Michael Fry: I fear we lack hunger for substance

Nursing their fledgeling democracy, Tunisians can teach complacent Scots a thing or two

IT IS a season of big elections in small countries. One country I am thinking of in particular is accustomed to occupying only a modest place in a world usually indifferent to it. Yet we ought to be more astonished by it than we are.

I wish the country I am thinking of were Scotland. Actually, it is Tunisia, where the winds of change first got up that have since blown right through the Arab world. I am here doing just the little bit I can to help the Jasmine Revolution along.

Not that I am in the habit of supporting revolutions but I am delighted to have got involved in this one, even to a minor extent. Till 14 January, 2011, when the former president Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia, Tunisians lived under a regime which not only terrorised and brutalised them but also robbed them at every turn, a true kleptocracy. The outside world took not the slightest notice.

Tunisia had been independent since 1955, during that time ruled by only two presidents. The first was Habib Bourguiba, a benevolent despot loved by the people because he loved them back. And then came Ben Ali, who was just a crook.

It would be easy to conclude that Tunisia, like so many other countries that in the second half of the twentieth century, escaped an imperial yoke - in this case the French one - had misused its independence, or at least failed to exploit the opportunities which followed from it. Over all those years, Tunisia has indeed never been able to develop anything like a constitutional public life, with free elections, competing parties, a parliament holding the executive to account, an independent justiciary and so on.

All the same, it is astonishing how soon and how far Tunisians have learned the language of freedom. They are an easy-going, gregarious Mediterranean people who love nothing so much as talking the night away, and they are liberal Muslims who will do it over wine as well as coffee. I have not seen and heard political debates so lively and so searching since the Scotland of the 1970s or the 1990s.

Which makes it all the more depressing when, over the internet, I try to keep in touch with the electoral campaign as it develops at home. Scottish elections have seldom been overwhelming in their excitement, except of course for the one I fought as a Tory candidate in Maryhill in 1999.

But the national poll was bound to be interesting the first time, and it felt good when we had a change of government last time: I am glad I voted for it. We could get another change of government this time, too, if in the wrong direction as far as I am concerned.But whatever the outcome, to date it seems to me the worst election we have had in Scotland.

Basically, devolution has made no difference at all to the sort of pork-barrel politics that prevailed before 1999. Up to that point, the sole purpose of Scottish representation at Westminster and of the civil service it sustained in the Scottish Office was to extract as much public expenditure as possible from the governmental machinery of the United Kingdom.

Despite the growth of nationalism in Scotland, there was seldom any worthwhile discussion of what it meant to be a nation, of what responsibilities it required as well as of what benefits it conferred.

And the SNP, meanwhile, set out to rattle the British begging bowl even louder than any other party. There is enough mental vigour and conceptual depth in the national movement to give me hope that one day it may change into something worthier of Scotland's history and culture, quite apart from the imperative for any independent country to face up to its real problems rather than invent illusory ones. But obviously none of that is going to happen at our visit to the ballot box this time round.

Not that I blame the SNP alone: it is just that I had hopes of something better from it by now, 12 years after the Scottish Parliament was re-established and four years after the party came into government. I had hopes of something at the very least better than what is offered by the other parties.

If I look just at today's electoral news, for example, I feel like tearing my hair out in frustration. Can we really not do better than these miserable trivialities? I find Labour offering free access to local authorities' swimming pools, the LibDems rambling on about home insulation and, heaven help us, the Conservatives coming out with this from their "enterprise spokesperson", Gavin Brown: "Reform will be delivered best if government plays it part. To achieve our radical ambitions for growth, it is clear that politicians must work together, work in partnership with the private sector, and do everything they can to unite all tiers of government behind the push for growth."

It so happened that last night I had been speaking to a group of Tunisian businessmen, lawyers and others about the reform of their corrupted society and the role of government within that process. The idea of the government not having a finger in every pie was something relatively new to them, just because that is the way Tunisia has always worked in its half-century and more of independence - and that is the way other Arab countries work, too.

It is one of the big reasons why most of those Arab countries turned corrupt and reactionary and, in the case of those with oil, quite failed to turn their economic good fortune into native enterprise and sustainable growth for the future. Now, the Tunisians agreed, it was time to get the big brother state off their backs and unleash the energies of the people.I wish I had had Brown's statement in front of me to read out to them. I am sure they would have dissolved into guffaws of laughter and perhaps have asked me to send a message back to Brown telling him that politicians working together and tiers of government uniting were more likely to stifle growth than achieve any "radical ambitions" for it. I would have added, on their behalf, that Scotland was in certain respects pretty corrupt and reactionary, too.

On second thoughts, I am glad that instead we stuck to the altogether more serious business of what an independent country, even one with such an unfortunate history and huge problems as Tunisia has, actually needed to do to promote growth and restore stability now that the people had seized their freedom from their former oppressors.

It came across to me as so much more substantial than the yah-boo discourse of Scotland's shadow-boxing politics. And I would not be at all surprised if, in the years ahead, Tunisia made more of an economic and political success of itself than Scotland is likely to do.