YOU do, occasionally, have to admire the political chutzpah of the SNP. One of several significant reasons why Labour haven’t been able to lay a glove on them for nigh on a decade isn’t simply the SNP’s good organisation; it’s because they have lately begun to organise all that is deemed to be good. You know a party has attained a state of political nirvana when many people believe what it says is true merely because they have said it.

Thus when the SNP says it is the radical alternative to the Labour Party almost 100,000 people, many of them former Labour supporters, don’t simply agree that this is the case; they go the full bifter and sign up for the party. It helps, of course, that the organisation purporting to be the Labour Party is actually an imposter, having kidnapped the proper one; drugged it and stuck it in an empty house in Ruritania.

For years the SNP has managed to convince very many people that the Labour Party is simply no longer a party of the left and that it has sold its soul for a mess of potage, a thin gruel by which it hoped it would win middle England. “Labour isn’t radical enough,” claim the SNP. Now that Jeremy Corbyn has been elected the message is: “Labour is now too radical to be an effective opposition… so vote for us.”

In attempting this admittedly skilful piece of political legerdemain the SNP have effectively admitted that a properly radical Labour Party in which the UK and Scottish leaders are reading from the same page presents a real threat in 2020, if not in 2016. That Kezia Dugdale and Johann Lamont are following the advice I offered them on these pages a few weeks ago shows that the ruinous Murphy-McTernan-McDougall axis which led Labour to the point of extinction in Scotland is now well and truly over. I wrote that for Labour to have any chance of a recovery in Scotland it must drop its ridiculous hostility to the idea of an independent Scotland and allow its members to follow their conscience on this still very raw and emotional issue. Now, in separate interviews yesterday, the party’s Scottish leader and her immediate predecessor have embraced the idea. This will be a springboard for an immediate recovery.

In the face of a reinvigorated Scottish Labour Party which has rediscovered its soul the SNP will soon have to deliver on its claims to be a party of radical change. So far it has been strangely reluctant to do so. And yet there are, in the dismal argot of the corporate boardroom, low-hanging fruit everywhere they might choose to look in Scotland. And so in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation, I now offer some free advice to the SNP on how they can make good on their promises to be radical.

HEALTH

There are many problems besetting the NHS, and not just in Scotland. But here’s one that can be removed immediately. Earlier this month figures showed that there are currently hundreds of consultancy posts unfilled in Scotland. Yet hundreds of consultants, trained at massive expense by the taxpayer, are allowed to hire themselves out to the private sector as part of their NHS contract. Astonishingly, there do not appear to be any collated figures of how many hours are lost to the NHS in this state-sanctioned scam. Memo to Shona Robison: stop this get-rich-quick wheeze now.

EDUCATION

In an interview I conducted with Nicola Sturgeon last week I asked her why there seemed to be no appetite for ending the absurd charitable status for the affluent independent sector. She replied that this in itself wouldn’t begin to address the issue of bringing the attainment gap in education. The First Minister is correct: it won’t. By Jove though, it wouldn’t half squeeze this iniquitous sector until its pips squeaked and end a practice that is plainly unfair and unequal.

And if she’s serious about addressing the low attainment threshold in our most disadvantaged neighbourhoods then let’s consider something truly radical and novel: give extra points to a Higher Pass gained in one of our poorer secondaries rather than one gained at a gilded fee-paying facility with the help of expensive maths, English and language tutors, the new royalty of the Chardonnay estates.


LAW AND ORDER

The police force under the dismal leadership of Sir Stephen House has become a national embarrassment. There are questions of corruption, violence, non-accountability, unlawful surveillance and a stop and search policy that looks like it was imported from the Gaza Strip. The scale of the problem was underlined when it was revealed last week that the Scottish Police Federation, the organisation that represents rank and file coppers, said it wanted a Taser gun in every police car because the level of assaults on officers was “far too high”. With statements like that it would seem that all their brain-power is actually used up just getting into their cars, so the Lord only knows what might happen if you let them run amok with Tasers. A full public inquiry into the customs and practices of our police is required urgently.

JUSTICE

Only this: why have more than three-quarters of our top judges attended fee-paying schools? As things stand, if you are a gifted lawyer with an excellent degree from any Scottish university but you were handicapped by having attended a state secondary school then you have more chance of becoming the procurement officer for the Taliban than of reaching the top of your profession in enlightened, meritocratic, fair Scotland.

INJUSTICE

The Labour MSP Neil Findlay has been campaigning for justice to those miners and their families who were wrongly criminalised during the Miners’ Strike in 1984-85. Many of them lost their jobs and reputations and were subsequently black-listed. This made it impossible for them to find work again and condemned generations of their families to even more hardship.

There are serious questions to be asked of the tactics deployed by the police, the falsifying of evidence and the collusion of our, ahem, thoroughly trustworthy and utterly unbiased judiciary. The government needs to announce an inquiry into these events now.