George Kerevan: This was the giant elephant in the room at BBC leaders’ debate

This policy vacuum was patently obvious in the first television debate on the BBC, where all of the party leaders on show – we’ll come to the missing ones later – spoke in platitudes eg on the necessity to tackle mental health issues.

None was willing to engage with the desperate need for an emergency programme to deal with the economic implosion caused by the lockdown and a chaotic Brexit. None seemed engaged with the need to fill the hole caused by a plummeting Scottish tax receipts or falling exports.

For saying this, I expect I’ll be accused of being an “economic reductionist”, as I was recently in the letters pages of this newspaper. But then I am. Unless we can feed, house and clothe ourselves, then everything else vanishes.

Without a functioning economy, we can’t pay for education or health. Without industrial production at a certain level, we can’t look after our infants and elderly, sustain a great culture, or eradicate poverty. Above all, who gets to make the economic decisions in society determines the health of our democracy and our environment. Which leaves debating matters of personal identity – important as these are – as a secondary agenda.

These points should be axiomatic for the ruling SNP administration for one simple reason: unless a majority of Scottish voters think an independent Scotland can survive and thrive economically, they won’t vote to secede from the UK.

Unfortunately, the SNP’s economic and fiscal blueprint for independence – as enshrined in Andrew Wilson’s Growth Commission report – has been overtaken by the pandemic and the UK Government’s Covid spending spree.

Nor does the FM seem very focused on outlining a plan to deal with the doubling of long-term unemployment likely to result from the medical crisis. Rising unemployment will reduce tax income and raise poverty levels.

This will put a heavy burden on the SNP Government’s ability to pay for its promised doubling of the Scottish Child Payment. Don’t get me wrong: I support the Child Payment. But to sustain it requires a robust economic recovery plan – and that is missing from the SNP’s election agenda.

If all this is not plain to the Holyrood parties, it certainly is to the enemies of the independence struggle. At the weekend, the Financial Times splashed a front page story headlined “Price of Scotland breakaway rises”. This was followed by a huge inside spread headed: “Scotland faces hard choices on cost of divorce”.

READ MORE: Richard Murphy: What the Financial Times gets wrong about Scottish independence

Now, the FT is a serious newspaper that takes notice of the impending break-up of Britain. This was no tabloid diatribe. On the other hand, the FT brought lots of hard numbers to bear on the present lack of a decent economic plan for independence.

The essence of the FT argument is that the pandemic and Brexit have caused “a significant deterioration in Scotland’s fiscal position”. As a result, keeping to the spending and borrowing rules laid down in the Growth Commission report would necessitate raising taxes or cutting spending by £1765 per person, post-indy.

The article then follows up with quotes from City investment gurus warning indy Scotland will find it difficult to borrow unless it implements austerity policies.

Cue a deafening silence from SNP HQ.

It is instantly possible to fault the FT’s numbers. For starters, that £1765 number is calculated on cutting the hypothetical Scottish Budget deficit (post-independence) to meet an international norm of 3% of GDP.

SPOILER alert: since the Covid emergency, that 3% norm has been abandoned by the major economies. The deficit is currently over 10% in both the US and UK. Safe to say, we can at least half the FT’s imaginary austerity number, even taking their dubious fiscal logic at face value.

But then, the FT’s underlying methodology is bonkers. It assumes there is no change to Scottish economic policy and growth rates after independence – and so no rise in tax revenues. To be sure, the SNP Government has come up with no specific, post-pandemic economic recovery plan.

So the FT can’t be entirely blamed for fiddling the numbers. But that just reinforces my basic argument: the Holyrood election debate has to address the economy. I don’t intend to abuse the privilege of this column for party advantage, but the one political party which is proposing an emergency economic package is Alba. I know that because I helped write the policy package. In essence, it involves stimulating the leading sector of the Scottish economy – housebuilding.

Of course, everyone is in favour of building more homes, and rightly so. The SNP promise 100,000 more by 2031. But that’s my point: 2031 is an eon away. We need an economic stimulus package over the next 18 months if unemployment is to be reduced and tax receipts raised timeously.

To be truly effective as a stimulus, we need to boost housebuilding by around 50%, taking us back to the completion rates seen just after the Millennium. My calculation is that meeting this target would add at least one percentage point to GDP per annum. If sustained, that would likely close the nominal fiscal gap that the FT claims would exist after independence.

Can we increase housebuilding quickly enough? To do this in the timeframe, the building effort has to be public-sector-led in order to remove roadblocks.

How to fund? Building homes for rent creates an income stream. This income can be rolled up and used as collateral to borrow. This creates the capital for construction. But where to get the land? The Scottish Government can easily use its compulsory purchase powers or fund community groups to acquire from big landowners. What about lack of water and drainage? Answer: use more dispersed building. We have labour shortages following Brexit, which create another bottleneck. We cure that with an emergency training programme in the further education colleges allied to paid apprenticeships in the building industry. We divert building contracts to local small firms, to help them expand.

Building materials? Only about 20% of materials for Scottish homes are locally sourced. Let’s change the technology and use more local wood, as they do in Scandinavia. And up the insulation specs to combat climate change.

Finally, lets commission our young architects to design better homes to live it – buildings that reflect Scottish culture – rather than the soulless boxes delivered by the big construction monopolies in England.

If Alba succeeds in giving the Scottish Parliament an independence supermajority, the combined indy parties can legislate an emergency housebuilding programme in the first week.

This would be a national effort, showing we don’t need permission from Westminster to take Scotland’s destiny into Scotland’s own hands. Such a national effort would also unite the independence movement around a common goal, helping to heal recent political divisions.

And it will annoy the hell out of the Financial Times.