Leader: Carry on, ministers - but not as before

GIVEN that he campaigned in the Holyrood election on the basis of the SNP having the best team for Scotland, it was not a great surprise that First Minister Alex Salmond opted yesterday to re-appoint all of the cabinet ministers in post at the end of the Nationalists' first term of minority government. However, to what might be called the continuity cabinet, Mr Salmond has added three new posts.

Fiona Hyslop, demoted from education secretary in the previous administration, comes back to a full cabinet job, as culture and external affairs secretary. She is joined by Bruce Crawford, as cabinet secretary for parliamentary business and government strategy and by Alex Neil in the newly created position of cabinet secretary for infrastructure and capital investment.

As both Mr Crawford and Ms Hyslop attended the previous cabinet, their new titles reflect Mr Salmond's wish to increase the size and status of his senior team to reflect the fact the SNP now holds an outright majority at Holyrood, whereas previously they were a minority administration. Even though there will be a small increase in the payroll - though all ministers will continue to be paid at 2008 levels - this is not unreasonable.

What is most interesting about the new line up is Mr Neil's appointment. Once seen as a hard-line fundamentalist, and an ally of former deputy leader Jim Sillars, Mr Neil was brought in from the cold by the First Minister in the previous administration, a move seen as astute in terms of internal party politics, and has now been rewarded for his work as housing minister but also, one suspects, for being prepared at all times to defend the administration in public.

However, what remains unclear is exactly how Mr Neil will live up to the task set him by Mr Salmond of driving forward a renewed emphasis on creating jobs, promoting investment and sustaining Scotland's economic recovery. In theory this sounds like a good idea but in practice, with a significantly reduced capital budget, this will be a very difficult task.

It will be particularly testing if Mr Neil continues the policies which Mr Salmond has insisted on of taking a very limited view of the role of the private sector in infrastructure investment, an attitude no better illustrated than in the dogmatic and ideological refusal to use the Private Finance Initiative funding model. PFI was far from perfect but in the SNP hostility to it is part of a bigger picture of a party wedded to old-style stateism.

It is to be hoped that, across the portfolios - from health, through education and the environment - the new cabinet is willing to throw off the narrow thinking of the past and adopt radical measures which are needed to meet the challenges of improving the areas of public services for which they are responsible. Scotland will be ill-served if continuity is really another word for conservatism.