THERE’S nothing better at creating a sense of urgency than remembering that in a relatively short period of time I’ll be dead. Relatively speaking, of course. Even if I’m fortunate enough to live until I’m 80, I’m almost a third of the way through my life.

In term of the spinning of this Earth and the swirling of this solar system, it’s a near meaningless fraction of time. Within that tiny window, then, why do we accept such miserable compromises? Why do we accept the excuses of political establishments that buy off our urgent demands for peace, for an end to poverty, for justice, with their shoddy stalling tactics and diversions?

Why has the self-proclaimed radicalism of the Yes Movement, with this paper as its masthead, accepted the moderate and mediocre domestic agenda of the SNP since September 2014? No-one, myself included, can extricate themselves from blame for that reality.

A political movement is by its nature an intoxicating cocktail of loyalty, passion, and hope, painting more in broad horizon strokes than the fine print of the here and now. Perhaps, too often, we’ve drunk too much. The cold, urgent reality remains. The 220,000 children in poverty. Citizens slumped homeless on our streets. Thousands more without money for heating or food. While the priority is constitutional brinkmanship, our debate has grown too tolerant, too patient towards inaction. These inequalities cannot hold. The purpose of politics, if it is to mean anything any more, is the redistribution of power and wealth. So why – in a circus of promises – is hope spurned?

Take tax. Where once the SNP promised to replace the council tax, now they tinker with it. The party’s 2015 support for a 50p top rate of income tax was shelved by 2016. Their biggest tax policy is a 50 per cent cut for the airlines. No wonder the recent budget was so monotone that I almost fell asleep during its presentation.

For 10 years, the SNP have been managers rather than reformers. Even where inequality pledges have been loudest – on education – policies have been standardised testing, the rearranging of funding models, and flirting with free schools. Meanwhile, wealth inequality, which ambitious devolved housing or land taxation or rent controls would reduce, remains high, and private schools continue to rake in devolved charity tax breaks.

As long as Scotland has a mini-UK economic model it can never be free. The SNP fail to meet the challenge of two great independence thinkers: Jimmy Reid’s demand for economic democracy and James Connolly’s demand for economic independence.

Kenny MacAskill understood this when he said the party has become a supreme electoral machine yet was defined “more by timidity than radicalism”. SNP MP George Kerevan warned that without radical financial sector reform “nothing will change” post-independence.

The SNP have chosen safe electoral stability, and the long game of independence ahead of making economic changes now. Lobbyists for wealthy landlords and landowners were comfortably accommodated in recent reform bills. The big banks, big oil corporations, and big whisky firms are all safe to pile up their wealth in our unequal Scotland.

Defenders of SNP social-economics praise universal provisions and spending on key services. These are good things.

But they do not redistribute wealth.

Practical projects such as community empowerment, getting vulnerable folk out of the prison system, and the latest children in care review are all good aspirations but they need to be more radical to break the centuries of social segregation by class in this country.

In May we will elect another five years of a moribund council regions system centralised by the Tories. With squeezed budgets, councillors can only alter the margins of the regressive council tax – also designed by the Tories.

How can we convince doubters that independence means more democracy and equality, when that isn’t realised with devolved issues? Why do we dilute necessary demands in the name of unity, for the sake of a promised land at an unknown future date?

Is this what we settle for? A world where Scottish politics, power, and wealth is static – yet we can point to southern NHS chaos, xenophobia, economic risk, welfare bullying, tax cuts, and warmongering as enough to prove the superiority of independence?

That may be enough, but it is not all we could be. I want to believe. I want to believe that a democratic awakening can lift the centuries of pain from the nation’s poorest, that the economy can be transformed, that we can lead the world in the creation of a good society.

Yet now a beautiful, ambitious movement of more than150,000 people shuffles behind insincere professional hackery. If the importance of self-criticism and diversity of voices is forgotten; if all talent and energy is consumed in party electioneering; if new establishments arise unchallenged – then we will get what we deserve.

We may avoid the worst of the UK’s decline, but there will be no sunlit uplands. We will have competence in place of transformation for those who need it most. Our time here is short. When we reflect on this movement, is it really good enough?