SNP: It doesn't have to be this way...

"The future is what we make it," says Salmond in the SNP's latest campaign video, Let's Work Together - Be part of better.

On one level, this is encouraging, optimistic boilerplate. On another it emphasises the simplest of the SNP's messages - It doesn't have to be this way. If we screw up our courage to the sticking place, if we take responsibility for the future of the polity, a politics driven by a different set of values is possible. While framed as a caress, the thought is also a rebuke to those who eschew the challenges of responsibility - who want a revolution without a revolution, in a manner of speaking - and hope to salvage our parlous political state yet remain thirled to a Union dominated by interests and values which are not our interests and our values. Week by week, month by month, the chasm separating Conservative-Liberal coalition policies from mainstream Scottish opinion grows wider and wider still.

The broadcast's soundtrack is furnished by unsigned Edinburgh band Jakil, a young band of crooners and strummers. Except for the lyrics and Salmond's wee cameo - which both evoke the principal theme of social solidarity - I'm particularly interested in the imagery and characters invoked in the piece. They're certainly not accidental casting, but are a subtle form of positioning, identifying  political Nationalism with particular constellations of ideas. So which ones? The camera slips smoothly from rural field fallow and plough and Heilan' coo to the coast, where a hardy fisherman is lugging his creels. A bored and half-bashful photocopy bod and a pair of chirpy nurses share in the song, with a breathless huff or two from a couple lugging the shopping into the back of their car.  A young female student scribes away at her studies, distracted by the tune. On a beach, a younger lassie struggles to coax her reluctant and truculent basset hound into motion.

A number of elements struck me. Firstly the broad sweep of characters is clearly intended to encompass a vital, optimistic but crucially Scotland-wide sketch of the populace, from sea to sea, from countryside into the heart of the towns and cities, tenements and traffic jams. On one level, this merely reflects the range of of constituencies the party represents and seeks to represent - but also throws a discreet elbow at the increasingly concentrated representation of Scottish Labour in the urban West of Scotland.  What is also particularly striking is that the be part of better theme is actually dominated by vignettes of individual labour. The only group work we're shown are the two folk flinging messages into their car and Jakil's overriding music-making. A middle aged woman wielding her hoover, a vital old woman clipping peas in her allotment, a lonely window-washer shammying for dear life - they're all discrete but united by the melody and the values of collective endeavour and social solidarity. Each enjoys a moment of fulfilment, whether in an immaculately vacuumed carpet, a gleaming pane, a hot rectangle of photocopies - or a fully-primed fishing boat, setting out to sea. While these may be tasks completed, I think it's important that the broadcast's individual characters are depicted working away by themselves - committed in theory - but not yet working together in concerted action. It implies commitment on the ends and values - but challenges the audience with unfulfilled promise, which only action can seize. 

Solidarity in principle, but work yet to be done, the undertone of this swishly produced and even gently comic piece. The impression isn't even disturbed by the looming form of Eck in a room boasting the worst mustard tartan wallpaper in Christendom...