What is the purpose of the state? Increasingly, it appears to be to secure something called ‘equality’. But we long ago moved past the point at which this was achieved through formal equality in the sense of everybody being equal before the law. What we now seem to expect is to experience equality in what I have previously called the ‘sibling’ sense: everybody loved equally by the benign parent, yet at the same time rivalrous with one another, seeking to be the one who is ever-so-slightly more loved than the rest.
The result of this is a grotesquely fake, cloying and sentimental governing style which apes a simpering maternalism while achieving something more like bad therapy. It coaxes, it reassures, it purports to nurture and support, in a manner that is transparently false and patronisingly obvious. And there is I think nowhere in the Western world where this style is more finessed or pronounced than Scotland, land of my fathers, where I spent the last two days speaking at an event.
