POLITICIANS are always trying to get themselves noticed by using stand-out phrases that catch the reader’s eye or the listener’s ear.

At the SNP, we’ve all enjoyed a little alliteration recently with our “Brexit Bourach” phrase. It sounds snappier than “Brexit shambles”, but its meaning is just the same, of course, and it is a lot more fun than “Brexit means Brexit” and definitely more apt than “strong and stable”.

Theresa May repeated these latter two phrases so much this year that people started to think she was a malfunctioning robot. It pays to get the public interested in your political agenda with a few memorable sayings, but if your catchphrase turns into a cliche, then it can quickly come back to bite.

“Coalition of chaos” is another oft-repeated slogan from 2017. The Tories’ warning of a possible Corbyn government helped into office by the SNP at the June election has come back to haunt them like the ghost of Christmas present as the country continues its descent into Brexit-inspired disarray.

British politics are at their most chaotic in decades, with no sign of recovery any time soon. In the end it was the diminished post-election Tories that cobbled together a dodgy parliamentary deal with the DUP.

In truth, May should probably steer well clear of slogans, as they haven’t served her well so far – remember the letters falling off the wall at the Tory Party conference? Amateur, ill-fated and badly applied – rather like her premiership. Sometimes a repeated phrase comes along that is painfully ironic, if the politician using it only recognised the bigger meaning. Take the new besties of the Tories, the DUP, for instance, whose insistence on seeking “regulatory alignment” with the rest of the UK on leaving the EU and not budging on “regulatory divergence” ring very hollow considering how divergent their attitude to gay rights and unaligned their abortion laws are from the rest of these enlightened isles. I’m pretty sure Theresa May didn’t bother to point this out to her friends across the water, but it’s phrases like these that can take on a life of their own if not properly managed. With the invisible ink just dry on phase one of the shaky Irish, EU and UK talks on Brexit, the Tories would do well to dig deeper than mere slogan, rhetoric and soundbite. But, for irony with a capital “I”, the catchphrase that sticks in everyone’s craw has got to be “getting on with the day job”, a favourite of the Scottish Tories, which was used to divert attention away from their own serious lack of policy and their own obsession with constitutional gripes.

I was always told that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but it seems that this bon mot has fallen on deaf ears with Ruth Davidson and her cronies. In any case, their boast has boomeranged. With one government in the south of the UK totally wrapped up in a disaster of its own making, namely Brexit, to the detriment of social policy and economic progress, another government, in Scotland, has been tackling these domestic problems head-on in the day-to-day business of running a government.

Before Christmas, we discovered to general jaw dropping that the UK Government had failed to draw up any in-depth analysis of the economic impact of Brexit on the UK, 18 months on from the referendum. In December last year, the Scottish Government published a clear and well-researched document on Scotland’s Place In Europe, highlighting the Scottish people’s democratic desire to stay in the EU, with suggestions for remaining a member of the single market and customs union. It seems that, rather than build castles in the air, it is the Scottish Government that deals in hard facts and robust analysis, the lifeblood of competent governance.

With shocking figures showing a 132 per cent rise in rough sleeping, with 65 per cent more children in temporary accommodation rather than permanent homes in England since the Tories came to power in 2010, the UK Government should be looking north to the Scottish Government’s homelessness initiatives and innovative solutions to this harrowing and growing problem. Building a greater number of affordable homes and helping homeless people to rebuild their lives through supported accommodation is one more example of “getting on with the day job”.

Saving our banks from closures, recognising the needs of our communities, rural and urban, delivering gender equality and tackling discrimination, this is what a working government does for its citizens to improve the quality of their lives. Taking a stand on the abhorrent rape clause and two-child cap on benefits, binning the bedroom tax, providing baby box for new parents, doubling free childcare, and reforming the social security system to put dignity at its core, are just a few examples of what a government can do when it’s not distracted by party infighting, scandal and nostalgia for the distant days of empire.

That’s getting on with the day job. That’s being ‘Stronger for Scotland’. Now there’s one catchphrase that does what it says on the tin.