easdale and Susan Haughey.
[15] see Johnson, Paul (2023) Follow the Money New York: Little, Brown.
[16] I am simplifying and I have not adjusted in the light of the changes of the past 10 years, because I want us to learn from the early decisions and not the later ones.
[17] Maalouf, Amin (1998) On Identity, London: The Harvell Press, p62 and passim
[18] Kishore Mahbubani holds that ‘The spread of Western reasoning triggered 3 silent revolutions in Asia that explain the extraordinary success of many non-western societies in recent decades.’ They are, 1. The political. In the past, the people were accountable to the rulers. Now rulers are accountable to the people. 2. The psychological. Most people used to believe themselves helpless. They now believe that they can take control of their lives, and produce better outcomes. 3. The governmental. 50 years ago, few Asians believed that, good, rational governance could transform their societies. Now, most do.
[19] Cowley, Jason (2022) Who Are We Now? London: Picador
[20] The Scottish Languages Act of 2025 gave hope that the Scots language will have a place in our curriculum equal with English and Gaelic. Scots is the language of all our great heroes, from Rabbie Burns to David Hume and (yes, even) William Wallace. Cosmopolitan Scots have been proud to speak it too: The 6th Marquess of Bute (1933-1993), very active in Scottish public life, was fluent in both Queen’s English and Scots as two distinct languages. As was my grannie.
