SCOTLAND’S economic performance is woeful, and is forecast to get worse. Moreover, those forecasts were made before Omicron threw its overheated spanner into the works before Christmas and before anyone in the West woke up to the horror that war is back with us, and is unlikely to go away any time soon.

In Scotland we have grown used to a politics that, when it is not fixating on the constitution, is only ever about how money is spent – and not about where it comes from in the first place. Partly this is because of the badly flawed devolution system New Labour designed which, until the Smith Commission corrected it, created a Parliament that was responsible only for spending powers (and not for taxation).

No government should be able to spend other people’s money without having to look those people in the eye and explain why it is taxing them. In devolved Scotland we have had such government only since 2016.

But, equally, our skewed politics is also the fault of the present incumbents in office. We have a First Minister who is notoriously uninterested in and bored by economic policy. We have an SNP administration that has done nothing to stimulate growth in the economy, nothing to boost earnings, nothing to address our chronic poor productivity, and nothing to support the innovation and enterprise Scotland’s economy so desperately needs.

If that sounds a little partisan, think again. For this is not my verdict. You can read it in what the (politically independent) Scottish Fiscal Commission have said. You can read it in the recent work of Holyrood’s Finance Committee (which has an SNP/Green majority). And you can read it from the chorus of dismay and disapproval that greeted last week’s Scottish Government “National Strategy for Economic Transformation”. It wasn’t just the Scottish Tories who described this supposed flagship as “thin and underwhelming”. The STUC said it was a “missed opportunity” and Sir Tom Hunter dismissed it witheringly as a “wish list” with no means of delivery.

Before Covid, I sat on Holyrood’s Finance Committee for four long years, poring over the accounts, battling with ministers about why they were not taking the warnings – all hiding in plain sight – seriously. As Covid struck, there was a great deal of talk about new beginnings, the new normal, new ways of working, new work/life balances, a new resilience, and all the rest.

The shame is, it was all just talk. Reading this year’s SFC forecasts, and reading this year’s Finance Committee budget scrutiny, it all feels achingly familiar. It is as if we have learnt nothing. Certainly, we have changed nothing. All the problems that haunted the Scottish economy in the years before Covid menace it still.

So here is what we know. We know that Scotland, yet again, lags behind. We have slower growth than the UK as a whole, which means we have slower wage growth, which means we have suppressed earnings, which means we have lower income tax receipts. Thus, despite being the highest-taxed part of the United Kingdom, with bands of income tax stretched and rates pushed up, the Scottish Government is facing a deficit as regards its tax receipts because there are not enough jobs – and, specifically, not enough high-end, well-paid jobs.

In the UK as a whole earnings are going up, as is participation in the labour market (ie. more people are in work). Scotland is not merely struggling, but failing to keep pace. In part this is due to the disastrous effects of the Scottish Government turning its back on oil and gas jobs in the North East. But, in larger measure, it is because the Scottish Government has never taken seriously the long-term challenges which we all know confront us – our ageing population, our sluggish growth, our poor productivity, and our disturbingly low rate of participation in the labour market.

The tragedy is, this blows holes not only in the country’s economic performance, but also in the social policy outcomes the Scottish Government professes to want. Poor productivity is not a piece of economic jargon to make your eyes glaze over: it means we have to skew our work/life balance in favour of the former at the expense of the latter; it means we have to suffer with unfair allocations of resources; and it means we have to endure poorer quality public services.

This cannot be blamed on the UK Government. The block grant, which Whitehall passes to the Scottish Government every year, is at a record high level (and would be, by the way, even without additional Covid spending). Scotland’s economic under-performance is the responsibility of the Scottish Government. It is they who have presided over a collapse in Scotland’s skills-training.

It is they who think that integrated transport means joining up a few unloved cycle lanes, rather than finding ways of allowing people to move and meet quickly, swiftly, and smartly. And it is they who have so hollowed-out Scotland’s once fine education system, that they are embarrassed to allow assessments of our schools even to be published or to be entered into comparison with our international competitors.

Bad enough, but things are about to get a great deal worse. As our news is dominated by images and stories of the horrors of war, the chaos it unleashes, the misery it inflicts, we need to think also of its tragic, appalling costs. We have been cossetted in Scotland, as elsewhere in the West, in an illusion that defence spending was somehow a thing of the past, that security now meant welfare and health, not soldiers and arms. Well, no longer.

It is plain we have a fight on our hands and, even if we haven’t realised it yet, it is going to cost us. Until we get serious about fixing our broken economy, our future will be grim.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.