Why political division is necessary for a country to prosper

Nicola Sturgeon has today announced she will seek permission from Westminster to hold a new Scottish independence referendum between Autumn 2018 and Spring 2019. But both the Tory and Labour parties have stated that the last thing they want is more division.

But just what is division and should we fear it?

Division is just another word for competition. This is most closely associated with the private sector. Should all those doing business unite into one company? Or should they remain divided into separate companies? Competition is seen as the creator of innovation and innovation the driving force behind growing the economy. So a workforce divided into separate companies is essential to the economic wellbeing of our country.

The alternative is a socialist state where there is only the state and the public look to the leader of the state to be the sole source of innovation. This is why such states fail – we need as many people as possible to be innovators, not just the one person. And that is why division of the workforce into many separate businesses is crucial to the economy.

Why should politics be any different?

Competition is a necessary and pre-requisite condition for any open democracy to thrive. Just as the commercial sector needs competition – i.e. division – to drive innovation, so too does the political world. If we had just one party standing in elections, then there’d be no challenging of ideas. And it’s the challenging of ideas that leads to the innovation that is so crucial to the economic and political successes of our country.

Without division, society stagnates. We end up simply implementing the same old tired ideas. Standing up and challenging the status quo makes us all think long and hard about our current problems and the received solutions to those problems. In the commercial sector, such challenging brings down the unit cost of produced items as new, cheaper ways are found of manufacturing them. In politics, the challenging produces new ways of running our country and better conditions for our citizens.

For both the Conservatives, the self-called champions of competition, and Labour, who in the past successfully challenged such assumptions as only managers not workers should have rights or that homosexuality was abhorrent, to call for less division within politics is not just astonishing but counter to their own principles.

To be frank, if they both wanted less division within politics then they could have followed their own advice years ago and combined their two parties into one. The fact that they stubbornly remain separate parties shows that neither believes the messages they are delivering to the Scottish public; they both know division and debate are crucial elements in any democracy that wishes to be successful.

The SNP are therefore right to challenge the status quo. Already, it has produced fundamental changes to our society. We now have a Scottish parliament and the growing belief in Westminster that further devolution – such as City Deals and elected Mayors – is the way forward for society. Even UK Labour are now seriously discussing the need for a federal system of government within the UK.

So let’s not stifle creativity by heeding the voices of the Tory and Labour parties who contradict their own principles in calling for the SNP to stop generating innovation by dropping their call for a new debate on Scottish independence.

As we all know, it is the challengers that spark the innovative changes that a country needs.