|
Scotland 2025: the end of
delusion, the start of recovery?
First written and published for ThinkScotland.org by Annemarie Ward
Jul 30, 2025
How a nation sedated by spin and slogans must rediscover truth,
virtue and courage
DELUSION is the last comfort of a collapsing regime. It turns decline
into dignity, dependency into policy. But no nation can live on illusion
forever. There comes a moment in every tired farce when the house lights
rise, the illusion dies, and the audience finally sees that the
“progressive drama” they’ve been watching is, in fact, a state-subsidised
tragedy directed by people who mistake moral posturing for public
service.
Welcome to Scotland, 2025. The actors have forgotten their lines, the
stagehands have unionised against the script, and the audience is
slipping out the side doors in disgust.
We are a nation now governed not by statesmen but by amateur dramatists
with egos inflated by applause from civil service diversity workshops.
People with the gravitas of a vegan meringue, clinging to the soggy
wreckage of failed ideologies like Kate Winslet on the Titanic’s door,
though with less grace, more hashtags, and a golden public pension.
Wellbeing while we rot
Scotland is not in crisis. A crisis implies urgency, consequence, the
possibility of change. What we face is worse – a slow, syrupy decline
disguised by slogans and sustained by subsidy. A publicly funded decay
where failure is not punished but process-mapped. Our institutions no
longer collapse, they quietly expire in committee rooms. The NHS is now
a bureaucratic hospice [1], our schools manufacture activists who can’t
spell [2], and councils are pawning office furniture to fund bin
collections.
We are governed by people who would rather commission an inquiry into
the colour palette of decline than pick up a broom.
Meanwhile, the ministers most of whom couldn’t survive a week in the
real economy assure us that Scotland is a “world leader” in wellbeing
[3]. Like all slogans, it’s a substitute for evidence. In reality, we
lead the developed world in drug deaths [4], in illiteracy among the
poor [2], in adolescent gender confusion, and in the weaponisation of
euphemism.
And now the grim crown: Scotland is the only high-income country where
mortality among young men is rising.[12] Let that sink in. Across the
developed world, men under 50 are living longer except here. In
Scotland, despair is a death sentence, and the State calls it
“inclusion.”
The lived experience in working-class communities? You can’t see a GP.
You can’t get housed. And you can’t speak the truth about it without
being branded a bigot by someone with a rainbow lanyard and a
postgraduate diploma in unconscious bias.
Progress Pride flags flap above closed libraries and broken lifts. It is
the Potemkin Nation.
Decolonise this
Education in Scotland has become a sort of reverse alchemy where gold is
transmuted into grievance. Children leave school with no knowledge of
their own history, but fully equipped to deconstruct Shakespeare as a
colonial oppressor and to explain why ambition is a tool of patriarchal
violence.
Instead of reading books, they’re taught to “centre their feelings.”
Instead of learning to think, they learn to emote. The curriculum has
become an emotional colouring-in book, scribbled over by TikTok
influencers and civil servants with a fetish for victimhood.
This is not equity. It is infantilism with a Twitter feed.
Inclusion without truth
In rural Scotland, you’re more likely to find NHS leaflets on
unconscious bias than to be able to catch a reliable bus. Our roads
resemble WWI battlegrounds, our railways take weekends off, and our high
streets look like the opening scene of a zombie film stinking of high
potency cannabis. But fear not, every department has a Director of EDI a
sort of high priest in the new faith of bureaucratic redemption.
Glasgow is now pioneering a new form of state-enabled destruction,
rebranded as “progressive compassion” with the opening of its first Drug
Consumption Room [5].
Just down the road, a mother walks her son to school through Calton. He
sees a woman injecting in the street and asks why. She tells him the
woman’s meant to use the official facility a copule of hundred yards
away, but she’s too desperate to get there. He thinks for a moment, then
asks, “Why do we help people use drugs, but not help them stop?”
She doesn’t know how to answer.
This is what happens when compassion is severed from courage. Harm
reduction without recovery is not healthcare, it’s a slow-motion
euthanasia programme, sanitised by policy consultants and subsidised by
pharmaceutical firms.
Catholic social teaching, and indeed any functioning moral compass,
tells us that to love someone is to will their good. As Pope Benedict
taught, the state must never absorb the person, but must serve their
dignity. Here, we have structures of enabled self destruction decorated
in therapeutic language, where failure is reframed as “non-linearity”
and nihilism masquerades as inclusion.
The scented candle budget
We are governed by people who speak fluent buzzword, but couldn’t
balance a chequebook if their pensions depended on it. The Finance
Secretary talks about “values-based budgeting”[3] while presiding over a
fiscal sinkhole large enough to swallow an ideology. The First Minister
tweets like a teenager running a fan account, mouthing pieties about
justice while dodging accountability.
They tax the productive to subsidise the performative and when
insolvency arrives, as it always does, they blame Westminster. Or the
Tories. Or any other convenient phantom. This, despite the fact the
Conservatives have never governed Scotland under devolution.
Like arsonists blaming the fire brigade, they set the roof on fire then
demand more public money for sprinkler systems… and a DEI audit of the
flames.
