THE Scottish Parliament returns today from its summer break, and everybody had been expecting its legislative programme for the next year to be announced. But it seems this does not follow straight on from the glossy new pact negotiated by SNP and Greens, so we have to wait another week for the nitty gritty.

While an absolute majority at Holyrood is a vital first step towards another referendum, the demands on the diligence of our lawmakers may not be quite so benign. So far Scots at large have hummed and hawed. Last year’s rising majority for independence in the opinion polls has wilted. Even boosting it with the quasi-coalition may not offer the complete answer, because the SNP and the Greens do not agree on all public questions.

Indeed, they seem to oppose each other on some. For example, should an independent Scotland aim for faster economic growth, or should it remain content with a lower standard of living for the sake of preserving the environment?

We can have no doubt where the Greens are with this. But setting their sights on a poorer rather than richer Scotland is surely one big reason why they have never advanced in the polls beyond a meagre 8%.

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After all, most Scots have a personal desire to get richer rather than poorer. Their desire is indeed part of the national mythology, and the basis of countless quips about the bawbees. To promise material benefits to voters has been, up to now, what Scottish parties do. It is the basis of the nation’s modern politics. “It’s Scotland’s oil.”

The SNP have taken a full part in the materialistic clamour, and for the last 14 years has been its champion. It rests on the view that Scotland should have more money to spend on the government of the people.

In its short life, on the other hand, the Green Party has espoused the opposite principle. It wants economic growth to cease. Then taxes can be kept stable because there will not be so many policies to spend them on. Or else, possibly, the habit of charging ever higher taxes will enable us to spend more of the proceeds on narrowing differences in the personal incomes of taxpayers. That could be a road towards equality, which most Scots say they want even while being rather hazy about the way they want it.

Under the pact between the two parties, have the Greens turned more towards the SNP or the other way round? Nicola wants a secure majority for independence among MSPs, and has shown herself ready to make concessions to the Greens in order to build that majority.

Except on the biggest question of all, independence, her SNP have up to now been policy lite. By contrast, the Greens are weighed down with policies. So we must expect the Government’s detailed programme being announced next week to owe more to the eight Greens at Holyrood than to the 64 SNP. That’s Scottish politics for you.

What surprises me is to find that in Scotland the widening of horizons, the innovative policy-making, the wakening of clever minds, the quest for fresh ideas, is being sought mainly on the left of the political spectrum. By contrast, in global politics for the last 30 years, the left has been in intellectual decline. Few countries even have governments of the left.

There is no left-wing dogma among proposed remedies for the pandemic. In Scotland, however, we have no competition from the right either.

To illustrate what I say, I’ve found an impeccable native source in Stuart Patrick, chief executive of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce. In a recent encounter, he directly addressed the First Minister on the “significant deterioration” in the relationship between the Scottish Government and the business community since the onset of the pandemic.

Here are his own words:

“I think the Scottish Government has a challenge in that a lot of the business community are concerned the Scottish Government doesn’t trust the business community. That attitude is reaching a level of being reciprocated.”

AND things are still getting worse rather than better: “There is a raw anger at times with the way business perspectives are dismissed in the debate in Scotland.”

It was not always like that: “I think there was a degree of modest respect between business and government. I don’t think this Government has been anti-business per se. It doesn’t automatically talk about the economic and business issues as its highest priority.” On the contrary, “there has been a tendency to [see] it as the lowest priority”.

As for business’s view of the Scottish Government, Patrick said: “There is a degree to which it varies according to sector and according to size. The smaller business community, the entrepreneurial community, has always been a little less shy about making its views known … That cannot be where we want to be if we want to create a partnership to build the economy.”

What is the answer to this powerful critique? A possible one we might expect from the First Minister and her party is that their prime political duty lies in representing the majority of Scots voters. Just as, inside the Parliament, they have sought to construct an absolute majority of MSPs, so it is at least consistent for them to propose policies for a majority of the people.

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Except that redistribution of income on the grounds of social justice is not a policy that serves the interests of such a majority. This is because Scotland is a rich country with a well-educated workforce, a large part of it earning well above the average.

On the classifications used by the Government itself, 22% of us belong to the categories of AB “higher occupations” and 31%to C1, the “junior managerial and professional occupations”. Below them come 21% belonging to C2, the skilled manual occupations, and 26% to DE, the semi-skilled, unskilled and unemployed.

So this is certainly not a nation polarised between tiny but bloated bourgeoisie and downtrodden masses, as you might read about in the more polemical newspaper columns. On the contrary, a majority of workers actually belong to the two categories earning the most.

That also explains why a political grouping such as the Scottish Conservative Party has been able to hang on to the level of support that maintains its second place in the system.

In some places, such as the rural north-east of Scotland, this support can win it a decent tally of seats with the help of converts from the SNP, as happened in the election to Holyrood in 2016.

It has not been enough to turn the governing party away from policies designed for the least successful sections of our society. On the contrary, it tries to rule a rich country with policies for the poor – a waste of everybody’s time.