On a good day, First Minister’s Questions is as illuminating as a power cut during an eclipse. Predictable priorities, toadying questions, cut-and-paste answers, worn-out talking points and a whole lot more ya-boo than is strictly necessary in a parliament where the parties only really disagree with each other on the constitution.
But last Thursday’s FMQs offered a rare insight into a possible future for Scottish politics, one in which there are competing ideas on how the country should be governed and to what end.
This glimpse came in exchanges between John Swinney and Russell Findlay, the new leader of the Scottish Conservatives.
Findlay relayed the comments of Sir Tom Hunter, who had pointed out that ‘no economy in the world has ever taxed its way to economic growth’, and challenged the First Minister to cite an example to disprove this thesis.
None was forthcoming but what we did get was a telling encounter between two very different ways of seeing the world.
Russell told MSPs: ‘John Swinney surely knows that high tax kills growth and costs jobs but, in his topsy-turvy world, hitting hard-working Scots with high taxes will somehow boost our struggling economy.’
Swinney replied: ‘I believe in using investment to stimulate growth.’
While it might not seem all that surprising that a Tory favours lower taxes and an SNP leader backs more spending, there was actually something more profound at work.
Findlay and Swinney were setting out their philosophical stalls on either side of the economic debate.
Findlay was articulating a fundamental tenet of supply-side economics, which is that cutting taxes stimulates economic activity which leads to growth.
That is the theory of economist Arthur Laffer of the Laffer Curve fame and was put into practice in this country under Margaret Thatcher.
Swinney was voicing the opposite view, that prosperity is generated by government investment in infrastructure and public services.
This is often referred to as New Keynesianism and its proponents include figures such as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. We got a taste of this approach following the global financial crisis, when Gordon Brown’s government saw public expenditure as the way to kick start the economy.
The Laffer Curve has no shortage of critics, who dismiss it as ‘trickle-down economics’.
On the other hand, the big-spending approach, as embraced by Joe Biden, helped drive up inflation to the point where Americans were prepared to re-elect Donald Trump.
But since we’re not here for an economics seminar, we’ll leave the theory there.
What matters is that is that for the first time in many years the fault line in Scottish politics is not the saltire versus the Union Jack but how to create prosperity.
It would be churlish to deny Swinney’s role in this shift.
It takes two to tango and it took Swinney to move on from the social and cultural fixations of the Yousaf and Sturgeon years and to put the economy back on the Scottish Government’s priorities list.
But the real hinge moment came with the election of Findlay as Conservative leader.
Although his party chose him just over a month ago, he has already brought to an end the credit card consensus at Holyrood, whereby every party was vying to outdo the others in the variety and scale of their spending pledges.
All it took was one party leader prepared to strike out in a different direction and that altered the nature of the debate.
Of course, these are very early days.
Findlay still has a great deal of work to do and we will have to wait and see whether he is able to bring opponents closer to his position.
However, he is allowing voters to see an alternative to the tax and spend orthodoxy that has ruled at Holyrood since the parliament’s inception.
What he is doing is drawing battle lines for 2026, putting the Tories on the side of lower taxes, more efficiency, less waste, and in contrast to the record of the SNP and the instincts of the Labour Party.
He is saying, in effect, that the Conservatives are Team Prosperity while their opponents are Team Taxation.
His message might not land, or it might be rejected by the voters, but if he continues in this vein no one will be able to say the Scottish Conservatives are just more of the same.
At the next election there will be a choice, an opportunity to break with two decades of failure and chart a different course for Scotland.
That is not to say that Findlay is an ideologue. Far from it.
While he might be giving voice to liberal economics, he does not come across as a dogmatic Thatcherite whose only consideration is the latest update on the Bloomberg app.
His outlook is ‘common sense conservatism’, bringing together free market ideas about creating wealth and conservative intuition about what makes a safe, stable and orderly society.
The latter, even more than the former, involves a departure from the Holyrood consensus on everything from crime and drugs to school discipline and gender identity ideology.
Examples thus far have included opposing taxpayer-funded bus travel for asylum seekers, spending millions improving schools in Africa, and opposing early release of inmates from overcrowded prisons.
I would like to see some more meat on these bones in areas like Net Zero, where there is an obvious gap in the market for a party that strikes a better balance between protecting the climate and generating jobs and wealth from our fossil fuel resources.
Other fertile territories for common sense conservatism include political neutrality in education and other public services and Scottish Government funding for third-sector organisations that function in practice as highly ideological lobby groups.
And sooner or later, someone is going to have to question – temperately and intelligently – the lockstep pro-immigrationism at Holyrood that has MSPs and ministers too busy signalling their progressive bona fides to consider the challenges that come with sudden population increases and how to manage them.
While doing all this, the Scottish Conservatives must be careful to remain mainstream in the eyes of the average voter, which is a question of tone and presentation as much as policy.
The party has to walk a delicate line between the sort of populism that might tempt back Tories who decamped for Reform in July and the sort of common sense that might make it easier for floating voters to give the Conservatives their second vote in 2026.
Findlay cannot be for more of the same but nor can he allow himself to be cast as a Scottish Farage, which is what the SNP and Labour will try to do.
Most voters in Scotland don’t like Nigel Farage and won’t vote for his brand of politics.
Fortunately for Findlay, his brand of politics can already point to electoral success with the clean sweep of north-east by-elections witnessed last week.
In Aberdeenshire and Moray, where it is a straight fight between the Conservatives and the SNP, the Tories won and won again.
The scale of Findlay’s success will depend on whether he can, in time, extend the gains beyond these areas and into parts of the country currently unwinnable for his party.
There is a long road ahead but in his first, decisive steps, Russell Findlay appears to have vindicated the confidence his party placed in him.