THERE’S a chill wind blowing. The first frosts have arrived and the odd blizzard has managed to deliver hundreds of students from school over the last few days.

They wander past our home every day at lunchtime, volume rising at this time of year as they look forward to their Christmas break. I blame the shops. From sweets and costumes, to fireworks and santa with no intervening period whatsoever. There’s always an excuse to buy.

Not much has changed at school in the decades since I marched off. There’s still the big chat about what they’re going to get, a brutal game of one-upmanship that drives parents into debt or another layer of guilt on top of the quota that already comes with the job.

In the end, promises or plastic, most of it ends up buried beneath the trash of an age we seem to be unwilling to grow out of.

For years across Britain we’ve kidded ourselves on about recycling, packaging up our plastics into neat bales to be burned or buried in some far off land about which we choose to know little; the wonders of the market providing us more than ample deniability as the junk passes through company after company on truck and freighter.

Now even the stuff we don’t pretend to recycle in Scotland will suffer a similar, if less exotic fate. Leading the way as ever, landfill will be banned up here from New Year’s Day, the rubbish instead being loaded at considerable expense onto lorries and shipped to fill England’s quarries.

Think global, act local, and aw that.

There is always something to be said for setting challenging goals. Properly formulated, they can bring out the best of our collective endeavour, but when they’re not, at best they deteriorate into empty slogans and at worst, they have a habit of warping behaviour.

I’ll never forget sitting at a meeting of Greater Glasgow and Clyde health board to be told — and this is a sign of how long ago it was — that the four-hour accident and emergency wait-time target had been met that month, only to then hear an apparently baffled clinical lead point out that unplanned admissions had inexplicably rocketed over the same time frame.

There was much chin stroking, head scratching and worthy deliberation in the room while someone down the road was being admitted to a ward after spending three hours and 45 minutes on a trolley in a corridor only to be immediately discharged. Mysterious stuff.

If the aim of scrapping landfill by January 2026 was to reduce waste and grow recycling rates, it has manifestly failed. If the aim was to say that you ended landfill at least five years earlier than down south however, it is a roaring success — moral superiority delivered in the form of convoys of used disposable nappies snaking down the M74/M6 to be planted in England’s green and pleasant land for a thousand years.

Speaking of rubbish, the Scottish Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth offered a new “national deal” for teachers this week. In all fairness, she has not been in the brief long enough to be entirely to blame for the Scottish government’s failure to deliver on its pledge at the last Holyrood election to cut class contact time to 21 hours by the end of the parliamentary term.

With less than six months to go, the chances of it being met are somewhere between slim and negligible, and pointing out that the Scottish government had “delivered absolutely nothing,” teaching union EIS is now balloting its members on the issue.

Not to worry, we have a new pledge to cut class contact time, and Gilruth was able to boast “the lowest pupil/teacher ratio and the highest education spend per person of anywhere in the UK.”

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? I could point to the fact that the Scottish government’s own statistics show the ratio trending upwards, as the number of teachers have fallen proportionately faster than school rolls while universities churn out hundreds of teachers every year for jobs that don’t exist, but that isn’t the whole story.

These inconvenient facts are intended to be washed away with the comparison with the rest of Britain, but the comparison tells us nothing. Gilruth and her fellow Cabinet members are keen to tell us that spending per head is higher in Scotland on any given subject, and they’re right. There is a reason for that though, and it has nothing to do with the actions of her government, or indeed any of its predecessors in living memory.

A quick geography lesson would demonstrate that Scotland has a population density of 70 people per km2, compared with 153/km2 in Wales, 434/km2 in England and 274/km for the UK as a whole. In that context, it would be absolutely astounding if spending per head on any given public service wasn’t the highest, or if the numbers of GPs, teachers, or even bin lorries per head weren’t higher.

While the tendency to limit ambitions to being marginally less bad than successive UK governments appears a peculiarly SNP thing, they are just part of a cross-party political culture that leads them to spend too much time dreaming up ways to insist on success by using telephone book numbers to describe inputs rather than look around themselves ask: “is it getting better?”

We’ll have more of that in the coming week at the Budget. The Chancellor will talk of billions to be raised in taxes, and billions more to be spent on this, that, or cut from the other.

Of course inputs matter; a stroll along any street on these islands will tell you what decades of cuts have done, from the roads, drains, schools and hospitals to our museums and public gathering spaces.

Where that money goes matters too. This week I had to check for a pulse after I realised I supported a policy that was once enacted by Margaret Thatcher. Broken clocks and all that.

SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn has asked Rachel Reeves to revive Thatcher’s windfall tax on big banks, a move the Institute For Public Policy Research says could raise £8 billion. So far so good.

Flynn wants the Chancellor to use the money to chop £300 off people’s energy bills, something I’m a little more sceptical about.

In many ways it’s the perfect political gimmick. Who can’t support taking from the rich to give to the masses huddled under their blankets for warmth this winter?

There’s a catch, naturally. The money redistributed would be taken directly off energy bills, just as the last Tory scheme did a few years back, a scheme which handed over £11 billion straight from the Treasury to the pockets of energy companies already coining it in.

If there is a consensus that energy prices are too high — and I believe there is — then why not tackle it at root? That’s not to say that short-term measures like this shouldn’t be used, but the issue must surely be that they are just that; short-term.

They may grab a headline, but soon enough they melt away and take us back to square one. The corporate world has pulled off the finest snow job of them all; convincing the political classes that only profiteering can deliver life’s essentials and that the state has a duty to guarantee that profiteering.

If they are barely able to understand their own promises and pledges, their implications, or how to deliver on them, it is perhaps too much to expect ministers to challenge ownership.

To do so requires the kind of leap of imagination that would be shot on sight if unfurled in any Cabinet room in Britain.

No, that task falls to us.

We, at least, have promises to keep.