LAST week at a lunch for a member of the Scottish Government, her words to the assembled company were a little contradictory. On the one hand she identified this as a time of opportunity for business, thanks to the progressive measures of herself and her colleagues. On the other hand the shadow of Brexit lay over everything, beyond our control, and was bound to make the whole country poorer.

I agreed with half of this. On top of the calamity of Brexit we see further UK policies being piled, all geared to the interests and outlook of the south of England, such as the hostile environment for immigrants and the deliberate inflation of house prices. These policies are contrary to the interests and outlook of Scotland, because we need and welcome immigrants and because wider access to home ownership would still be for us a social and economic plus.

Of course, short of national independence we do not have the mechanisms for working out and enforcing better policies, which is why I will continue voting SNP despite what I am about to write in the next paragraph.

We do not yet have those mechanisms, but that does not mean there is nothing we can do. The Scottish Government is still a long way from adopting the right policy mix for our situation. Most of the present generation of senior ministers served their political apprenticeships in the 1980s.

They remain marked by the harrowing experience of that decade, as the old Scotland of heavy industry expired and thousands of traditional jobs vanished. Only the first halting steps could be taken on what would be a long road to a new economy. The policy mix proposed in that era was public spending as high as possible, top-down intervention, regulation of every last economic detail. We still have the same policy mix 40 years on.

Yet the world has changed. I gave an example in my column a couple of weeks ago on the theme that Scotland had regained full employment, something last seen in the early 1960s. With the participation in the labour force of over three-quarters of working-age adults (which is anyway high by international standards), we have unemployment of 4%, and falling. In the real world this comes to less than 100,000 individuals without a job. For most, the reason they are temporarily idle is a need, for a variety of motives, to change from one workplace to another. Few remain idle in the long term.

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Yet, to judge from the evidence of our public discourse, we can hardly believe this to be the case. In our Parliament and in our media, we carry on talking or acting as if vast swathes of industry were at risk, and as if multitudes could be thrown on the dole tomorrow. Hence the knee-jerk rescue operations from ministers when some firm goes bust, usually a waste of everybody’s time.

Because the world has changed, so have the new jobs for which workers swap their old ones. In the 21st century we see an industrial revolution, emerging from digital technology, as momentous as the one which brought the age of steam for the 19th century or the internal combustion engine for the 20th century.

In the digital economy, change accelerates the whole time. Ten years ago, the iPhone did not exist. Now as a constant companion it makes all sorts of things easier for an oldie like me, while for the younger members of my family it is inseparable from their very existence. Life without texts is to them inconceivable.

From TV last week I learned they are starting to do without money as well. Everything goes on a card. In other words, the digital destruction of the inherited finance industry is already in train. Never mind about nationalising the banks – by 2100, they will be long gone and forgotten, together with much else forming the fabric of ordinary life today.

It is good Marxism to expect that from a new basis of production a new superstructure of employment will arise. At the moment the Marxist analysis points not towards socialist revolution but (once again) to the infinite capacity of capitalism to adapt and renew itself.

At the higher end it favours entrepreneurs, people able to apply their skills in fresh ways. At the lower end it generates the gig economy, a sector of simple services performed by the unskilled.

Two questions commonly occur to observers of this novel scene, condensing many others posed for our politics and our society. The first is whether the new economy can create and sustain as many jobs as the old economy did – or are we going to be left with an elite in secure, lucrative occupations and then an underclass drifting between drudgery and despair?

The experience from the two previous industrial revolutions is that they led on to much higher levels of production and prosperity for the broad masses of the population. Our third industrial revolution is following the same pattern.

In just Scotland alone, we have today more people employed, nearly 2.7 million of them, than ever before in our entire history. Our native workforce is now shrinking so we provide jobs for immigrants, and need these to keep up the progress.

So much for the quantity of employment, but how about the quality? The two previous industrial revolutions never avoided the creation of an underclass hanging on at the fringes, and perhaps we cannot expect to improve on their record.

One feature of Scotland’s present economic situation is that productivity has stagnated, that is to say, we do not get more output for our inputs of labour and capital. Till this situation improves, we will not get any sustained increase in living standards either.

The Scottish Government should bend every effort to improving productivity. Yet often, in trying to slow change because of its bad memories of the 1980s, it does the reverse.

If youth and charm can make a difference, then the young minister I met last week has all it takes. I see how perilous it might be for her career to start raising some basic questions in a party which is intolerant of dissent and in a government still perversely convinced of its own omnipotence. Yet it remains wrong about a lot of things, especially in the field of economics of which it is both ignorant and disdainful.

And so long as we are not making any progress towards solving Scotland’s economic problems, under our own steam and without waiting on the actions of others,

I fear it is most unlikely we will make progress towards the independence of the nation either.