This week Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond launched a 650 page white paper, "your guide to an independent Scotland."

This was meant to show how the golden goose would lay the golden egg on September 18 2014, the day of the referendum.

But as with all fairy tales we were soon returned to reality when the glossy cover started peeling off what is not a proposal for government but an SNP wish list based on a fantasy vision of the future a million miles from the real world and the struggles of working people today.

The paper promotes a Scotland that will:

Retain the monarchy
Remain part of the EU
Join Nato
Keep the pound within a currency union with the rest of Britain
Remain part of the UK energy market
Have UK-wide financial regulation
Continue within university research councils
Continue with cross-border health arrangements

In effect everything will remain the same but everything will change.

It's just we will have no MPs at Westminster to influence these UK-wide issues.

Doesn't sound too much like independence to me.

It promotes a vision of a country where everything that is bad miraculously disappears and everything good in life just gets better, all with a cross on a ballot paper!

It paints a picture of a place with its economy based on oil that will never run out. Where everything is green but we scrap air passenger duty and build dual carriageways.

Where the bank of a foreign country controls the currency but at the same time we have independence.

Where business competition is promoted but so is the minimum wage.

Where childcare is expanded, but just not now.

Where the Royal Mail is renationalised but someone else pays for it.

Where we will become a "progressive beacon" but where bankers and big businesses get a corporation tax cut of £350 million per year.

Where an oil fund will magically appear from the oil fund tree.

This is the mirage, the charade, the fantasy the people of Scotland are expected to swallow.

If we apply this principle to our own lives, our own families and our own communities, it's like saying your family income will rise, your life will be better, you can have free childcare, a better pension, increased benefits and you will pay less tax into the bargain.

Meanwhile back in the real world people want to hear a credible alternative to what we have at present.

I would like to see a different Scotland.

One that fully finances public services and redistributes our wealth through a progressive taxation system.

That tackles the extreme wealth and health inequalities and poverty that Scotland faces.

That lifts living standards, redemocratises local government and puts jobs at the centre of a national crusade.

This requires real political change and a challenge to neoliberal orthodoxy, which incredibly even after its utter and abject failure, is at the core of the SNPs white paper proposal.

I believe we are much more able to challenge that orthodoxy if we work with progressive movements across Britain.

Progressive reforms occur not by accident but through unity, solidarity and the action and campaigning of working people.

I want to see enhanced devolution, a position if the polls are to be believed that is favoured by the majority of Scots and a position that would see us retaining our links with our friends and relatives across Britain while maintaining the ability to move money around the country to areas of most need. That is a good thing.

I give way to no-one in my love of my country but I love my community, its people and my friends and relatives across Britain too.

It is because of this, it is because of where I come from and the values that my family and community has instilled in me - values of solidarity, co-operation and justice - that I am a socialist, not a nationalist.

It is for these reasons I will be voting no, but that will be a no for change.

The Red Paper Collective, a group of trade unionists, academics, politicians and activists, is promoting such change and has published The Red Paper on Scotland 2014: Class, Nation and Socialism, a book that promotes a radical, socialist alternative to independence taking a class-based position.

Neil Findlay is Labour MSP for the Lothians region. You can purchase the book for £11 including postage from the Centre for Work-Based Learning, Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA or for £7.99 from Neil Findlay - contact neilfindlay56@yahoo.co.uk.