WHEN WAS the last time you heard the phrase A Smart, Successful Scotland?

Do you remember the time when that was the widely accepted blueprint for the growth of Scotland plc in general and the part the enterprise agencies would play in that in particular.

It seemed for a while that was a "hymn sheet" from which more Scots than ever before were prepared to sing together.

It was actually unveiled in 2001 and was meant to be implemented in stages after that. Yes, it was back in the days when Wendy Alexander was enterprise minister, remember those?

One of my own memories is of a more than usually boisterous Friday night business dinner audience in Glasgow, which the MC was struggling to control.

Few seemed to hear him introduce Alexander but the room was quiet when she went to the lectern and started to speak.

Would those in charge of the enterprise ministry and the senior controllers of the levels of power in its agencies now receive the same measure of respect?

It is an answer worth pondering, I would suggest, before you cast your vote on May 3.

These thoughts were sparked by a debate I chaired last week at the Unversity of Glasgow business school.

It was one of the speakers at that event, John Downie, formerly of the Federation of Small Businesses and now co-founder of strategy consultancy The Vision Works who raised the question about A Smart, Successful Scotland.

The other speakers were enteprise committee chairman Alex Neil and Dave Anderson, senior operations director of Scottish Enteprise Edinburgh and the Lothians.

There was an encouraging level of agreement in the analysis of Scotland's economic ills shared between the three speakers.

But Downie also questioned whether having six key sectors and eight other targets was too much for Scottish Enterprise and a small country to work towards.

This alleged plethora of targets is presumably why Sir Tom Hunter has urged the country to go for just five, namely education, biotechnology, renewable energy, tourism and financial services, in which he urges Scotland puts "huge, big bets."

Whether it should be those particular five or not is a question to which I shall return in a future column, but it does seem to me that the idea of having a clear vision, on which there is clear focus for delivery for Scotland's economic development, is a good one.

And so it seemed also to those gathered from the university's MBA programme, from academe more generally, and from the wider public and private sectors gathered for that university debate.

A clear vision, crafted and backed with a suitable dose of ambition and clear and effective mechanisms for putting that into practice. Is that too much to hope for?

Certainly that is what I believe we should all be looking for from the political parties seeking our vote on May 3. The University of Glasgow Business School event was one of a series to mark the 30th anniversary of its MBA programme.

A future event in that series, planned for March, is hopes to include the main economic spokesmen from the four major political parties.

I hope they will all give their time for that event and provide the answers to the questions which the business and wider community in Scotland are seeking.

MEANWHILE, what a footnote there was last week to the Monetary Policy Committee's shock decision to raise interest rates at its January meeting.

The revelation from the MPC minutes that the committee had voted by five to four, meaning that that short sharp shock was visited on mortgage holders by one vote was a further surprise.

My comment in this space two weeks ago that Bank of England governor Mervyn King actually deserves my previously ironic "Merv The Swerv" nickname was even truer than I knew at the time.

Never again will he be able to say with any credibility that his long-held ambition is to be boring.