The lexicon of control
We used to have blasphemy laws to protect sacred truths. Now we have
hate crime legislation to protect sacred lies [6]. Language, once the
tool of truth, is now a bureaucratic cudgel. “Addict” is verboten [7],
“Recovery” is too judgemental. “Woman” is conditional. “Violence” is
“distress-related behaviour.” Euphemism has become the official language
of cowardice.
This is not inclusive. It’s Orwell in pastel colours. It’s the politics
of the nursery, with none of the innocence.
In government documents, women are “bodies with cervixes,” and truth is
whatever a civil servant with a rainbow lanyard says it is this week
[8]. The state has become a linguistic magician pulling identity rabbits
out of empirical hats and demanding that the audience applaud or be
criminalised.
The Scottish Government’s submission to the EHRC treats sex as a
colonial construct and female biology as a clerical error [9]. This
isn’t policy, it’s theology. Only instead of God, they worship the
gender unicorn and take their catechism from Stonewall.
And when the Supreme Court hands down a judgment reaffirming biological
reality [10], the Government responds not with humility, but with
semantic loopholes and taxpayer-funded evasion [11]. This is not
politics. It’s a very dangerous parlour game played with people’s
rights.
Moral hazards, ethical vacuums
Underneath the decay lies not just economic mismanagement, but moral
malnutrition. We have forgotten subsidiarity, that power should reside
as close to the people as possible. We’ve abandoned solidarity, that
society exists to bind the weak and the strong together in shared
purpose.
Instead, we have created a bloated bureaucracy whose only currency is
control. The state manages you, monitors you, and medicates you. But it
no longer serves you.
The result is a society that feels more like a holding pen than a home.
A culture that flatters delusion, punishes dissent, and wraps
dysfunction in the language of inclusion.
Rebuilding from the rubble
The regime is running on empty. It has no plan, no integrity, and no
mandate beyond the inertia of the past. Like all failed empires, it
survives by projection and distraction. If the NHS is collapsing, shout
about climate justice. If crime is soaring, host a diversity seminar. If
the public complains, accuse them of phobia.
But here is the crack in the wall: reality bites. Delusion can only be
maintained until the lights go out and the shelves are empty. You cannot
eat a slogan. You cannot live in a hashtag.
And so, painfully, awkwardly, inevitably, the people are waking up.
They’re tired of the theatre. Tired of the lies. Tired of being told
they are hateful for seeing clearly.
Because once you hit bottom and Scotland has punched through the
floorboards, the only way left is up.
But let us not aim for the surface just to breathe the same stale air.
The next chapter must be written not by consultants or committees, but
by the people armed with memory, faith, and backbone. No more
therapy-state. No more pastel tyranny. Rebuild Scotland in the image of
its people, not its quangos.
Let the recovery be real, not performative. And let it begin not in
Holyrood, but in the hearts and minds of the people who’ve had enough.
Established in 2006, ThinkScotland is not for profit (it makes a loss)
and relies on donations to continue publishing our wide range of
opinions – you can follow us on X here – like and comment on facebook
here and support ThinkScotland by making a donation here.
[1] Public Health Scotland, Drug-Related Hospital Statistics Scotland,
2023 to 2024,
https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/drug-related-hospital-statistics/drug-related-hospital-statistics-scotland-2023-to-2024
[2] Audit Scotland, Improving Outcomes for Young People Through School
Education,
https://www.audit-scotland.gov.uk/publications/improving-outcomes-for-young-people-through-school-education
[3] Scottish Government, Wellbeing Economy Monitor,
https://www.gov.scot/publications/wellbeing-economy-monitor
[4] National Records of Scotland, Drug Misuse Deaths in Scotland, 2023,
https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/vital-events/deaths/drug-related-deaths-in-scotland/2023
[5] The Times, “Drug Consumption Room to Open in Glasgow,”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scotland-first-drug-consumption-room-glasgow-2024
[6] BBC News, “Police Scotland Records Male Rape Suspects as Female,”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-60224335
[7] Scottish Government, Drugs Policy Division Language Guidance,
https://www.gov.scot/publications/national-drugs-mission-language-guide/
[8] Equality and Human Rights Commission, “Interim Update: Practical
Implications of the UK Supreme Court Judgment,”
https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/media-centre/interim-update-practical-implications-uk-supreme-court-judgment
[9] The Times, “Ministers ‘Delaying’ Implementing Gender Ruling Till
After Election,”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/snp-delay-supreme-court-trans-qxctnmkqn
[10] UK Supreme Court, For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers,
https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2023-0099-judgment.pdf
[11] House of Commons Library, Definition of “Sex” in the Equality Act
2010,
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10259/
[12] “Analysis of Scottish mortality data published in International
Journal for Equity in Health shows that, unlike in other high‑income
nations, all‑cause mortality among men aged 15–44 in Scotland has
increased since 1980, largely due to drug, alcohol‑related and suicide
deaths. Absolute and relative inequalities in these causes have worsened
over time and now dominate mortality in this demographic
https://equityhealthj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12939-020-01329-7
|
