Increasingly Britain looks like Absurdistan, a bizarre dysfunctional place where the centrist political parties converge on doing nothing about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and share a dismal economic outlook as Britain heads again into recession. Take a glance at the chaos of the Rochdale byelection or the manic debate about naming the London Overground trains (Lioness, Mildmay, Windrush, Weaver, Suffragette and Liberty) which threw right-wing pundits into a spasm of outrage.
Yet Scotland too has become a strangely stuck and stagnant place, having moved from the liminal to limbo where so much dwells in everyday banality. As the writer Neil Mackay wrote this week: “Scotland has become Lilliput, a place of small ideas dominated by small people. Across nationalism and unionism, Scotland’s political discourse — from the street to social media and all the way to Parliament — has become petty and absurd. We fail ourselves.”