Can you feel it? The sense of emptiness, the intellectual deadness hanging in the air over Scotland? We’re a nation treading water.

Every person, every family, every country needs a "story" - a sense of where they’re going; something that yields purpose and direction.

What now is Scotland’s story? Our purpose? Direction of travel?

Independence and unionism have both failed. Independence is going nowhere, and while many still cleave to it emotionally, for the time being it can in no way be seen to offer a path to a new future. It’ll be a long time before independence once again presents a viable story about the path Scotland takes.

And unionism? What kind of story is that today? A story of the past, at best. There’s nothing that unionism offers when it comes to the future or renewal; there’s nothing new that unionism can tell us.

Keir Starmer proves that. His unionism presents managed decline. The story for Scotland - and indeed Britain - should be recovery. But it’s not. We’ll endure more austerity, more poverty, more crushing of aspiration and optimism.

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Rather than a story of recovery, we’ve the story of a patient slowly bleeding out, just with a kinder doctor in the shape of Labour, rather than the sadistic Nurse Ratched of the Tories.

Our political debate isn’t just moribund, it's climbed into the grave, pulling the........

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