New political landscape, same old message? The first Scottish Labour Party conference since the SNP came to power in May last year began in Aviemore yesterday. Gordon Brown addressed the spring conference as Prime Minister for the first time; an altogether more auspicious occasion to mark for the party. Who wants to rake over the ashes of electoral defeat?

Not Mr Brown. As he reminded delegates, he is the first Labour premier to represent a Scottish seat. By his achievement, he had shown how high a Scot could rise in public life. He did not labour the point (so to speak) but returned to the theme later, citing the examples of Douglas Alexander, Des Browne and Alistair Darling, each a Scot who has scaled the heights of cabinet office and is influencing events on the world stage. Mr Brown's point was that the Union did not diminish but enhanced the influence of Scots, Scottish ideas and Scottish values.

This was as risky as the Prime Minister was prepared to be. This was not what he would have said in a speech in Middle, or probably any other part of, England. What he cited as the benefits of the Union for Scots and the wider world, through the dissemination of ideas and values, would have appeared as crowing about the influence of the Scotia Nostra to a different audience.

Mr Brown wanted to tell a positive story about the Union and its impact on an increasingly interdependent world, contrasting that narrative with a narrow SNP vision of a return to nineteenth-century standards of nation states, borders and limited co-operation. His problem was that suggesting the eradication of disease and the drive to ensure each child in the world had access to education would somehow be threatened by an SNP administration at Holyrood just did not stack up.

Is it not the case that Scandinavian countries, similar in size to Scotland and independent, are, proportionately, among the biggest donors of aid on the international stage? Mr Brown would have been better concentrating his fire on those SNP policies which are vulnerable to attack. They are not hard to identify. But he did so only to a limited degree yesterday. Going back over the old negative ground of separation has little wider resonance in Scotland today.