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Not any more. We have handled the defining crisis of the credit crunch badly, and probably because our institutions are rotten. Some of our leaders tell us the worst will soon be over, others promise us only years of austerity and hardship ahead. Yet all of them now agree that we need the reform that they have at best pursued half-heartedly, and more often refused and rejected.

In the competition being run by The Sunday Times Scotland and Reform Scotland to find the best young thinkers in the country, I look forward to hearing ideas from the generation who will have to bear the burden of reshaping Scotland.

It does not seem to me that either the traditional left or the traditional right starts with any natural advantage: everybody has to surmount and think beyond political positions that have been more or less discredited. The judges will want to hear from all sides.

Let me set out some problems for which I would like to see answers proposed — mainly because I cannot think of any myself. For those on the left, how is the traditional progressive agenda to be revived? Rather against the odds, Old Labour has come through the years of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair and is now perhaps, under Gordon Brown, reasserting itself. If this is so, we cannot yet say that Old Labour has overcome the record of disaster that caused its eclipse in the 1970s and 1980s. So has it a future that is not too cumbered by the past?

As for new Labour, does it really mean anything apart from the glamour and glitz that accompanied Blair into 10 Downing Street? The spectacle, even at its most exciting, obscured some less pleasant realities: the frank acceptance of widening social inequality, the inability to renew public services, the subservience of British interests abroad to American interests.

Was there more to it than spin? Some of those Blairites who have just resigned from the government appear to think so. If there was more than spin, what can be salvaged and put to better use in future?

Those on the right have a somewhat similar dilemma to face. Thatcherism changed Britain in many ways and for ever. In its heyday, it enthused a lot of young people — much more in England, admittedly, than in Scotland. Would it be possible to create a Scottish Thatcherism (doubtless under a different label) that would in the same way destroy outdated structures and liberate novel forces in society, with the aim of giving ordinary people more control over their lives?

The combative energy that had to be expended on the right in the final quarter of the twentieth century has left even English Tories looking for a quieter life, which they have found under David Cameron. He has been able to exploit the current political crisis in Britain, but once the smoke of that battle has cleared, will we find much distinction in actual policy between the party he seeks to lead into power and the party he hopes to throw out? In other words, is there anything in his cuddly Conservatism that makes it all that different from new Labour? Could it offer a programme for Scotland, too?

And, finally, we have within Scotland the opportunity, which many of us took in the Euro election, to reject British politics entirely by voting SNP. It offers us the prospect of a new nation. Yet oddly, the new nation it projects often seems much like the old nation — with a hyperactive state, heavy public expenditure and a weakness for yielding to the demands of any special interest group that cares to get its act together and lobby hard enough.

Has the realisation of Scottish dreams been hindered up to now simply by lack of revenues from North Sea oil to spend on them? Or is there something wrong with those dreams? In that case, what new dreams do we need?

I belong to the generation of 1968 and I have to admit we have not made as good a use as we might have of our political inheritance. I hope the generation of 2009 can do better. Let us see, in this competition, if they at least have the potential in them.

How to enter

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