Nicola Sturgeon’s “most ambitious” programme for government will include 16 new bills to add to 11 currently progressing through Holyrood. What was surprising was the highlighted focus on education as yet again the area for “bold” reforms, given that education has been the ongoing bugbear of this government struggling to make its case for reform under fire from some teachers and the opposition.

However, this along with the confirmation of the lifting of the pay cap on Scottish public sector workers can be taken as an aggressive move by the Scottish government to move off its opponents’ territory and be seen by the public to be “getting on with the day job”. The desire for a refreshing of its agenda is as much a result of nudges from the SNP membership as it is the external pro-independence left which have both demanded that the Scottish government go further than be relatively better than England. On social housing, climate change, renewable energy and public procurement on Scottish rail the Scottish government challenge is to maintain confidence while conceding the need for more action.

Sturgeon’s rallying cry of “Scotland’s ambition to be the inventor and the producer” sought to outflank a Scottish Tory party whose mantra is to uphold the trope that Scotland lives off the benevolence of the UK government’s charity. The appointment of a network of trade envoys to “champion business” this year and the expansion network of investment hubs to Paris also show a party keen to reassert its pro-business credentials. To be the party that can please all and do all.

The forward-thinking here is clearly the laying down of a strategy to make an irrefutable case for Scotland’s self-sufficiency and success for an independent state and economy. Common Weal, the pro-independence thinktank had already been prodding the Scottish government over the feasibility of a national investment bank which the first minister confirmed in her speech.

These policies lay out the difficulty for a party so successful in holding the centre while keeping a toe on the left’s ground in Scotland. It must be seen as a party of enterprise and probity or perhaps lose votes to a Tory party itself struggling due to reported incidents of racism. But it must additionally be wary of the challenge from a Labour party mauled but not annihilated and keen to capitalise on Corbynmania – even if it does not really believe the hype.

The period of negotiations between the UK government and the EU is fraught with dangers for a party which despite its protestations has found no action of support from fellow European governments so far. Scotland as well as the Scottish government risks drifting into irrelevance without the urgency of the constitutional question which functioned as a smelling salt to the entire British body politic for the past three years. The delay in the effects of Brexit has left the party in a position ready to spring forth and say “we told you so” to a wary and irritable Scottish public. Until then it can do nothing except make the constitutional and European case by practical actions in Holyrood.

Kezia Dugdale’s departure from the Scottish Labour leadership means that the SNP could now face a party ready to go much further in attempting to seduce left-of-centre independence voters desiring a radical message. But Anas Sarwar, who was unseated in 2015 by Alison Thewliss, and Richard Leonard a former GMB trade union organiser are less than inspiring candidates. Pro-independence voters can still point to the unionist core of Jeremy Corbyn’s message as proof that he offers a lukewarm revolution at best, leading a party still dedicated to renewal of Britain’s nuclear arsenal, now seemingly ambiguous on matters of Europe and immigration. These things can be exaggerated by SNP supporters but they still matter to the Scottish centre and left. This programme for government may have contained if not fear, then at least a conscious nod to the way Corbyn has been able to cause some on the pro-independence left to question who was more radical as a force in the country.

However, the party’s greatest danger does not come from the opposition parties in the Scottish parliament or the UK government but a growing tendency towards complacency and managerial politics: what some Scottish leftwingers have controversially called Blairism without Iraq. This may be too harsh on a party which even as a centrist force still holds a relative advantage of radicalism over its rivals. The SNP wants a radically different relationship between the nations of the UK. Corbyn’s Labour is still dominated by a notion that radicalism and class solidarity can be upheld and fortified with a commitment to Britishness. Much of the left and centre in Scotland are still sceptical.

• Robert Somynne is a journalist and commentator on Scottish issues