AT their worst, conversations can be shouty things or else so banal and boring that you struggle to stay awake. At their best, on the other hand, they can be lively, piquant and enlightening enough to lead to a positive change of behaviour in all those taking part.

Let’s hope the “national conversation” being broached by Nicola Sturgeon at Stirling on Friday falls into the last category.

It will mark the overdue start of the SNP’s ‘summer initiative’, slated as a hard-nosed look at where the Yes side must improve to win the next Scottish referendum. With the autumn equinox only three weeks away, it is high time we got a move on. When the First Minister announced the conversation back in March, she promised: “This summer the SNP will embark on a new initiative to build support for independence. We will listen to what you have to say. We will hear your concerns and address your questions – and in the process, we will be prepared to challenge some of our own answers.”

That is good to know. Not only were some of the answers obviously wrong, but the concerns and questions have also changed hugely in the last six months: the many-headed Brexit crisis seems like a political century away now. Yet its effect on the future of Scotland remains opaque. When I look into the Scottish Government’s published views on this (or indeed on much else), I find only a lot of touchy-feely stuff about sustainability and inclusiveness.

But one problem really should loom out of the encircling gloom: the economic downturn that all those seismic events have brought on, quite likely to lead to technical recession in Scotland by the end of the year. With companies already closing and jobs being lost, we really need to address the question of how to make the Scottish economy start growing faster. At the moment, it is slowing sharply.

For those in public life who still prefer to evade the issue – an awful lot of members of the governing party, I’m afraid – let me put it like this. Scotland must match, and if possible beat, the UK growth rate, which up to now it is far from doing. Unless it does, Scotland the independent nation can only ever be poorer than Scotland the dependent region. The No voters of 2014 will not be converted by that prospect. Therefore, the day of independence will never dawn.

What to do then? Fortunately, I don’t think Scotland’s various deficits are going to be much of a hindrance to a fresh programme of action. The true size of the fiscal deficit will be smaller than the one cobbled together for the dubious GERS exercise, but a fiscal deficit certainly exists. In any case, after the failure of six years of austerity in the UK, the government in London is obviously itching to bring deficits back into fashion again, if only because it cannot think of any other way to solve its own problems. At his emergency budget in the autumn, Chancellor Philip Hammond may leave our Finance Secretary, Keith Brown, looking somewhat timid.

But in Scotland we do have new tax powers of our own. No Scottish government has since 1999 made use of the old powers but the existence of the new ones could provoke a bit of action, what with the fisc (as insiders say) in turmoil. If I were the minister, I would choose this crucial juncture to cut taxes. It is, after all, the traditional Keynesian method of dealing with the threat of recession. It will certainly put clear blue water between Keith Brown and Kezia Dugdale who, alas for Labour, is her own shadow Finance Secretary and sees the threat of recession as good reason to raise taxes (d’oh!). Time for her to sack herself.

Meanwhile, the first priority for the Scottish Government should be a cut in corporation tax from 20 per cent to 12.5 per cent, as in Northern Ireland. There it is lower than in the rest of the UK because otherwise the province would be hopelessly uncompetitive with the Irish Republic. Yet to our cost we have found in the past that Scotland also competes with the Irish Republic for footloose investment. This is one reason the UK Government proposes to cut its own corporation tax to 18 per cent by 2020.

True, this tax is not, or not yet, devolved – but why not just devolve it? It seems to me precisely the sort of further move Gordon Brown was hinting at in his speech over the weekend on how to complete the unfinished business of devolution. More than that, companies keeping a greater share of their own profits will be better able to invest them, create jobs and so help to get the Scottish economy growing faster.

Secondly, now that a good chunk of income tax is under our own control, we should cut that too. I would seize the opportunity to make the incidence of the tax flatter. I would take the lower earners out of the tax altogether and for higher earners make it less progressive, that is, shrink the range of rates at which it is paid. What, you say, would not this be the opposite of social justice? How can we possibly have such a thing in radical Scotland?

But policy can pursue more than one aim, and I am thinking rather of the need to keep up actual revenue in the coming squeeze. In fact, as experience all over the world shows, the flatter the tax, the readier people are to hand it over to the state. In the end the government actually rakes in higher levels of cash from the rich, who are better able to pay it, because they feel less penalised by the system and divert less effort to evasion. It may be a truism, and difficult to prove or disprove by any statistical method, but I think it is part of common experience that people will work harder if they can keep more of the rewards from doing so. When they then spend the stuff, the economy grows faster.

At least the discussion of these points would enliven the proceedings at Stirling. At any rate, it is hardly enough to keep repeating the bland mantra that seems to have been the Government’s holding position over the summer, of how resilient the Scottish economy is. I am not sure myself if it is all that resilient: it is at this moment not showing itself in the least resilient in the North-east, for example. One sure thing is that by the end of the year we will find out. It may not be a pretty sight.