Scottish Labour leadership candidate Michael Marra says the party will rediscover its ‘soul’ if he wins against rival Joe Fagan. The ballot opens today, with the result announced on September 19. Marra is widely seen as the continuity candidate against the upstart outsider Fagan. Marra says he will positively highlight his party’s policies rather than negatively focusing fire on the SNP.

But neither candidate is capable of rediscovering Scottish Labour’s sense of a socialist soul. And while it does not exactly help, this has not much to do with Scottish Labour’s languishment, whether that be in terms of MSPs or party membership.

On May 7 this year, Scottish Labour won its lowest ever tally of MSPs, just 17, since the return of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Its membership is now around 11,000, down from some 30,000 in 1997. These are the symptoms, and not the causes, of Scottish Labour ‘losing its religion’, as rock band REM might have put it.

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Scottish Labour, as we know it today, came into being in 1994 as a distinct and autonomous body. Allegations of being a ‘branch office’ of London Labour have dogged it ever since.

These allegations have been immeasurably helped by Scottish Labour never putting ‘clear red water’ between itself and the UK party, as Welsh Labour did in the early 2000s over........

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