A dose of 'nation' could cure schizoid SNP

CONTRARY to popular myth, journalists welcome new titles appearing - even if they are potential rivals. With newspaper readership as a whole contracting in the UK, we need all the lively product we can get in the market place.

So I dashed to get my first copy of the Scottish Standard, a cheerful weekly that wants to become a daily, and which bills itself as Scotland’s only pro-independence paper. Which also explains its choice of birthday - this weekend is the SNP pre-election conference.

Alex Salmond launched his election campaign on Tuesday with the only serious economic policy document I’ve seen from any of the parties. The Tories want to cut taxes (except for us Scots) but increase public spending. The Lib Dems want to raise the marginal rate of income tax to 50 per cent, plus introduce a local income tax: God help you if you are a two-income household. They also want to join the euro, which means halving interest rates, hence boosting inflation and driving house prices through the roof, Dublin-style.

Labour, being in power, is forced to be more sensible. Yet on Monday, Jack McConnell was prattling on about exchanging his supposed goal of improving on Scotland’s depressingly low economic growth - a third of Ireland’s - in favour of making us all happy. Jack: I’m in charge of making me happy, not you, because we have different tastes.

On the other hand, Alex Salmond has been bold enough to announce a target figure for Scottish growth of 4 per cent per annum, compared with our average of 1.6 per cent. Setting a growth target is the key to framing economic policy and testing its effectiveness. To stoke up growth, attract inward investment and return exiled Scots talent, Alex has made the SNP the only party to advocate tax cuts. He proposes to drop corporation tax from its present 30 per cent to 20 per cent.

Alistair Darling, the Westminster Transport Secretary, immediately denounced the SNP plan by likening it to the tax cuts of Ronald Reagan in the Eighties. For the record, after Reagan cut taxes the United States experienced its longest period of growth in peace-time history, with GDP growing at an annual rate of 3.5 per cent (twice the Scottish average). Net employment increased by 20 million jobs during Reagan’s term in the White House.

And by the way: the share of the income-tax burden borne by the top 10 per cent of US taxpayers actually increased after Reagan’s tax cuts. It went from 48.0 per cent in 1981 to 57.2 per cent in 1988, while the share of income tax paid by the bottom 50 per cent dropped from 7.5 per cent to 5.7 per cent. Why? If you cut marginal rates of tax, you incentivise a growing economy and create more middle-class taxpayers coming up through the ranks.

However, I have a wee problem: I’ve been reading the Scottish Standard. It reminds me that the SNP is still politically schizophrenic. The front-page story has Alex Salmond denouncing Westminster for wanting to impose more nuclear power stations on Scotland - something of a made-up story, I should add. Now, two nuclear stations - Hunterston B in Ayrshire and Torness in East Lothian - provide 50 per cent of Scotland’s electricity, and have done for years without any of us glowing in the dark. Is Alex going to shut these down tomorrow if we win independence? No: because it would cost a fortune and most of us would rather have the money spent on more important things.

So why go apoplectic over a bogus issue? Why pretend to be against nuclear power when, if you were in government, you would happily live with it? Because the SNP tries to have its cake and eat it. It advocates low business taxes but at the same time breathes a ludicrous infantile leftism. Does Alex Salmond really think the electorate doesn’t notice?

Alas, the Scottish Standard epitomises the worst of the SNP’s utopian fixation. As well as wanting to turn off our electricity, the Standard has the Scottish Socialist Party’s Colin Fox telling us we should abolish prescription charges. But Colin wants to abolish every kind of charge and make everything "free". When are we going to grow up? There’s also a paranoid piece implying that the events in Lebanon are a US neo-con plot and we should back the Syrian presence to "maintain order". So much for the independence of small nations.

Now, before lots of hard-working and dedicated SNP activists start foaming at the mouth, I’m not suggesting the Nats adopt Margaret Thatcher as patron saint. Instead, I’m saying two things that are vital to grasp if the SNP is to make an impact at the general election.

First, SNP policies have to be grounded in the will to govern - as are the tax cuts - and not in conspiracy theories about America, multinational companies, or the daft notion that some people are poor because the middle classes don’t pay more of their income to the state.

Second, the SNP has to stop contemplating its own navel and engage more closely in the rapidly-evolving post-devolution debate in Scotland. The Scottish Parliament was a deliberate halfway house designed by Labour to see off the SNP while entrenching Labour’s power base. The result is economic stagnation, cultural implosion, and a failing NHS.

Meanwhile, the Executive’s state machine has expanded to dominate over half the economy, putting thousands on its payroll in best Chicago fashion.

As a result, the electorate - and especially Scotland’s youth - are turned off politics. They are getting no leadership, no inspiration, no passion, from the parliament. Consequently, they don’t vote.

Meanwhile, the intellectual wing of the old devolution movement that is close to Labour is desperately employed in looking for scapegoats. Daily, we are being assaulted by books and partisan think-tanks - outrageously funded by the Executive - who blame this state of affairs on the "traitors" who (supposedly) dare to criticise the torpor in St Andrew’s House. We, it seems, are responsible for Scotland’s "lack of self-confidence", whatever that means.

When the SNP gathers at its conference this weekend, it might care to remember what it uniquely stands for - Scottish nationalism, believe it or not. In a rapidly globalising world, modern, civic-minded nationalism - not class politics or anaemic social democracy - is in the vanguard of progress, from the Lebanon to the Basque Country, from New Zealand to the nations of the former Soviet bloc.

On a practical level, such civic nationalism unites diverse peoples, protects the best in local cultures, and gains direct entry to the global economy. National pride - not spurious racial identity - can fill the spiritual hunger of idealistic young people in a way that Gordon Brown’s abstract and self-serving "Progressive Consensus" can never do. The answer to any lack of national self-confidence is nation-building, and a party that puts that first.

Here’s what the SNP always misses: it cannot be about class war - if it is, it divides, rather than unites. It cannot be about telling folk they can’t do things (such as sending their kids to independent schools). It is about telling folk they can do things. It is about liberty, freedom and national accomplishment, or it is nothing.