IT is less than 90 days till the May 6 Holyrood election. The polls indicate an overwhelming victory for the SNP, who are polling at more than 50% despite having been the governing party since 2007. One might think this gives the SNP an unrivalled position to set out a policy menu to transform Scotland. Yet, surprisingly, this election seems to be about everything except policy prescriptions for governing our country.

I include myself in this criticism. On the nationalist side, we are all excited about the May vote as a launchpad for the final push towards independence. The First Minister is wedded to securing a majority to put moral pressure on Number 10 to grant a Section 30. Others (me included) would prefer to see the May 6 poll as a national plebiscite for independence, after which we withdraw MPs from London and open negotiations for Scexit. Result: not enough thought is being put into ideas for running the country over the next five years.

Of course, the Tories are just as bad when it comes to ignoring policy and focusing on the constitutional question. I don’t blame them. Any reference to Boris the Buffoon and the murderously incompetent Government at Westminster will only lose the Tories more votes north of the Border.

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Besides, the Conservatives have completely lost the plot when it comes to Scotland. Which over-paid idiot thought up the wheeze of sending Mr and Mrs Edward Windsor to reside at Holyrood Palace as a way of persuading working-class Scots in Glasgow to return to the Union? LOL, as they say.

Certainly, the independence question is central in the sense that without cutting the London apron strings, Scotland lacks political control of the vital economic drivers necessary for change. But rather than wait for independence, we should be thinking long and hard about how we will use our economic freedom. And even with the limited devolved powers at the disposal of the Scottish Government, it is still possible to start on economic and social reform.

Indeed, as I have preached repeatedly from this pulpit, the Scottish Government should be challenging UK Government restrictions at every step.

So what should an incoming SNP administration do, assuming a May victory? Thankfully, the SNP Common Weal Group (CWG) has just published a paper outlining a set of radical policies to include in the SNP manifesto.

It is entitled “A People’s Manifesto”. We’d better pause here to explain the CWG is not the same thing as the Common Weal think tank (on whose board I sit). The think tank is not affiliated to the SNP while the CWG is composed of SNP members who meet and vote on their own policy decisions. The People’s Manifesto is solely the work of SNP activists, although it draws on – but goes well beyond – policy research done by the CW think tank.

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Essentially, the People’s Manifesto proposes a coherent, integrated programme which challenges the domination of free-market forces in Scotland. In this respect it stands in contrast to the pro-market nostrums of the SNP Growth Commission report of 2018. Regardless of where you stand on the Growth Commission, its scenarios and policy prescriptions (eg keeping sterling) have been relegated to the dustbin of history by the pandemic.

An indy Scotland without its own currency – and ability to print money to pay for the lockdown, as the UK Treasury is doing – would be forced to go to the City of London to borrow. Which would result in a generation of austerity while we paid it back. The People’s Manifesto is restricted to policies a Scottish government can implement now, before independence. It is grouped around four policy initiatives. First, building a “people-centred” economy and breaking with the profit motive. That means taking key drivers of the economy into public hands: transport, energy (to spearhead climate action), and construction.

THERE is a debate to be had about how to implement public ownership and planning so that it is democratic and not bureaucratic. And it is also vitally important that we create a planning agency to think long-term and to co-ordinate with the new Scottish National Investment Bank. These things will come if we win public support in May to rebuild the Scottish economy (post-Covid) for people, not profit.

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Second on the People’s Manifesto wish list is housing reform. For starters, we need rent controls and stronger tenants’ rights legislation. Above all, we need a massive public house building programme, as proposed recently by Alex Neil MSP. The latter is key to reviving the economy after the ravages of the pandemic. It is also key to better insulation as an aid to fighting climate change and could spearhead a national programme for raising skills. Such a project would appeal to Labour voters and even win support from what remains of the Scottish Labour left (that in turn opens the prospect of winning them to independence).

Third on the People’s Manifesto menu is health and wellbeing. That means a National Care Service, drug reform (pushing the legal boundaries imposed by Westminster) and a radical commitment to enshrine a “right to food” in Scots law.

The latter is not a gimmick – it would mean an end to the need for food banks. It is the ultimate insanity of the free market that one of the richest economies on the planet lets ordinary families starve. After 14 years of SNP administration, it is also an indictment of our own political priorities.

Finally comes local democracy and community empowerment. This is not an add-on. Ultimately, the society we wish to build must return power from the global marketplace and from the bureaucratic state to the grassroots. Socialism is not about a more efficient economy but about returning control to ordinary people and the local communities they live in. I pay tribute to the SNP Government for starting the ball rolling by passing legislation promoting community land ownership. But this legislation needs extending. We need local community banks to keep savings at work where we live, and not sent abroad. We need to reform local taxation to give communities control over spending – an agenda the SNP Government has run away from.

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There are policy gaps here, but the strength of the manifesto is that it gathers together projects that can be implemented in the next five years. It also reflects decisions already taken by the SNP conference, but which remain on the shelf.

The aim is for SNP branches to put pressure on the leadership and Scottish Government to get on with the job. Time is short, but then, elections are when the party leadership most needs to listen to the membership.

None of the policies presented in the People’s Manifesto are utopian or that difficult to implement, at least in embryo. All it takes is the will to change things.

An SNP Government should not be a caretaker until we get independence. Rather, it should be showing in action a vision of what a future Scotland could be like. In the old phrase of Alasdair Gray, a future SNP government should act “as if we were in the early days of a better nation”.