IT came as welcome news that the Scottish Government is going to spend its summer holidays thinking about how to relaunch itself, after a year so far spent too much in the doldrums.

I know there are sections of the nationalist movement, and of the radical commentariat (including some contributors to this newspaper) who will never be satisfied unless ministers come back with a detailed plan for Red Revolution.

But this column takes the view that Scotland is rather a douce, old-fashioned kind of country, and likes it that way. At the first whiff of grapeshot, its natives tend to take to their tellies, and not so much twitch a curtain till the trouble outside has passed by. At least that’s what they do in the north-east of Scotland, where at their last trip to the polls the voters both dished the Nats and saved the Tories.

So it will not displease me if the relaunch turns out to be something less than apocalyptic. On the other hand it could be useful, at least more useful than ministerial maunderings tend to be. I say that because Nicola Sturgeon has made clear economic growth is to be one of the top priorities once her politicians return from their holidays. This will bring to an end a period of 10 years, ever since the SNP took power at Holyrood, when it has paid remarkably little attention to economic growth, unlike most ruling parties in other Western countries.

I know, I know, the Scottish Government has set a target for growth, but international experience also tends to teach us that such targets are often dreamed up with little notion of how they are going to be achieved. For example, In 2007, the Scottish Government said it would aim for our own economy to match the growth in the UK economy, which usually it lags.

Nothing in the following decade decisively changed the pattern of the previous half-century. Up to the present, the target has been hit in only 11 quarters out of 37. I know, I know, the latest quarter, the first of 2017, was one of them, giving the lie to Unionists’ gleeful predictions that it would instead be a quarter of contraction, the second in a row, so sending Scotland into recession.

But it takes more than one swallow to make a summer. Now is the time not to assume everything in the garden is rosy but, before another economic winter hits us, to get working with all the tools available to make sure the growth is sustained.

Growth has been moving up the Government’s agenda anyway. Last year it appointed a growth commission under ex-MSP Andrew Wilson, whose forthcoming report will presumably feed into the summer’s deliberations. And now the SNP leader at Westminster, Ian Blackford, has in his turn insisted prosperity is the key to victory in our national debates: “We will win independence when we can persuade the people of Scotland that their economic future is better as an independent country.”

I agree, and this column has been saying so ever since it started. Now I would only add it is a pity the lesson has taken this long to sink in among Ian’s colleagues. After all, the referendum of 2014 was largely fought, and lost, on the battleground of the economy. There has been no shortage of economic issues in the Scottish and UK electoral contests since. They have all confirmed the argument: if Scottish growth remains in the long term lower than UK growth, we can kiss goodbye to any chance of Scots voting in a majority for national independence.

The relaunch after the summer holidays will be a mirage if it does not acknowledge as much, and we will just have to keep plugging away at the point till it is. But on the assumption that the relaunch will represent some sort of genuine change of mind, I want to try to move the argument on a further stage. We must start to take account of the economic realities any independent nation faces and not remain frozen in the posture of provincial supplicants, with begging bowl extended towards Westminster.

A danger to be aware of is that the SNP Government tends to line up its objectives in a theoretically infinite series, so that they can be added to or subtracted from without any conflicts among them arising.

I say this because economic growth could well compromise some other desirable political aspirations, and we should be prepared to deal with this.

For instance, economic growth may be rather incompatible with the Government’s dreams of equality, at least as measured in incomes (there are, of course, other types of equality). Economic growth arises from the success of particular individuals or companies in meeting the needs of their markets, and of profiting from this: why else should they bother? Growth does not take place in the abstract, in other words, but brings its rewards to the successful individuals or companies that others do not receive.

Most of these others carry on as they always have done or perhaps some fall into decline, given how the economy as a whole is constantly changing. In any event, amid all this normal working of capitalism, inequality is bound to arise – and is in fact useful, because it signals to us which activities are worth pursuing and which are not.

Apart from the purely capitalist aspect, there is also an inescapable historical legacy of inequality. We should not underestimate its social strength because it arose not from any desire to oppress the workers, rather from the workers themselves who established differentials broadly reflecting their relative levels of skill. Then they formed trades unions to enforce and defend the differentials.

This was the normal practice in Scotland’s heavy industries, which have now largely disappeared – but in more modern industries I do not get an impression that the differentials of age, qualification and experience are less pervasive, though they may be less rigid. They are there because people want them to be there and feel they are a just reflection of the abilities they bring to their place of work.

In response to all this I can assent to progressive taxation, of something like the present incidence, so that inequality of income is to an extent mitigated.

I confess I would much rather have flat taxation, because that is of proven effect in raising the revenue in countries where it is in force and so giving their governments more money to spend.

Flat taxes obviously do nothing in themselves to reduce inequality of income, but at least they offer this compensation of providing resources for a government to pursue equality by other means. It is that sort of uncomfortable but necessary choice a Scotland of the future could have to face, rather than slumbering on in the lazy confidence that all desirable outcomes are alike attainable if only a government wishes them to be.

Here is the kind of reality we need to accommodate in our national aspirations. If we seek to suppress the inequality that naturally arises in the course of economic growth, with some citizens doing well out of it and some less well, we can really only do so by suppressing the growth in the first place.

In that case, Scotland will remain in its present condition, going nowhere in particular, either economically or politically.