To save Gaelic, we have to have it all: thriving traditional communities, a right to Gaelic-medium education, dozens more all-Gaelic schools and the teachers to staff them, thousands of fluent new Gaelic speakers both young and old, a TV channel with a full program of new content every day, Gaelic research and scholarship of the highest quality, Gaelic cultural centres all over the country, a small army of well-paid Gaelic development officers, lavishly-funded Gaelic arts, music and literature, and much else.

There is no one tactic or target of Gaelic development that trumps all the others. Language revival is a wholistic process. You have to do everything all at once.

But of course, all of this costs money, not a lot of money in the grander scheme of things, but money nonetheless, and after forty years of neoliberalism dominating the political discussion in the UK, the surest way to argue against further Gaelic development is to do so using the language of austerity: to site its cost.

The argument typically goes something like this: “Gaelic is such a lovely, lyrical, ancient language, and we would truly like fund your Gaelic development project, but sadly there just isn’t enough money right now.”

This argument never changes. Boom times or bust, there is never enough money for Gaelic. Since Reagan and Thatcher, austerity thinking has become so deeply ingrained in our public discourse that politicians, journalists and economists simply regurgitate it as if it is self-evidently true.

But this argument is founded on a lie. The wish-list at the top of this post may seem completely pie-in-the-sky, but it is actually far more firmly grounded in reality than the austerity arguments against it. The UK is the sixth most wealthy country ever in the history of the world. We have more than enough wealth to save Gaelic. We are not poor.

So this argument is a trap. We can’t win by engaging with this argument on its own terms, and we certainly don’t want to internalize the zero-sum assumptions that underpin this argument and start debating each other about priorities, about what Gaelic development projects should be funded and what shouldn’t. Successful language revival movements go big. We can’t let the zero-sum thinking of austerity box us in. To save Gaelic we have to have it all — and we can. We don’t have to choose.

The truth is that the money we need to save Gaelic is tiny compared to government spending overall. The government can bring silly money to bear on a problem if politically compelled to do so, and a good example of this is the Gaelic school campaign in Edinburgh.

Parents in Edinburgh fought for more than 14 years with the City of Edinburgh Council, trying to compel them to set up a stand-alone Gaelic school, and opponents of the school, both inside and outside of the Council, often used the cost of the project and budgetary constraints as arguments against the proposal. In the end, the parents built the political pressure required to prevail, but only then did it come to light that the Council had so neglected the proposed school building that it would require millions extra to repair. The Council turned to the Scottish Government, and together, in a matter of months, they found the required money, because by then, it would have been too politically painful to do otherwise.

So in spite of all the arguments, austerity was a lie. The money was always there. In a rich country like the UK, austerity is always a lie, so there is no point in engaging with austerity arguments directly. To win, we have to change the terms of debate. To win, we need take a step back and relentlessly attack the zero-sum assumptions that underpin these arguments: i.e. that a country as dizzyingly wealthy as Scotland is somehow too poor to save Gaelic.

When politicians, civil servants, or journalists revert to their knee-jerk practice of talking about “difficult economic times” or “tight budgetary constraints”, we, as Gaelic activists, need to keep coming back again and again to the fundamental truth that Scotland is a rich country and that we have more than enough money to save Gaelic.

Granted, many of the local politicians and civil servants who control the purses-strings do not have much revenue-raising power themselves, but that’s really not our problem. It is not our job as Gaelic activists to find the money. As Arthur Cormack pointed out when he was chairman of Bòrd na Gàidhlig, parents and other Gaelic activists are often called upon to develop detailed funding and business-plans for new schools or units, but this shouldn’t be our role.

And at the same time, there are larger arguments to be made against neoliberalism in general, about out-of-control wealth inequality, the need for a wealth tax and for more progressive taxation in general, but as important as these arguments are, again, most local politicians and civil servants don’t personally have much power to change how money is raised. It should be sufficient for us to simply point out that saving Gaelic in a country as wealthy as Scotland is not an extravagance and then to demand that they get on with it.

The Gaelic movement has never gotten anywhere by being reasonable, by talking sense and respecting the austerity discourse of the powers that be. That’s a chump’s game. We make progress by issuing demands and then building the political power to back up those demands.

With enough money, anything is possible, and we not poor. We have more than enough money in Scotland to save Gaelic.