Galloway decision shows Scotland's leadership has given up on change

It has been a busy couple of weeks for Scotland's 'Reporter'. A seemingly all-powerful yet largely opaque position, the Reporter has overturned almost universal democratic opposition to a major commercial development which will absorb a public beach on Loch Lomond and give it to a businessman.

Fresh from that decision the Reporter has just defeated what was once cross-party support and what remains strong local support for a National Park to cover the Galloway Forrest. Both these decisions appear to be dominated by one form of reasoning; wealthy people first. A commercial business has spent a lot of money trying to get its hands on the Loch Lomond property and this appears to be the primary reason for the anti-democratic overruling of local planning decisions.

And four well-connected landowners were opposed to having their possessions designated as part of a National Park, so they weren't. Both of these decisions reflect what would happen if we had no democracy; in both cases there was strong popular public opinion on one side and in both there were wealthy vested interests on the other.

Before the democratic era, that wouldn't have been a debate at all – the wealthy would have got what they want. However the democratic era came with the promise that 'things would be different' and that they would get better for ordinary people.

This is indeed what happened. Over the course of modern universal suffrage in the Western world we've built welfare states, great public infrastructure for the public (as opposed to for the factory owner) and changed many of the rules in favour of ordinary people.

But that disguises a very uneven and patchy process. In reality our democracy has had periods of mission-driven radicalism or ambition spread in between fallow periods where things stop changing or actually go backwards. The arrival of the Scottish Parliament was a moment of mission-driven ambition – for a while.

It began to pursue initiatives which reflected the kinds of things done in other places when they had moments of ambition or radicalism. The National Parks movement was a radical socialism-informed and environmentally-shaped public movement that emerged in the late 19th century in the United States and was turbocharged during the Great Depression, aimed at returning access to land to ordinary people.

Its Depression-era New Deal manifestation is often taken to be the classic forerunner of what we came to know as Keynesian economic stimulation. The creation of the US National Parks was both a means of creating a great national institution and a way of rapidly creating jobs during a period of mass unemployment. They were fundamentally radical.

By the time we get to Scotland's devolution era, it is hard to call the Scottish incarnation of National Parks radical exactly, but they were undoubtedly progress in terms of recognising the national nature of our big land resources, in pursuing good environmental management and in terms of encouraging people to connect with nature.

The drive for parks is almost simultaneous with devolution with the first National Park in Loch Lomond and the Trossachs being designed within three years of the Parliament being restored.

It is very difficult to believe that that would ever have happened under the current administration. What happened in Galloway was that strong local support was overturned through a well-funded and predictably secretive lobbying campaign by wealthy landowners. They appear to have a strong ally in the office of Scotland's 'Reporter' and willing accomplices in our Cabinet.

It is clear that the current political leadership in Scotland is no longer interested in change that benefits the public at the expense of the wealthy. It is behaving more like a factor, managing matters nationally on behalf of landowners and anyone else who has money. The Scottish Government drops good ideas at a rate it is difficult to keep up with.

The opposition in Scotland are mostly no better, and at a national level the Labour administration is doing exactly the same only worse. Both administrations say 'economic growth first' and it is clear what they think that means.

The only thing which has any chance at this point of stirring Holyrood out of its abject complacency appears to be the fury of the public. Common Weal's Daily Briefings are about demonstrating the means to solve problems which are live in the day's current affairs. Except often it just isn't that difficult to solve the problem other than a complete lack of will on the part of political leadership.

That is a problem which is escalating in Scotland continually at the moment. Our political system does not appear to contain within it the dynamic to change the current situation. Only public action appears to offer that dynamic.