ON the face of it, the latest numbers on Scotland's manufactured exports are worth a cheer or two.

In the April-June quarter, total export sales rose 4.4% in real terms, the sharpest quarterly increase in nine years.

On the Scottish Government's own detailed figures, the last time Scottish exports grew this fast was in the second quarter of 1998, when output from Silicon Glen was still powering towards its post-millennial peak and together with other sectors, like whisky, was spelling boom time for Scotland's trade with the rest of the world.

That surge did not survive the bursting of the global tech bubble or rapid retrenchment in more margin-sensitive areas of volume IT production. Indeed, after that 2000 performance spike, 2004 found us back, in overall export terms, where we had been in the mid-1990s.

But that boom-bust episode has since stabilised and our manufactured exports are showing some signs of renewed vigour. On an annualised basis, Scottish export sales are up 3.6% in these latest returns. And the improvement has come without too much assistance from what remains of our electronics sector.

The silicon industries are still our largest single export contributor by far. Last year the electrical and instrument engineering sector (the official proxy for electronics) accounted for 34% of all Scottish exports. But at peak, in 2000, the sector accounted for 58% of total exports. Its contribution has been flat-lining for most of the past three years.

The drinks sector, dominated by whisky, accounted for 22% of total exports in 2006. But overall Scottish engineering is still more than twice as important, contributing 49% of everything we exported last year.

The grounds for a cheer or two seem obvious enough to me. But Scotland's Enterprise Minister, Jim Mather, was determined to greet them in a rather more curmudgeonly way.

Where his LibDem predecessor would predictably have squeezed every last ounce of political capital out of a nine-year performance high, Mather's press release was headlined, in true glass-half-empty style: "No room for complacency."

The only upbeat comment the minister allowed himself was an admission that he was "encouraged by these latest figures". The rest of his remarks were determinedly downbeat.

"It is important not to be complacent and lose sight of the fact that growth has been modest in previous quarters," he went on. "The Scottish government recognises that Scotland's economy has underperformed historically and we must do more to give Scotland a competitive edge. We must aspire to the kind of performance achieved by countries such as Ireland, Norway and Iceland, the arc of prosperity that surrounds us.

"Reform of the enterprise networks, outlined in parliament just last week, as well as other economic policies, will ultimately help us achieve our goal of increased, sustainable growth. And the government's economic strategy, to be published in the next few weeks, will help the whole of Scotland focus on raising Scotland's growth rate to the UK level by 2011."

Clearly an export performance that straddled May's Holyrood poll owes little to the actions of the new nationalist government. But doesn't Mather's attempt to damn these good export numbers with such faint praise smack of something else?

A refusal to acknowledge any evidence that might challenge the SNP's own prevailing narrative on Scotland's economic condition - that our economy has been underperforming for 30 years or more, that remaining part of Britain is an economic cul-de-sac and that only independence and the freedom to make big cuts in the tax on business profits will ever turn things round.

It's a take on these latest figures that does a serious disservice to all the people who have worked so hard, after the export slump from 2000 to 2004, to rebuild markets and open up new ones and who have been doing it regardless of which political party is in power at Holyrood.

I gather the minister has taken to describing his government's objective of raising Scotland's growth rate to match the UK as a whole by 2011 as the administration's "north star". But is he really asking us to believe that none of the other stars in the sky can, from time to time, illuminate our economic journey?

The rise and partial fall of Scotland's electronics sector which, as his own department's statistics note acknowledges, grew by 124.6% between 1995 and 2000, but fell back by 65.9% between 2000 and 2004, was not primarily caused by which party happened to be in power in Scotland or, I venture, the level at which corporation tax was set.

The willingness of policymakers to attract mobile investment in the silicon sector to these shores, to offset relentless job losses in more traditional industries certainly left Scotland much more exposed to any IT downturn than other places, as some of us warned at the time.

But the downturn itself was down to global forces from which even an independent Scotland would not be immune. The fact that we've come out the other end of that with an exports recovery in which electronics is still accounting for a third of the action is surely worth a bit more encouragement than the minister is minded to offer.