THOUSANDS gathered, Nicola Sturgeon said, to hear the SNP “set out how we are giving hope to people across the country.”

As Scotland’s largest party marked its 11th year in power, this bold but dreadfully vague message was eerily reminiscent of third-period New Labour. And perhaps it’s no surprise. I hear that Peter Murrell, SNP chief executive and Sturgeon’s husband, waxes lyrical about the late Philip Gould’s book The Unfinished Revolution — widely considered the Blairite bible.

Still, Tony Blair would have killed for the message discipline on display at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre (SECC) this week. The Labour conferences of the party’s last term in office were forlorn affairs.

The 2009 gathering at the Brighton Centre offered a bit of drama not seen for years when then Unite co-leader Tony Woodley ripped  a copy of the Sun — which bore the headline LABOUR’S LOST IT, signalling the rag’s inevitable confirmation that it would switch support back to the Tories — to shreds on stage. But the near-empty seats in front of him said it all.

Even five years later, the SNP was putting Labour to shame with a conference that featured debate on policy motions as well as speeches from MPs.

Now, however, with Labour’s inane on-stage sofa discussions thankfully consigned to the dustbin of history, the SNP conference looks like a frightfully stage-managed affair.

In Liverpool this year, Labour featured fewer keynotes than ever, and an unprecedented volume of contributions from the floor. At Glasgow’s SECC this week, delegates received every last Scottish minister for paperclips as a prodigal son.

The SNP claims it coined the slogan “Yes we can!” decades ago, but that didn’t stop the party’s deputy leader Keith Brown sounding like a third-rate Obama impresario when he used it repeatedly in his address.

Deputy First Minister John Swinney went unchallenged when he claimed the Edinburgh government’s pay offer would give teachers the best deal in Britain — until unions blasted it as utter nonsense the following day.

The few digressions, meanwhile, could all be considered rather helpful to the stage managers in the wings. MP Joanna Cherry raised the prospect of independence without a referendum.

A few crumbs for the ultras, from where it doesn’t matter — leaving it easier than ever for Sturgeon and the portly millionaire Ian Blackford, the SNP’s Westminster leader, to chuck the party’s defining issue into the long grass.

There was more loudmouthing over Brexit, but this too seemed awfully convenient. With no dissenting voices in the conference hall, I wandered over to the SNP Socialists fringe meeting on the issue, jointly hosted by Another Europe is Possible (AEIP) and Left Against Brexit.

The meeting was chaired by SNP councillor Graham Campbell, who in a past life starred in the visually mesmerising 2010 Scottish Tusc party political broadcast.

In an oddly refreshing twist, he asked audience members as well as the panel to introduce themselves — revealing a few non-SNP members from the southside of Glasgow, who I hoped would liven things up a little.

My hopes were in vain. In fairness, Fiona Robertson, of the SNP’s disabled members’ section, delivered a hard-hitting indictment of austerity’s impact on disabled people, along with the impending climate catastrophe — outlining how Brexit would exacerbate both.

MP Chris Stephens made some decent overtures but digressed into justifying Commons fun and games — such as heckling Brexiteer Tories as “narrow nationalists.”

Angus MacNeil, one of the SNP’s longer-serving Westminster crew, delivered the kind of incoherent ramble for which he has become well-known.

AEIP Scottish organiser Kirsty Haigh, meanwhile, assured us that Brexit represented “an all-out fundamental attack … on working-class people.” 

She also argued that there was “no reason why we couldn’t be in the EU” and have publicly owned railways, citing European countries which manage fine.

This has become a common defence of pro-EU progressives hitting back at left eurosceptics.

They are of course right in saying that France, Germany and many other EU members have railways owned by the state. But using this to dismiss concerns over the impact of EU rail directives is at best ignorant — and at worst, insulting our intelligence.

Anyone who pays cursory attention to the continent’s railways will be aware of the strikes on SNCF this year — called in response to what rail unions term the “Thatcherite reforms” of President Emmanuel Macron.

His government says it has to “liberalise” its rail industry thanks to the European market being opened up to competition from the end of next year.

And it’s not only France. Across Europe, thanks to the successive “railway packages” pushed through by the EU Commission, we have seen state railway companies broken up into subsidiaries controlling track and train as separate entities.

As Costas Lapavitsas, the economist and former Syriza member of the Hellenic parliament, argued at a TUC fringe meeting last month, the EU forces state-owned companies to mimic the private sector, rather than providing a public service.

At the SNP fringe, panel members repeatedly insisted they were not advocating or defending the status quo. Instead, they wanted to smash Fortress Europe and reform the neoliberal institutions, they stressed.

But as the rail example showed, there was little acknowledgment of reality, let alone a strategy for change.

If you really want us to think another Europe is possible, surely you would set out precisely how you aim to achieve it through the mechanisms of the EU?

But this attitude sums up Scotland’s largest party. Defined as a party of protest, in government it is awash with reactive attacks on Westminster and vague sloganeering.

But, like New Labour and its present-day advocates, it is content to maintain business as usual — which isn’t just the status quo, but creeping corporate power and rising poverty.

The party’s plan to allow a “public-sector company” to bid against privateers to run ScotRail is eerily reminiscent of EU rail directives and competition law.

And for some independence supporters, the SNP leadership is a little too comfortable with its current settlement, which for them explains why a second independence referendum is not coming soon.

Another Scotland, like another Europe (though perhaps not another EU), is indeed possible. But the current versions seem to suit plenty of so-called progressives just fine.