LABOUR is right to condemn the SNP’s Growth Commission report as committing an independent Scotland to a “decade of austerity” — a manifesto, as Richard Leonard put it, for “cuts not growth.”

Since the general election, the SNP has been in a quandary over its future direction. Should it shift to the right to regain the dozen seats lost to the Tories in its tartan-Tory heartland in the north-east or move left to forestall further loses in the working-class constituencies of central Scotland ? 

The party’s Growth Commission report supplies the answer. For everyone on the left, it is a deeply disappointing document which, if not challenged, threatens to shift the whole balance of debate in Scotland towards the right — aligning the SNP, in terms of the party’s basic assumptions, with Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives.