THE Scottish Government needs urgently to grasp that there are two basic human types running the private sector of our economy. One lot are the entrepreneurs, the go-getting self-starters whose main aim in life is, on the basis of some bright idea of their own, to set up a company and to make a success of it, incidentally enriching themselves. They want these things so badly that if they can’t have them in Scotland, as has often been the case, they will without a backward glance move to another country where they can have them.

The second lot are what is often called the business community. They don’t start companies of their own, but go into existing companies. These they often stay with to the end of their working lives. They rise step-by-step up the management ladder till they get to the top. Then they may find they do not need to work as hard as they used to do, so have time for outside activities.

Public bodies and charities will be only too eager to benefit from their experience and contacts. Once they get used to mingling with the great and good they may come to the attention of government, who will flatter them by seeking their advice and appointing them to positions in its gift that are at the least honorific and sometimes lucrative. They stay in Scotland: why should they go anywhere else?

READ MORE: Scottish Government backs plans to block industrial scale kelp harvesting

Such people have, therefore, been running the Scottish economy for a century. It has been a century of relative decline, with few breaks. Wars were good for the old heavy industries, but wars could not go on forever. North Sea oil might have represented a turning point, and the opening of a new era, but only if the revenues had been invested in Scotland – and they have not been. The business community has lived through this, and occasionally even exploited some of the opportunities, but with no change to its basic character. Again, why bother? The UK Government was always going to prop it up through regional aid anyway, on condition of total loyalty to the Union and of the political donations needed to defend it.

What is amazing to me is that the SNP Government, in power since 2007, has done nothing much to alter this state of affairs either. Of course, the Government wants independence, but in purely economic terms it has been hard put to present that prospect as something so very much more attractive than what we have at present. Though it wishes to spend more money, it will not be able to do so in the long run unless we also earn more money. Yet it shows next to no interest in the sort of changes that would raise the productivity of the economy, which is the only sustainable means of improving our standard of living.

If this seems too glum an analysis, I have to hand a practical example. Some months ago I wrote about Marine Biopolymers, a company set up by a group of SNP-voting scientists to commercialise their research and start exploiting the kelp that grows in abundance around our shores. With the advancing technology they can turn it into alkaline products with a vast range of industrial applications, and the bonus is ending pollution by older kinds of chemical compounds.

READ MORE: Kelp proposals are bang in line with 21st-century economic ideals

It is an augury of the sort of new industries which can be set up in an independent Scotland with the encouragement of our government, in a way never to be expected of the faraway and indifferent Westminster regime. The project is, however, opposed by the Greens, who think kelp should be harvested not by machines designed for the purpose, but by buckets and spades only.

The responsible minister, Roseanna Cunningham (pictured below), announced a consultation which, I surmised at the time, would allay their fears while still giving an early go-ahead under reasonable guarantees.

I should add that this is taking place in the context of the transfer of the Crown Estate in Scotland, of which the coastal foreshore formed part. It has always been the personal property of the Queen administered on her behalf by commissioners. In future it will come under the Scottish Government, to be run instead for the benefit of the people.

The minister’s next job is to put the results of the consultation into law. She set up a steering group which, at its first meeting a couple of months ago, divided its task into three parts: review of seaweed activity and regulation; scenario mapping; and research requirements.

There is no room in this column to deal with all of these, so I’ll stick to the third part. The first of the requirements is to “establish the locational evidence base to better understand where seaweed resources are … ”. The second is to “outline the research and evidence-base requirements to identify and assess potential environmental impacts of seaweed harvesting …”. The third is to “consider the need for a pilot project, on an appropriate scale and design”.

The National:

If you were to conclude that the gobbledegook indicates a leisurely pace is being set, you would be right. What I have quoted makes up only a fraction of the earliest stage of the research. Afterwards would come a “mechanical harvesting/kelp bed function desk study”, in five instalments. And only after that could follow the pilot project itself, “to monitor the extraction efficiency, recovery rate, impacts on non-target species, communities, commercial fish stocks, harvesting strategies, wave exposure and physical characteristics of the seabed”, not forgetting “biodiversity, habitat recovery and climate change”.

Pondering this preposterous paraphernalia for a mere pilot study, I have a question to ask.

I know we are proposing a piece of the new legal regime for the former Crown Estate, but why should it deviate so extremely from the permissive common law under which normal commerce operates? After all, when Gareth Williams set up the world-beating Skyscanner in Edinburgh, we did not first require him to demonstrate the impacts on communities. When Dave Jones invented Grand Theft Auto in Dundee, we did not ask him in advance about the effect on biodiversity. What is the reason for Marine Biopolymers being treated so differently and so stringently?

Let me suggest an answer.

I think the conditions created by the transfer of the Crown Estate represent an ideal for the control freaks in the Scottish Government. I believe they would really prefer our whole economy to be like this, operating under their political instructions. Whether an economy of such a kind would actually work is to them a minor matter.

I’ll finally tell you one company for which it doesn’t work, and that’s Marine Biopolymers. Those behind it had hoped to be up and running by now, but here they are faced by years, perhaps decades, of pilot study before they can even make a start. They have gone to Iceland instead, and been received there with open arms on the sole condition they enter into a joint venture with local partners: no problem. So Iceland gains an industry of the future, and Scotland loses one.

“Where is the evidence the Scottish Government is hostile to capitalism?”, I was asked by readers in response to a column a couple of weeks ago. Here is the evidence.