POLITICIANS with visions, the former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt once remarked laconically, ought to go and see an optician.

Thus spoke a great statesman of the post-war era, naturally more interested in practical reality than in grandiose - and thus often quixotic - political masterplans.

This came to mind when I read of Jim Murphy's intention to make the first 'major' speech of his leadership in Glasgow late this morning. This, a press release informed journalists, would 'set out his vision for Scotland'.

Inevitably, it's largely symbolic: a rewriting of the Scottish Labour Party's 'Clause 4' based on five principles, much of which are unobjectionable statements about democratic socialism, patriotism and solidarity. It will represent, according to the evangelic Murphy, nothing less than the 'refounding and rebirth' of the party he now leads.

There will be much cynicism in response, some of it justified, although Murphy has at least realised the need to talk big, just as the SNP has done to obvious effect over the past decade. For much of that period Scottish Labour was rightly reticent about over-promising, a caution summed up by Jack McConnell's bland (but realistic) mission statement of 'doing less better'.

But having vacated that visionary space, naturally the SNP and its leading proponents, who have never bothered much about the deliverability of their visionary pledges, occupied that ground. Talk, however, is cheap; much harder is actual policy, and the Scottish Labour Party's capacity for creative policy making ain't exactly in rude health.

Even before his election, however, Murphy had made a promising start by daring to talk about the gap between independent and state schools in Scotland, gently suggesting the former might do a little more to justify charitable status. Although this echoed a recent intervention from Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt, it's a good pitch, not least because it addresses an issue about which the Scottish Government has absolutely nothing to say.

The fifth 'principle' of Murphy's proposed Clause 4 is to 'renew' Scottish Labour's "historic mission for a more equal and fairer society where power, wealth and opportunity are more fairly shared by our fellow Scots and human beings around the world". This, of course, is standard stuff, although again the new leader has realised the necessity of reclaiming that ground.

As Iain Macwhirter recently observed, Murphy has been shedding lots of his long-held views while modifying others. Nevertheless, the most obvious charge that will be levelled against him is that of being an unreconstructed Blairite, committed to lots of wicked Blairite things like nuclear weapons and winning elections.

Laying aside the obvious point that beyond the political village I imagine few Scots have earnest discussions about 'Blairism', this is all the more curious because the political ideology of Jim Murphy and Nicola Sturgeon is virtually indistinguishable: a belief that economic growth and entrepreneurialism is necessary in order the forge social justice. That used to be called the Third Way, now it is orthodoxy in the Scotland of both Yes and No.

And while the new First Minister's response to Murphy's election on Saturday was admirably free of tribalism, nevertheless the SNP leader comes from a generation of Nationalists that earnestly believes everything started to go wrong for the Labour Party when Neil Kinnock began shifting towards the centre ground.

Indeed, Nationalists have many potent myths about their main political rivals. I remember interviewing Winnie Ewing during the first Scottish Parliament more than a decade ago and she told me that Labour had never done anything for Scotland. When I gently suggested that the NHS, Welfare State, higher levels of public spending and devolution might constitute evidence to the contrary, she retorted that all of that had only happened in response to pressure from the SNP, which of course had been an insignificant force until her by-election win in 1967.

Such thinking also dominated the recent referendum campaign and its aftermath. In a recent Huffington Post blog, for example, the Creation Records founder Alan McGee declared that the SNP had "done more for Scotland in seven years than Labour in 70". This defies any fair-minded reading of 20th-century history but then it was pure, undiluted tribalism, and that's generally immune to tedious qualities like rationality.

And yet when it comes to tackling inequality, now the 'vision' of both Labour and the SNP, Murphy's party has a good story to tell, not only during the post-war era but under three New Labour governments when there were significant achievements in terms of tackling child and pensioner poverty; hey, Gordon Brown, as Chancellor, even redistributed wealth. It is difficult to contrive a comparable record from the SNP governments of the last seven and a half years.

Another modern Nationalist myth has it that Scotland 'rejected' New Labour, just as it 'rejected' Mrs Thatcher and Thatcherism in the 1980s, although the evidence for this appears to be three landslide election wins between 1997 and 2005, and a pretty good outcome (at least north of the border) in 2010 too.

But then those who believe such things are not Murphy's target audience. Rather he, like the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, now faces the challenge of winning back disillusioned Labour voters while also reaching out to 'soft' Yes voters, those who don't completely buy into the world according to SNP but took the leap in September for a broad panoply of reasons.

Murphy's aides point to his electoral provenance as proof that he has the ability to do this, in other words transforming what was once a safe Conservative seat into solid (New) Labour territory. Many people, of course, don't want to be won over.

Take Suki Sangha, a member of the Unite union and member of the STUC's general council, who yesterday wrote that Murphy becoming leader was "a victory for the most right-wing elements of the party and a colossal blow for the Scottish trade union movement". Reading the rest of her article was a depressing reminder that so much of what passed for 'debate' during the referendum was little more than student politics writ large.

Visions, therefore, only take you so far, although I reckon Murphy could make hay in this regard by (as has been suggested elsewhere) taking a year out of parliamentary politics to travel around Scotland and flesh out his particular vision of Scotland's future. Not only would he be good at it, but it would neutralise a tricky transition from Westminster to Holyrood while giving the SNP almost nothing to criticise. Even Helmut Schmidt might approve.