Playtime over - now the search for the real pledges

To stimulate the pre-election debate last week we published draft manifestos written by four senior party figures for their political rivals. Today they reply, setting out what their own parties should promise the electorate in May

EWAN CRAWFORD responds to John McTernan's draft SNP manifesto

IN ONE of the most ill-judged speeches of modern politics, the then Conservative leader, William Hague, once warned the British people the UK was in danger of becoming a foreign land.

Seemingly in that spirit, the assumingly playful manifesto for the SNP last week by Labour adviser John McTernan conjured up an image of a Scotland unrecognisable for most people who live here. Reading more like a wish-list drawn up after a boozy Ronald Reagan tribute night at the Adam Smith Institute, few, if any, of McTernan's ideas should even get close to SNP thinking ahead of May's Scottish Parliament elections.

There will not be, and should not be, market-style, red in tooth and claw competition in schools or in the NHS; tuition fees should not be introduced for higher education; nuclear power should not be expanded and politicians should not be personally doling out grants to their favoured artists.

So what should be in the SNP manifesto? This election, more than any since devolution, will be a jobs election. Among the neo-Forsyth tone of much of McTernan's offering, he touches on one of the two key issues facing Scotland today and that must be addressed in any manifesto: the issue of private-sector job creation in Scotland. Quite simply, we don't have enough of it.

In writing any SNP manifesto there is the constant dilemma of how much to concentrate on what can be achieved with devolution and how much with independence. On the economy, the troubles of Ireland and some other countries should not deflect the SNP from its core economic argument: nobody owes Scotland a living and we require a competitive advantage if we are to thrive and prosper as a country.

That in turn means offering a competitive business tax regime and an imaginative use of tax incentives for key sectors that can only come with tax powers currently denied to the Scottish Parliament. It is important that an SNP manifesto spells out strongly both the need for those tax powers and how they should be used. Tony Blair once wrote that tax harmonisation stifles growth and kills jobs. He is right, and the SNP will no doubt be asking its opponents why they are stifling growth and killing Scottish jobs by forcing us to harmonise our taxes with England.

The second great issue facing Scotland today is inequality. If we don't have enough private-sector job creation, then we have far too much inequality.We hear a lot about Scotland's shame being sectarianism or domestic violence - and they are truly shameful - but the unequal nature of our society is shocking, and the SNP should not be afraid of saying so. This is particularly true in education, where the disparity in results between high-performing and struggling schools is unsustainable. Much of this, of course, is down to wider economic inequalities, but that cannot mean throwing in the towel.

Policies aimed at helping parents in difficult circumstances to be involved in all stages of their children's education should be developed. The impact of the idea of a "pupil premium" should be investigated (even if it is also advocated by the hated Lib Dems) and university admissions policies need to be addressed to make university a realistic goal for bright kids from low income backgrounds.

It's often said, incorrectly, that Bill Clinton's success in the 1992 US presidential election was due to total focus on the economy ("It's the economy, stupid"). In fact, there were two other main strands: "Change versus more of the same" and "Don't forget healthcare."

It's a mark of the success of Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP government that the NHS has been so much less of a political issue compared with previous Lib-Lab Holyrood coalitions. But with the pressure on budgets, this is unlikely to last. That is why the second Clinton maxim will be crucial - which is the party that represents change, and which is offering more of the same? For the SNP, this means highlighting Labour as the party of the status quo - saying to the electorate that voting Labour last year has not re-instated a single pound of Tory cuts - and the Nationalists as the party of realistic change and job creation.

Whatever is included in the manifestos of all the parties, one thing I hope we can be spared in the coming election is the tired old game of whether an independent Scotland would have a budget deficit and it so how big it would be. When your opponents have run up a deficit of 160 billion or so, this is really not something the SNP needs to waste its time on.

• Ewan Crawford was private secretary to John Swinney, the former leader of the Scottish National Party, and is now a lecturer in journalism at the University of the West of Scotland.BRIAN MONTEITH responds to Ewan Crawford's draft Conservative manifesto

There is every possibility that the four suggested party manifestos that were run in The Scotsman last week will be more interesting and more honest than the real versions served up in the next few months.

The reason for this is simple: the mock manifestos were written by commentators whose natural allegiances would be with parties other than those that they were asked to write about. This meant caution could be thrown to the wind, demons could be confronted and elephants in the room could be revealed.

In his Scottish Conservative manifesto, the former SNP adviser, Ewan Crawford, sought to redefine Annabel Goldie's party by diluting its apparent toxicity through making it more Scottish and more local. Although not agreeing with every suggestion, it is an approach I can only commend.

Before worrying about which policies Scottish Conservatives should advocate, the party needs to re-establish its Scottish credentials. Until it does this everything else is wasted time and effort.

Why is it that so many Conservative policies have become popular with the public and are eventually adopted by opponents - and yet the party continues to languish in the polls? Simples. The party is not seen by enough people as putting Scotland's interest first.

It is for this reason that the Scottish Conservatives should have made more of a running with the Calman Commission and its report, and then called for Calman Plus. Ewan Crawford's focus on this oversight is not just right; it is fundamental to everything else on offer becoming palatable to a cynical and suspicious electorate that continues to swallow myths about the poll tax and the sustainability of deep mining for coal.

Crawford's vision of greater localism is also the right one - although it does not square with the Tory centralism that currently has them supporting a council tax freeze. You cannot have both. The answer is to set the councils free and let them increase council tax with safeguards of local plebiscites to check against punitive rises, while reducing income tax at the centre. Calman plus ties this together, giving a coherence the Tories currently lack.

If there was a weakness in Crawford's piece it was that he did not give enough emphasis to the good work done by Liz Smith MSP in raising the party's game in education.

The former George Watson's teacher has outshone every other education spokesman in her diligence and open-minded approach to encouraging new thinking about how our schools are managed and how our universities and colleges can be funded.

She has not hidden behind policy reviews that will not report until after the election, nor sought cover by offering only meaningless platitudes.

Smith has come up with clear proposals to devolve power locally; giving headteachers more power to manage their schools, and assuring higher education institutions of credible funding through tuition fee contributions only once graduates have achieved above-average earnings. Greater bursaries would square this off.

The Scottish people understand just how important education is to establishing a meritocratic society where equality of opportunity becomes a reality and not just an aspiration. The Scottish Conservatives should therefore elevate education to be their main policy focus, as it shows them in a positive light based on Scottish traditions.

If education then fed into Crawford's economic policies of using tax competition to deliver economic growth through greater productivity and entrepreneurial spirit, a virtuous circle could be created that would pay for the health services, the bobbies on the beat and the better infrastructure that everybody wants

A party that puts Scotland first by making the nation's politicians responsible for their actions and accountable to the people, at both a national and local level; a party that makes Scotland a country of equal opportunity with many different ladders to climb no matter what one's background is; and a party that encourages economic prosperity through lower taxes and lighter regulation would get my vote. It is in essence a liberal conservative approach.

Ewan Crawford came pretty close to all of that; will Annabel Goldie come any closer?

• Brian Monteith is policy director of ThinkScotland.org and a former Tory MSP