I have a love-hate relationship with politics. As the owner of a lobbying and PR business, politics is my job, but I’d also count it as a hobby. Now more than ever, I feel engulfed by politics in the way that I feel engulfed by sport, or any other pastime. I have the same feeling of excitement as I wait for a major TV political interview that I have as I wait for a major golf championship. Sad, perhaps, but true.

But unlike politics, neither sport nor any other hobby infects me with hate as well as love. And just as my fascination with politics has never been higher, nor has my frustration. Most people, families and businesses in Scotland and the UK plan. We plan in the long-term when we can, in the medium-term when we can’t, and only in the short-term when we absolutely have to.

Not so in politics, where I cannot remember the last time I heard anything from any political party which even drifted into medium-term planning, let alone showing us anything close to a long-term strategy.

This week, the short-termism which increasingly characterises our politics reached the Liberal Democrats. Brexit, contaminating all the main political parties to one degree or another, has led the LibDems under their new leader, Jo Swinson, into shifting its Brexit policy from calling for a second referendum to advocating Article 50’s revocation after winning a General Election.

READ MORE: Jo Swinson: Scottish nationalism is the same as English nationalism 

This is not necessarily a bad one-election strategy, but it is risky. The LibDems need to nudge themselves up to over 25 per cent in order to see a slew of seats under first-past-the-post. Jo Swinson is already only appealing to 48%, so she needs over half of them to vote for her. And how many of those who voted Remain agree with the wholesale cancellation of the biggest democratic exercise in the history of the country? Of course, one might say that winning a General Election legitimises such a cancellation, but that is a skinny argument, to say the least.

And even if half of the 48% does support a revocation, they may still have a journey to travel to desert tribal allegiances to one of the other two parties, who between them hoovered almost 85% of the vote in 2017. It means, firstly, winning seats from Labour in urban England. But how many moderate Labour people who also happen to support revocation have not already shifted allegiance from the current extremist version of that grand old party?

And it also means taking seats in the shires from the Tories, which may be even harder. For sure, there are plenty Remainers in the Tory ranks, particularly in the south-west of England. But "revokers"? I am not so sure.

The biggest problem of all, of course, representing a cavernous hole in this short-term thinking, is that in little over a month the UK may have exited the European Union with a deal. What then? The only place for Swinson to go, at that point, would be to go into the election advocating a referendum to rejoin the EU. However, this is even shakier, because the mental foundation on which voters make their decision will have been completely reset by the act of leaving.

How many of us will actively vote to get back into the EU, once we have legally departed and once, as it inevitably will, the dust settles? I’d say not enough to take the LibDems to 25%.

But let me lay off the Lib Dems, because the other parties are no less infected by the disease of short-termism.

It seems to me that the Tories unless they are rescued by a deal with Brussels, have nowhere to go other than to pursue a short-term strategy. It involves doubling-down on the current narrowing of the party - similar to how the LibDems are narrowing into a "revoke" funnel. It pursues a no-deal Brexit in the event of a failure to agree a deal (how this could legally be achieved is a moot point), and takes on a much more English nationalist, blue-collar persona in order to sweep up the Labour Leave voters in the Midlands and north of England who are continually and increasingly disillusioned with the incompetent ambiguity of the Corbyn leadership.

READ MORE: Jo Swinson accused of 'utterly grotesque' hypocrisy on Brexit and independence referendums 

Again, like the LibDems, this may be a good one-election strategy, if the number of seats they win from Labour in those areas can exceed the number they lose to the SNP in Scotland and to the LibDems in the south of England as a result of no deal. But the electoral mathematics make that look like a knife-edge calculation.

Even if it works, where then? What is left for this narrowing party when Brexit is done and people once again look for a safe, broach church?

And when we talk of narrowing, the LibDems and Tories are pale imitations of Labour. The astonishing self-harm of that party has been normalised, but it remains the political story of the decade. A sect run by former Communists, Venezuelan fetishists and supporters of the Soviet Union, with, being kind, a chequered record on anti-Semitism and a questionable relationship with a variety of terrorist organisations. Polling now shows Jeremy Corbyn to be the most unpopular opposition leader in history and it is clear that the prospect of him as our Prime Minister is sending shivers down the spines of larger and larger numbers of people, including Labour’s own supporters.

Why does this matter? Why is it a big deal that our parties are only able to operate on a hand-to-mouth basis? It matters because we need to address seismic issues created by the biggest intergenerational and climatic changes we have ever seen. But politicians are not talking about them. They do not have sufficient "headspace" to dedicate any of it to non-Brexit issues.

No headspace to think about how to deliver state-funded healthcare to a growing, ageing population in a world where medical advancement is keeping us alive for longer. No headspace to be serious about state pensions, which those of us just on the right side of 40 know we have no realistic prospect of getting, or at least not until we’re nearly dead. No headspace to take a step back and ask why our children’s education is falling so far behind the rest of the world, let alone to do anything about it.

We, the people, deserve better. And we can only hope that once the UK and Scotland have answered the two defining constitutional questions of our time, we will be left with a body of politicians, and a group of political parties, capable of delivering it.

Andy Maciver is director of Message Matters.