When faith in our politicians is at an all-time low, there has never been a more important time to hear the views of the guardians of our future on what is going wrong in Scotland and how to put things right. The search will take the form of an essay-writing competition with two categories open to all Scottish residents aged 16 to 18 and 19 to 25.

The essay’s title will be Political Accountability in Scotland: how can we ensure our politicians are answerable and effective?

The winning essays will put forward original ideas based on research and a clear understanding of the economic, political and philosophical issues at stake.

To start things off, the leading historian and thinker Michael Fry outlines some of the challenges facing the current generation.

In the 1960s, when I grew up, we thought we were going to change the world. We had the ideas, after all, whether of the left or of the right. The lads and lassies of the left were going to liberate every conceivable minority, from the racial to the sexual, and give them the equal status history had denied them.

Those on the right proposed what was in their own estimation a much more rational but no less radical agenda, to throw off the controls by bureaucrats and politicians that had cramped our parents’ lives ever since the second world war.

Revolution was in the air. We thought about it, talked about it, wrote about it, sang about it and some countries actually attempted it, such as France and Czechoslovakia. Britain was still feeling secure in its basic social and political values, but in Scotland, nationalism stirred. A lot of little revolutions in lesser spheres of life went on.

Looking back over 40 years, I would say my generation did change things quite a lot. The minorities have been liberated, so that they are able to lead lives on their own terms, regardless of what the majority think. And the state has been rolled back — not as far as the purest libertarians would have liked, but still a long way.

All the same, not everything has worked out for the best. One liberated minority consists of pretty ordinary folk who for some reason or other become famous for being famous, and in their empty celebrity disport themselves across the media in a way the wealthy would never have stooped to do in the old days. They mock the concept of equality.

On the other hand are those who have abused the freedoms opened up to them (and at the expense of the rest of us), whether they be the managers of hedge funds or the politicians who have sought and won (or is that bought?) our votes. They mock the concept of liberty.

Yet, amid this current decadence of the values we live by, both the left and right in Britain have come to agree on a great many things. It is strange how at the end of 40 years the two sides in the passionate debates of that earlier era seem to have grown together into a consensus. Now this consensus starts to look stifling, even barren.

Time for another revolution, then? Let us hope so. Especially, I think, we need it in Britain, or more especially in Scotland. We used, 40 years ago, to compare ourselves complacently with foreign nations lacking the long-term social and political stability that allowed our revolutions to be evolutions, without upheaval or violence. This stability was above all institutional: parliament, monarchy, political parties, public bodies of all kinds enjoyed the confidence of the people that let them change when they had to, but not before they had to. It was a comforting country.

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