Our economy is, to put it mildly, in a bit of a bind.

UK national debt is around 100 per cent of GDP. The Government wrestles to get that percentage on the way down but this cannot disguise that the absolute amount of debt continues to rise as each year brings a further deficit. Scotland’s deficit is worse than that of the UK as a whole.

The hammer blows of the financial crisis, Covid-related expenditure and shielding the economy from high energy prices means debt is at a very uncomfortable level. Those who say we have been here before - after the Second World War for example - gloss over how different economic circumstances were then to what they are today. In the 1950s and 60s there were favourable demographics, liberalisation of world trade and worthwhile growth in productivity. As a result debt fell as a proportion of a growing economy whilst real wages, public services and investment improved.

Today productivity and real wages are stagnant, households and businesses are under sustained pressure, economic growth is anaemic.

Worse, we are only in the foothills of what will become a very large increase in demand for social and healthcare expenditure as the population ages.

This time around we will have much greater difficulty in getting debt down to a level where we can cope with another financial crisis, war or pandemic.

The choice we normally debate in order to improve the position - but it is an unwise choice - is between increasing taxes or reducing public spending.

Taxes are already at a historic high as a proportion of GDP. You feel it in your pay packet, you feel it when you spend on anything. We need to think more about where the burden of tax should lie. Income taxes have reached their sensible limit but taxes on capital and carbon could be increased. To raise the overall tax burden further risks slow suffocation of our already lethargic economy. High taxes hamper growth. Do we have world-class public services or infrastructure fit for the rest of this century and beyond? Unfortunately, we do not. The idea that we are going to be able, sensibly and with democratic support, to cut the level of public services is unthinkable; we will have to provide more not fewer frontline services and better infrastructure.

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Neither raising taxes (Scottish Government take note) nor cutting public services are viable ways out of the fragile economic position we now have. We must not kid ourselves that everything is fine and will remain stable - a number of western economies, UK included, are nearer a nasty squeeze from the financial markets than they would like to think. Action is required.

There is only one viable answer to our problems; efficiency, or productivity to give efficiency its other more economic name.

That sounds obvious, easy even. Unfortunately, it is actually hard but there isn’t really an alternative. This is going to take courage from our politicians and, especially in Scotland, they will have to lead in the opposite direction to where they have been going - and the economic lunacy of separating from the UK just has to be junked as an idea.

The last time we had a major burst of productivity growth was in the 1980s and 1990s when the Thatcher revolution swept aside state industries, nonsensical regulation and bureaucracy to enable the private sector to grow and, critically, to help deliver public services.

We must ask ourselves why every school can’t be publicly funded but run by its parents with incentives for efficiency. We need to avoid the knee-jerk view that zero-hours contracts are always wrong.

When we look at the NHS we cannot scream when private sector contractors clean the laundry or sweep the floors. What we must instead consider is what are the absolute core health services we want to be actually delivered by the state - and try to make these as few as possible rather than as many as possible as we do now. Patients need to become customers even if the taxpayer still pays the bill.

We need to start from the position that the purpose of the public sector is never ever about “creating” jobs but instead doing its tasks with as few as possible. Profit, wrongly identified by the political left as something bad should be seen as what it actually is - a return on capital, a reward for efficiency and a signal to other providers to provide more capacity. Profit drives efficiency and adds rather than detracts from the overall resources available to the nation.

Hundreds of small but vital decisions need to be made with a focus on providing more and better services with fewer resources.

It can be done, it’s the only way out.