IN her last speech of the parliamentary session at Holyrood, Nicola Sturgeon called for a “reset” of the timetable for a second referendum on independence. If I had been her speechwriter I think I would have chosen a stronger term – “recharge” or “relaunch” – considering how the engine has died on the whole project. But at least she revved herself up a bit for her peroration: “Over this summer we will set out afresh our vision for the country we lead, together with creative, imaginative, bold and radical policies.”

Let’s hope so, because as her MSPs set off for the beaches they show every sign of being drained of all energy after a year of frustration over Brexit and now of electoral setbacks. And it is not only the great political project of independence that has gone wrong, but a whole host of lesser policies that all the same have a more immediate bearing on the lives of the voters. Especially the aim of reducing inequality in Scottish society seems to have run out of steam.

So let me make a helpful suggestion: that it is time for the Government to switch its focus to economic growth as the main means of carrying the nation forward. The project of reducing inequality has after all failed. I have no doubt that Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon were entirely sincere in setting it as the centrepiece of their governments’ policies, even though under an imperfect devolution settlement they lacked all the instruments they might have needed to realise it. But even if they had had the instruments, I wonder what they would have done with them. After all, the Government in London did have them, though in recent times, admittedly, it has shown little interest in using them. At any rate, no Government in London has noticeably narrowed the wealth differentials in the UK.

Despite the efforts of the Government in Edinburgh, the situation here is not much different. The gap between rich and poor is in fact about the same as it was before we ever had the Scottish Parliament. In the period after the SNP took power in 2007 there was some narrowing of the gap, mainly because of the effect on the incomes of wealthier people from the financial crisis. But since about 2011 the gap has widened again, in the most recent years quite sharply, so that the poor are seeing the improvement in their relative (not absolute) position vanish once more.

Why is this problem so resistant to radical solutions? Is it just that we have not tried hard enough? There is an alternative answer, to be found in economics rather than in politics. The structure of wages and other rewards at any given time in a free economy may simply reflect what is going on inside it. It is subject to constant change which make some activities flourish while others decline: in Scotland at the moment, video games are booming while North Sea service companies are going bust. Wages, so far from simply being imposed on the workers by bloodsucking bosses, are a signal to the economically active population of where they can do well for themselves or where they will struggle to win a livelihood. Those who make the right choices will earn a lot of money and those who make the wrong choices will get less. The mechanism of a national economy is too vast for these deep processes to be controlled in detail by any Government. That means attempts to achieve equality are doomed to failure.

I would have said that Scottish experience over the first 10 years of SNP Government tends to prove this argument is correct. For the next 10 years, rather than continuing to bang our heads against the brick wall of inequality, we should try something new.

The problem of growth in Scotland needs to be addressed anyway. Tomorrow we will probably learn that Scotland has slid into recession, after two quarters of falling output. It is all the more galling that the UK economy is at the same time staging a modest recovery. Brexit can therefore not be the explanation of the Scottish predicament, as Brexit affects the whole UK. The end of the North Sea oil boom is a better explanation, because it affects Scotland alone. But it is not amenable to the usual techniques of demand management since here is an industry simply vanishing for good, or at least for a long time.

In response there is more we can do than simply wring our hands. After all, other small European countries have in recent times faced and overcome far worse situations. Estonia has gone from a slump of 19 per cent in its growth rate to a boom of 13 per cent, Slovakia from minus 6 per cent to plus 14 per cent, Slovenia from minus 10 per cent to plus 8 per cent. The former communist nations might have been special cases, but the British ex-colony of Malta, too, has gone from minus 4 per cent to plus 10 per cent. How did they all do it? They seized the opportunities open to them through the control of public spending and the opening of the private economy to the operation of the capitalist system. Now they find themselves able to promise their peoples far greater benefits than ever came their way from socialism.

For its next 10 years of government in Scotland, the SNP should emulate this successful model: it can at least hardly do worse than with the failed model of reducing inequality through intervention by the state. During the rest of this Scottish Parliament to 2021, I would recommend a ban on all increases in public expenditure – except on capital projects, financed by borrowing, which will increase productivity. This should have the same beneficial effect on central government as the freeze on council tax from 2007 brought about on local government. It would prompt a search for efficiencies and demonstrate how better use can be made of the money private citizens are already handing over to the public sector.

And then, as sufficient scope emerged, I would cut income tax for all the hard-working citizens of Scotland. I sympathise with the rising calls for an end to austerity in the UK, though I do not think pay rises are the best way to bring it about. If the public sector leads the way, the private sector will want to catch up. And if the private sector catches up there will be less money for investment – which is arguably the most clamant need for the whole country as, especially in its productivity, it falls behind the rest of the world.

In all this Scotland can forge ahead of the rest of the UK. And it should lead the way because we have a special need of our own. Unless we at least match the growth rate elsewhere (one of the SNP’s forgotten promises), then the second referendum on independence is a lost cause. What are the doom-mongers and the nay-sayers going to say as polling day approaches? Their slogans will be: vote for Union and subsidy, vote for independence and poverty. And unless meanwhile we have in fact raised the nation’s growth rate, there will be no answer to those cynical slogans. That is something for us all to ponder in the summer sunshine.