So what is possible now?

Global politics is all over the place and the old orthodoxies seem to be dead. So what might unorthodox economic policy for Scotland look like?

So Donald's like 'nah bro, you're taking too much of our money' and Xi's like 'dude, you want our stuff you gotta pay' so Donald is like 'man, we don't want your stuff' and, like, does tariffs and so Xi goes 'big talk!' and does tariffs so Donald's like 'well, here's even more tariffs!' and Xi's all 'bring it!'.

And then Donald's on about 'yeah, well we don't want computers! Computers are stupid' and Xi's like '….[typing]' and then Donald's all 'right, OK, we do want computers so we'll take those tariffs back' and then Xi's like 'LOL' so Donald's giving it 'nah, that's not an exemption mate, just you wait' and Xi's like 'yeah, waiting mate' and Trumps like 'grrrrrr' and then Xi goes 'OK, no magnets for you'.

And then Donald's being all 'who need magnets?' and then Elon goes 'dude, PHONE ME! URGENT' and so now Donald's giving it 'come oooooon Xi, why don't you just phone?' and Xi's like 'nah man, I'm on the phone to Vietnam' and then Xi's like phoning everyone except Donald and Donald's like 'dude, if you just phone first we could sort this tariff thing but I need you to phone first' and Xi's like 'whatever'.

Now that we've caught up with recent geopolitics it's pretty clear we're not in Kansas any more. Things most of us never thought we'd see in our lives are now hurtling past our heads like a flock of startled pigeons in a snow storm. At some point Scotland is going to have to lean into this madness. There really is no remaining orthodoxy. Everyone is making it up as they go along.

And given that the Wood Group (once the economic elite of Scotland) is now in a cut-price desperation sale, whatever we're doing to support our industrial base isn't working. We lose company ownership all the time and still our economic orthodoxy prioritises selling off Scottish assets for short-term gain (known in Scotland-talk as 'Foreign Direct Investment').

But mad as everything is just now, the tale of the struggle between three power blocks for economic dominance provides some useful pointers for Scotland. Trump is, as you'd imagine, the most clueless here. While Trump represents a startling break with the free trade and monetarist orthodoxy in US politics, he is still using free market, monetarist tools.

He's trying to follow basically the same practices (change the supply-side pricing and let the free market respond) but hoping to get a different outcome. This is more or less what Scotland has been doing for 20 years. We follow economic practices which incentivise the de-industrialisation of Scotland while claiming to be re-industrialising.

Trump wants to stimulate infrastructure development by altering market pricing. We want to stimulate industrial development by selling off our assets and businesses. But neither will work. Trump can either have lower tariffs with little incentive for manufacturers to re-shore, or have higher tariffs which incentivise re-shoring (a process which takes years) at the cost of a US economy hobbled by soaring prices.

Scotland sells our businesses, IP, financial assets, natural resources and market access and hopes for charity in return. But we give this all so cheap (I mean we really do signpost our desperation every time we go on about FDI) that there is no incentive to offer charity. It won't work.

If you want to see an economic policy that works, look at China. Europe is livid that China is subsidising its industry and helping its business sector develop faster than it otherwise would if it relied solely on the free market. The EU chooses to make that illegal for itself.

But what China has been doing for the last 40 years, Europe did for the 40 years before that. From 1945 until the 1990s, Europe was subsidising its industry base up the wazoo (it still does with agriculture) and ever since has been hiding behind giant protectionist barriers. Free trade rules were supposed to pull the ladder up from countries like China and the EU is pissed off China didn't play ball.

The lessons are simple; if you're ahead of the game, impose 'free trade rules' and if you're behind the game, protect and invest in the domestic economy. Scotland is behind the game. Scottish-owned businesses of reasonable scale trading here and internationally are now very hard to name. We need a new approach – here are three for starters.

First, you can grow industries in new spaces. This is what you might call 'mission-orientated market-making'; find something you want to do for a reason of general public good and use that to create markets for goods and services that new entries into the market can meet. I'd suggest construction and decarbonisation is the means here.

To make a market you need to rig it a bit, and to make that stick it must be justifiable. And then to make it work you need to intervene and invest. Here's an example; if you change building regulations to require that by a given date the insulation in houses must be non-petrochemical and then you make start-up and expansion grants available to any business ready to make organic insulation in Scotland, and then you match them up with the building industry and support with some training, you have an industry.

“Everything around us is changing - please Scotland, don’t be last to notice”

If you want to build an industry doing something that isn't currently being done, you need to make sure that industry has a solid order book so investment is de-risked. That is an industrial strategy. But if you have an industry which has orders but isn't working for Scotland you need to do something else.

Let's take whisky for example. Whisky delivers insanely high levels of return on investment which means an awful lot of wealth is extracted by its owners – and they're largely foreign corporations. You could legislate to change that (you'd need to be independent) by stating clearly that it is a crucial heritage industry that you want to protect for generations to come.

So you'd claim excessive overseas control and too much monopoly, and pass a law saying no-one can own more than say two distilleries. But now you need to support buyers. Ideally I'd be pushing the Scottish National Investment Bank to offer full funding packages for management or worker buy-outs. You'd then create a whole range of powerful new Scottish-owned businesses.

But that isn't enough, because the benefit the big owners bring is distribution networks. The sales managers that sell cheap rum or vodka or beer or cider just use the same sales networks to sell whisky. You need to replace that, so you'd then work actively with all the new producers to create a national-scale export cooperative. That needs the full support (and more) from Scotland's export agencies.

The first example is how to create new industries in a new space, the latter about how you shift ownership in businesses of national strategic significance. What about challenging existing businesses?

Let me give you an example; smaller businesses struggle because of market access. Everywhere they look a British or US corporation stands in their way – Amazon, the supermarkets, Google advertising, all routes now go through predatory corporations which insert themselves between producers and consumers to extract rent from producers.

If you want to grow the real businesses, help them find new market access avenues. That isn't going to happen because you want it to. If you're being radical, set up local food hubs. These would be like local, public-good food supermarkets and we support them for a range of reasons. But if these existed to support producers rather than exploit them, that would help.

It's not just about food of course and a collective online selling platform isn't that tricky these days – I mean, some of you will remember that Common Weal piloted this with our Common Market initiative (the off-the-shelf technology wasn't there yet). A publicly-supported one would be a different kettle of fish.

And then you've got the distribution barrier – so create a public-good distribution service. Buy a warehouse near the M74 and subsidise it (we are no longer trapped in EU subsidy rules) to become a storage and delivery hub for Scottish products.

Then create a market for all of this through public procurement – the billions of pounds we spend on buying goods with public money should all (I do mean all) go through this system to boost it and give it some stability.

Sure this stuff would raise the hairs on the heads of a Scottish Enterprise executive. This is not how we do it in Scotland. That's the point – the stuff we do in Scotland clearly doesn't work. If we can live in a world where a global trade war means America is being threatened over the availability of technology-crucial magnets (not something I thought I'd ever write), we can live in a world where Scottish Enterprise isn't screwing everything up too.

We live in unprecedented times and Scotland has an unprecedented domestic economy problem-going-on-crisis. It is deeply depressing watching the Scottish Government this week trying to change course by doing exactly what it was doing before. Everything around us is changing. Please Scotland, don't be last to notice. If everything else is changing, we need to change too.