It’s time to start fixing our country

Stop the endless political bickering. It’s time to get off.

After referendums, elections, constitutional mud-slinging, empty slogans and countless moronic platitudes, it’s time Britain’s politicians refocused on the basics.

Brexit can be soft or it can be hard. It can even be poached. But here are the issues we in Scotland need to get to grips with regardless: Our housing crisis We are not building enough homes for our children. Just 16,000 a year is a far cry from the post-war boom of 45,000.

Turbo-charging that to 25,000 a year would not just mean more affordable homes for young adults facing the prospect of staying with mum and dad indefinitely. It would provide a £1.9billion-a-year boom to our economy and employ an estimated 35,000 people.

And while we’re at it, it surely cannot be beyond the collective wit of Scotland’s leaders to develop a strategy to eradicate the wholly unneccesary and what appears to be the increasingly shameful blight of homelessness. Education and health Our two biggest priorities are seeing falling standards or failing targets. That must be addressed in the shortest possible order.

As French president Charles De Gaulle once famously said: “Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.”

So the task would be better served by teams of experts free of party ties. We need long-term strategies – not soundbites.

The NHS is the nation’s most-cherished institution. It is bigger than party politics and deserves to be a special case.

Likewise, there can be no higher priority for any government than securing the best education for the next generation. There are many things right with Scottish education, but lately falling standards have started to expose a rot which will bloom into a full-blown crisis if not properly addressed .

SNP big beast John Swinney has been in charge of the education brief for more than a year now.

He has brought forward reforms – admittedly not universally accepted as the right course of action – so we must wait to gauge the results.

But the clock is ticking. Every year of falling standards is another year of failing pupils who finish school having been deprived of the best chance to flourish.

If Scotland’s leaders can put plans into motion to crack these big issues, then this country of Bell and Baird, Watt and Fleming, McIntosh and Dunlop can again turn its considerable collective intellect to solving the challenges of modern life through invention and innovation.

So let’s end the incessant, infuriating and petty tribal politics and focus on the big issues.

Fix the basics first and a prosperous future will surely follow.