What we are doing isn’t working - is it time for some utopia?

The one rule in politics is that all you can talk about is how you will change what is already there. But what if what is already there is so broken it will never work again?

There aren't a lot of public institutions in Scotland which currently fill me with confidence. One of the few that does is the Office of the Auditor General which has done a great job of providing clear-headed analysis of why things keep going wrong in Scotland. It's latest raises a wry smile from us – and a big question.

The subject doesn't matter here (it's a report on health policy), the criticism does. Basically Audit Scotland says that the governance of the health sector is so broken that you can't do anything with it. I've used the metaphor often; it's like pushing on a bit of string and hoping it will move what is on the other side, even though a string is specifically designed in a way that means it can't push things.

We have a wry smile on our faces because once again the Auditor General appears to be siding with Common Weal against the political establishment in Scotland. We've been pretty well alone in raising the question of Scotland's broken governance (though with kudos to Brian Wilson, Kevin McKenna and James Mitchell who have all been astute about this). You'd be surprised how many subjects there are on which we've been out on our own and Audit Scotland has agreed with our position.

But that isn't the question. The question is 'if all the levers are made of string, how do you operate the machine?'. If you're meant to fix things using only the machinery that is already there and that machinery doesn't work, what then?

I very much do not mean only 'public sector institutions' here, I mean that none of the supposed 'levers of power' seem to work any more, public or private sector. Economic policy repeatedly fails to alter the economy, economic growth never balances the books like we're promised, 'corporate efficiency' does not improve the experience of consumers. Nothing seems to do what they say it does any more.

Every week when I am trying to decide what to write for this newsletter I'm driven by two questions; 'what would be useful?' and 'what are other people not looking at?'. It is why I keep reverting back to this question of 'what do we do next with Western democracy and its manifestations in Scotland?'.

Everyone is talking about the problem but there is remarkably little discussion of what the solutions should be, and that frankly is the same right across the Western world (I am reading relentlessly just now and pounce on anything of this sort and there isn't much of it). In Scotland it's tumble weeds.

In the mind of the Scottish political establishment (and I include most of the media, much of academia and pretty well all of the commentator class), what you do is always 'pull levers'. This week the Scotsman ran an editorial which is a classic of the sort – the economy has contracted so Pull The Levers! Now!

Except it is woozily unclear on what levers, how to pull them, why it thinks it would work this time or what they think it would achieve. For them it seems that 'just more of that sort of thing' is meant to work. I find that utterly unconvincing. It's like watching a child trying to knock down a house using a cabbage and you saying, reassuringly, 'you need another cabbage sweetheart'.

This is what I'd call 'incremental thinking' and it is basically at the heart of the problem. In incremental thinking, if something used to work but doesn't now, you just need a bit more of what made it work and a bit less of what made it not work. That is what was always known in politics as 'reform' (as opposed to building a new machine which is 'revolution'). And post-Blair, politics is absolutely always and only a reform process.

But here is when reform doesn't work any more; it doesn't work any more when the thing that makes it not work isn't undone by doing more of the thing that used to make it work. I can feel the need for an analogy to sort that one...

There are lots of medical occasions where building up emaciated muscle is a crucial part of recovery. So you do exercises – but then you strain the muscle. Now you have the old problem back again because the muscle isn't working, except the worse thing to do at that stage is try to build the muscle back up. It is strained. In needs a reset before it can be built up again.

It is the process of incremental reform of failing systems which has broken the machinery of our lives and that most certainly does not mean we can sort it with the same kind of incremental reform. We can't 'start from here' with things if the problems inherent in them prevent them from ever moving in their current form. Sometimes you have to tow the car to the garage.

“A cool, calm audit of reality screams out ‘not this, it needs to be something else’, but politics isn’t about reality any more, it’s about image”

While some of you reading this may be saying to yourself 'aye, but that's the sort of thing Robin always thinks', then let me put you straight. I'm a political strategist; if reform is the only game in town when it comes to government, we need to make that work. That's what Common Weal is about – but not incremental change away from something, rather steady process towards something else.

