POOR Anas Sarwar. A few weeks ago, he was the golden boy of the Scottish Labour Party, widely expected to romp to victory against his little known left-wing opponent. And he held millions of pounds of shares in his family business.

Now his campaign is in such desperate disarray that he’s had to relinquish his shareholdings — not of course for the benefit of his employees, or his community, or even his political party, but for his immediate family.

In the old days, before the Yes mass movement of 2014 transformed the political landscape across the UK, Sarwar’s wealth, his shareholdings in a company built on low pay and his support for the privileged private education sector would have posed him no problems. As Peter Mandelson memorably put it, “I’m intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.”

Even today, a majority of Scottish Labour members still subscribe to that philosophy. As one leading activist expressed it at the weekend on Twitter, “Labour will only win again when we are seen to celebrate success, not penalise it. Anas gets my vote.”

The problem for Duncan Hothersall and his thousands of ideological soulmates within Scottish Labour is that the rest of the world has moved on. The people who have abandoned Labour in recent years in Scotland – and joined it in England – are not quite so star-struck by successful businessmen who have inherited their wealth and refuse to pay their workers a living wage.

These days, Labour is expected to talk tough about wealth and inequality, workers’ rights, and private education. The problem for Anas Sarwar is that every time he expresses outrage over these issues, he exposes himself as a fake and a hypocrite. Not a winning formula, as even Scottish Labour’s bland, middle-of-the road majority must surely recognise.

So, does all this matter to people like me who’ve never voted Labour or to the countless hundreds of thousands who’ve turned their backs on the party? And what outcome would best for the independence movement?

Undoubtedly, Sarwar would be a gift for the SNP. I can’t see many of those younger, left-wing voters who were inspired by Corbyn to vote Labour in June’s General Election pouring into the polling stations in May 2021 to back Anas Sarwar to be Scotland’s First Minister. If anything, it’s the Tories who should be worried about a Sarwar victory.

But — and this is where I would have to break ranks with some of my friends in the SNP — I believe the wider movement for independence and social justice may well benefit from a shift to the left within Scottish Labour under Richard Leonard.

Yes, he’s pledged to defend the Union. That’s probably the only way he could have any hope of victory in this leadership contest, given the entrenched hostility of much of Scottish Labour towards independence.

But the conundrum facing Richard Leonard is that while bashing the SNP and ridiculing independence plays well with the Scottish Labour membership, it is not a viable strategy for rebuilding the party’s shattered support base.

From what little I’ve seen of Richard Leonard, he’s no fool. Although a parliamentary novice, he’s an experienced operator, and would undoubtedly be a challenging opponent for the SNP.

But his political intelligence must surely lead him to the conclusion that if it is to be revived as a serious movement, Scottish Labour needs to be transformed, not just into a Jeremy Corbyn fan club, but into a radical party that understands the progressive potential for independence.

At the very least, Leonard must realise that the kind of young people who supported Corbyn in England are those who support independence in Scotland. And he only has to glance at a map of the geographical distribution of the respective Yes and No votes in 2014 to confirm that working class Labour voters in the party’s heartlands have deserted the Union in their hundreds of thousands.

They won’t be swayed back into the fold by tired old arguments from the 1970s about the working class of Glasgow and Dundee having more affinity with the working class of Liverpool and Manchester than with the Scottish landowning and business elite. Of course, that’s true. But the big landowners and business tycoons are not promoting independence — they are the staunchest defenders of the Union. Working people in Dublin also have plenty in common with their counterparts across the Irish Sea — but they’re not clamouring to hand responsibility for their economy, foreign policy and defence strategy to politicians in London.

If Sarwar wins, I suspect his strategy will be more of the same old Unionism that’s driven his party into the political wilderness. He may not be quite so crassly arrogant as Jim Murphy, but Labour will continue to devote most of its energies to attacking the SNP and defending the Union. And it will block with the Tories — informally if not formally — to prevent another independence referendum.

Perhaps Richard Leonard would behave the same way. But I’m not so sure. Labour came close to destroying itself defending the United Kingdom in 2014, and I expect that are plenty on the Labour left who will be not keen to repeat that experience.

And that could be crucial. Why? Because while Scottish Labour inflicted serious damage on itself in 2014, it also successfully blocked independence. Labour’s hard line pro-Union stand was the difference between success and failure for the Yes movement. Had Labour adopted a more open attitude to the referendum, allowed a genuinely free vote of its elected representatives, toned down the scaremongering and pledged to work constructively to ensure a successful transition to independence in the event of a Yes vote, the result would almost certainly have been different.

And before we even get to that point, Scottish Labour is going to have to work out a more sophisticated attitude towards a second referendum. Right now, it’s on the same side as the Tory Party. But if nothing has changed before the next Scottish election in 2021, would a Leonard-led Scottish Labour go into that election — seven years after the first referendum — pledging continued resistance to a democratic ballot on Scotland’s future?

Or would it take a position closer to that of Podemos, the Spanish left-wing party which is sceptical of Catalan independence but also strongly supports the right of Catalonia to self-determination, and this week attacked what it calls the “shameful behaviour” of the Madrid government.

Who knows how the Scottish Labour leadership election will turn out. In recent years, we’ve become used to shock results, so I suppose anything could happen. Most pro- independence people probably don’t care that much one way or another about the result of an internal election in Scotland’s third party.

But with Scotland split down the middle on independence, a change in direction for Scottish Labour could create ripples that will reach far beyond the party itself.