Is 23 strategies too many?

It is only right and proper that the Scottish Government has an economic strategy. After all, there would be uproar if it didn’t. It’s the sort of thing that any sensible government simply must have.

The UK Chancellor holds up the Budget documents in a battered red briefcase every year just to make the point. “Look, I’ve got a whole lot of new, shiny and very intelligent ideas,” the briefcase says, before its human carrier utters a word.

But it’s perhaps not completely impossible that the Scottish Government has got just a little bit carried away on the strategising front with, at the last count, a total of 23 different strategies, plans and, even more excitingly, “action plans” affecting the economy and its various parts.

According to the Fraser of Allander Institute, this has resulted in a “confused and cluttered” approach. Doubtless somewhere in Victoria Quay a hard-pressed but highly intelligent civil servant – desk piled high with a riot of reports – will calmly insist they understand perfectly well how it all fits together.

However, the question is, does anybody else?