For those of you who have never attended the annual conference of a major political party, the Fear of Missing Out will never haunt what remains of your life. You may not be sympathetic to the work of the press, but when it comes to these annual jamborees I think we perform a vital public service. We attend these events so that you don’t have to.

Is it worth risking your mental health or even just your sense of proportion and balance to expose yourself to hours of very zealous people telling you that there is no greater force for good than The Party?

Not so very long ago, the SNP conferences were actually quite jolly occasions where the influence of the activist/payroll clientele had been diminished by the presence of multitudes of real people with normal everyday challenges. They’d been drawn to the SNP because, well … they seemed less cynical and more homespun and accessible than Labour and the Tories.

There was also the merest hint around 2011 that you were no longer required to have been an aide to the social and policy convenor of Glasgow University’s young nationalist group to stand a chance of being considered for a shot on the swings. Or have a direct bloodline to the man who held open the door of the car that took Winnie Ewing to the count at Hamilton in 1967.

There was a sense that you were no longer required to quote entire passages of Mel Gibson’s dialogue in Braveheart or have a ponytail and pamphlets about how Scotland invented everything and was the most intellectually sophisticated country in the world. Or claim that Scotland had been mentioned prominently in the Dead Sea Scrolls until MI6 had bribed Mossad to edit them out.

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Normal people with ordinary 9-5 working backgrounds in sectors not directly related to politics felt that they too could get involved in "the national conversation". And whereas Labour had begun to patronise them and assumed arrogantly that they’d always be guaranteed their votes - because their parents had always voted for them - the SNP seemed to want to welcome them. Who cares if you didn’t know about the McCrone Report into the effects of North Sea oil on the Scottish economy or hadn’t heard about the 79 Group? There was a welcome waiting here and your voice would be heard. You wouldn’t be judged.

And then, like Labour before them, the SNP fell into the same abyss. They were targeted by a predatory cohort of lobbyists and professional opportunists who began to realise that their degrees and impeccable connections were valuable currency in bypassing the conference hoi-polloi. A new class of careerists - indistinguishable from similar cohorts in Labour, The Lib-Dems and the Greens - began to hold sway in the SNP.

Yet, at the party conferences - if you look hard enough - there is evidence that the "change" which every party proclaims and none is serious about delivering can be possible.

At the SNP’s annual conference in Edinburgh on Saturday I went wandering through the conference exhibition space where the private, public and third sector groups set up little enclosures to provide information on their services. Kate Forbes was conducting her own little tour at the same time and John Swinney will have found time to do likewise. These companies and groups will have paid considerable sums to be here.

Many of these organisations are conference regulars, but on Saturday, there was a new one: Public Diners. I’d first read about this organisation in an article last year by Sandra Dick in The Herald Magazine, and remember thinking that what this movement offered was a relatively simple and straightforward way of making a difference in the life of the nation, like the baby boxes perhaps.

At the risk of over-simplifying a multi-faceted concept with years of well-sourced research behind it, Public Diners are state-funded restaurants providing a dining experience within the means of families living on tight budgets. They had been common during wartime Britain and in the decade or so thereafter until eating out gradually turned into a luxury social fetish and the local authorities began withdrawing funding.

Minister for Constitution and External Affairs Angus Robertson, Depute Leader Keith Brown and First Minister John Swinney during the SNP annual nationalMinister for Constitution and External Affairs Angus Robertson, Depute Leader Keith Brown and First Minister John Swinney during the SNP conference on Sunday (Image: PA)

Curiously, they then all but disappeared from our cultural memory-banks, unlike the echoes of Glasgow’s trams, cheap seaside holidays and American cream soda. The campaign to restore Public Diners say that the best time to roll them out was 20 years ago and that the next best time is now. I disagree. I can’t think of a better time than now.

The movement’s brochure says this: “there are aspects of societal life which are too important to leave to the markets. That’s when the state steps in. State backing makes social infrastructure powerful and lasting, allowing it to withstand short-term economic shocks.” It’s a reminder of why capitalists hate state intervention: they consider anything that places people’s sense of wellbeing before profit to be an anathema. In the capitalist’s worldview, those who have little must always be grateful that they are simply allowed to live, work and die and with a minimum expectation of deriving any enjoyment from it.

Post-Covid, even the occasional luxury of dining out is reverting to a state when it has become the exclusive preserve of affluence. The bill for an unspectacular meal - without alcohol - in mediocre establishments would choke a horse. And in Glasgow, if you did want to break your budget, you must now factor in the prohibitive cost of parking which the local authority has now weaponised as a stealth tax. You’re further disinclined to go into town by the withdrawal of late-night bus services and the dynamic pricing structures of Uber (black hacks are gradually disappearing from our streets).

Like the old pubs which maintain social cohesion and provide an antidote to loneliness and depression, the availability of a decent, reasonably-priced dining establishment offering good food becomes crucial to the nation’s health and wellbeing. Winston Churchill was an enthusiastic advocate of these places because he knew that in a time of acute crisis in the nation’s history and in its collective recovery it was vital to promote reasonable ways of making working people feel they were due a break now and then.

I’m not sure the present SNP administration has either the expertise or the imagination to pursue this idea. If Anas Sarwar and Keir Starmer though, are looking for an eye-catching, authentically radical idea to take into the 2026 Scottish election they should be all over this.