I always look at exactly where we're trying to get to which is always somewhere requiring far too much bravery for politicians, and so then I try to work out just how far towards that thing our politicians can go in one step without them panicking. That is what Common Weal proposes. Hell, our first book was actually subtitled 'Pragmatic Idealism'.

This is where my current personal intellectual crisis comes from – I don't think that can work any more. I don't think there is a 'better version' of the NHS's internal market, or a 'better version' of our dreadful inwards investment obsession, or a 'less bad' version of PFI. I don't think building the wrong ferry is fixed by reengineering the harbour. I don't think climate change will go away if we do slightly more of nothing much.

And this is my conundrum; my strategy is always to find the very, very best version of the maximum we can do within existing political culture, and I don't think there is anything left. I don't think that incremental never-change-it-always-polish-it culture contains within it much more gain to be wrung out, yet leaves in place the precise situation that everyone is desperately trying to reform.

I was supposed to be writing about food systems this week. And last week for that matter. But when I come to ask 'OK, what would success look like?' it is so far removed from what we have now that I am worried that discussing it just looks detached from current reality. So I wonder to myself how to make current reality look a little more like that far remove via incremental action, and I can't see how.

There is another version of the world in my head that I hold back from you. At university one of my main areas of study in my final year was utopia. I am and have always been obsessed with utopias, for many more reasons than I have space to explain here. I love the name of them – the literal translation (I'm sure you know) is 'no place'.

That is the point of them. No-one ever successfully builds a utopia and I don't think they will in any foreseeable future – but that is not their point. The point of utopias is to ask ourselves how we want to live and what our ideal world would be like. It would be a big mistake to fail to understand the importance of late 19th and early 20th century utopias in the road that led to the welfare state.

It is also worth noting that the welfare state that existed even by 1955 would probably have looked totally impossible a dozen years earlier. But Thatcher finally killed the utopian era (there are depressingly few utopias published since the 1960s anyway) and brought in the era of management consultants – and it is them who designed and run NHS governance in Scotland, and it is that which is bringing our healths sector to the ground.

So when I can't sleep I invent utopias in my head. Just for me, because 'everyone knows' that only a fool mentions utopia out loud in contemporary politics. There is literally nothing that will get you laughed out the room faster than 'what if we didn't try to fix what is broken and tried to build something else instead?'.

This is my personal paralysis at this moment, half way through 2025. I am certain that no good policy we or anyone else could propose would be likely to be successfully implemented in Scotland now (unless it is mind-crushingly simple). Government almost always ignores them and literally any time it doesn't it screws them up anyway. Me or them doing more of that is futile.

So I increasingly become convinced that we need to start to think openly and seriously about 'after next', purely so that we can get some coherent plan for 'next' which isn't 'this but...'. And still I know that 'after next' is not a discussion you can have inside the Scottish political establishment. Jeez, 'after today' unnerves them.

And yet I swear the Auditor General is on my side with this one (not that I know him...). A cool, calm audit of reality screams out 'not this, it needs to be something else', but politics isn't about reality any more, it's about image. Everyone is running around panicking about our democracy. Things really are falling apart. All of these things can't square up at once. Something must break.

At the moment the thing which is breaking is reality. And it is a sorry state of affairs if we are to relegate reality somewhere behind political convention. I think talking about utopia is no longer a luxury and pragmatic reform is no longer pragmatic. I have become utterly convinced that we need to open up a serious, extensive conversation about what on earth it is that we are actually trying to build. Not this again, surely?

Once upon a time I'd have been intimidated out of writing this by political orthodoxy and its mockery. Yet I look at political orthodoxy frantically pushing at strings and failing to move what is on the other side. Is it really me who is embarrassing if I shout 'no, not this!'?