This is the first in a series of individual contributions to the publication, ‘Reforming Scotland’, which aims to set out a possible vision for Scotland’s future which can inform and influence the policy debate in the coming years. The contributions are by people from a range of different backgrounds and political perspectives who have looked at how policy could be reformed across a range of different areas and they represent the views of the authors and not those of Reform Scotland.
Dr Craig Smith’s chapter seeks to “revive interest in Scotland’s often overlooked liberal tradition” and does so by “highlighting a series of ideas that have had a strong resonance in Scottish political life, while pointing out that, though many of them are shared by the social democratic narrative, they also form the basis of an alternative way of thinking about politics that challenges the assumptions of the consensus on Scotland’s left-leaning political sentiments.”