SNP MSP Fergus Ewing will step up his criticisms of Humza Yousaf government when he appears tonight on Alex Salmond's show.

The former cabinet minister will praise the record of Mr Salmond's government and continue his attack on the current administration and on their partners the Scottish Greens.

He will raise concerns about plans for homeowners to replace gas boilers with heat pump and argues that the Scottish Government will lose the legal battle with its UK counterparts over the gender recognition reform bill, due to be heard next week.

It is the second in the new series of Mr Salmond's Scotland Speaks with the show's theme the Scottish economy and routes to success. Clips from the programme were released ahead of tonight's broadcast at 9pm.

“I’ve spoken out against policies which have been damaging to economic growth, for example the deposit return scheme which was uniformly opposed by businesses, the current madcap policy to impose heat pumps on inappropriate properties and the current plans to require law abiding, hard-working providers of bed and breakfasts and guest houses. who have done no harm to anybody for decades, to get a licence by October or become criminalised leading to thousands, thousands of them leaving the sector," Mr Ewing tells the programme.

"Now I’ve spoken out and they’ve scrapped deposit return, they’ve scrapped Highly Protected Marine Areas, they’re going to lose the court on gender recognition which has done no-body any good ….but the way I look at it is rather different. As my late father used to say “never do anyone a favour - they will never forgive you”.

He adds: "Many of the bad policies have come from the Greens. To quote their former leader Robin Harper, he said they've “lost the plot”.

"I'm not sure if that's being too kind to them. I'm not sure they ever possessed the plot in the first place in order to mislay it. But seriously, even the staunchest critic of the extremist Greens, like me, wouldn't say that it's all their fault.

"I do think that the Scottish Government should be supporting industry, we should be praising our brilliant sectors, in finance, in oil and gas for which we'll need for decades to come, in renewables, in life sciences, in food and drink.

"That's what we used to do, if you don't mind me saying so, when you were the boss. But instead of putting Scotland first, instead of putting our people first, we seem to be pursuing all sorts of weird and wonderful policies, the only thing they have in common is that they're deeply unpopular, as well as in some cases being damaging to the economy"

Mr Ewing set out his views when he appears with fellow guests SNP veteran Alex Neil and former SNP MP George Kerevan.

Mr Neil will argue that more needs to be done to build affordable homes and doing so could lead to an increase in economic growth.

He will say: “At the moment you are lucky if you hit in a normal year just over 20,000 new house being built in Scotland, so I think over a period of three years you have to build that up to over 40,000 houses to meet the demand, so the impact of that would be very substantial; it might increase the growth rate in Scotland by between about half a per cent and one per cent, at the moment we are flatlining ……we are going back the way so this one initiative which would allow us to move forwards.”

Mr Kerevan will say:  “If you look into the statistics, services are flatlining, services are the biggest bit of the economy, by far, and in the three months to June they flatlined. Now that’s a sign that the whole of the Scottish economy, not just bits of it, is in serious trouble so we need to look at some kind of holistic solution and the solution is to improve productivity. You can fiddle growth, short term, any government can do that if it tries, but productivity underlies growth and the key lesson is that we need to get our productivity up.”

Summing up Mr Salmond will say: “Between these three wise men you have enough ideas to fill a Cabinet full of politicians wanting to take the economy forward and who knows……perhaps some of these ideas may be driven forward into policy effect.

"One things for sure. If we are to achieve the potential of Scotland, and not be satisfied with second best and second rate, then we’ve got to focus on growth and how to achieve it and thus bring about the well-being of our people."