THIS week, the Labour Party in Scotland made a brave break for freedom. Despite assuring us ever since Johann Lamont was elected branch manager that the party in Scotland had all the independence it doesn’t want Scotland to have, it turns out that Labour’s idea of letting the Scottish party loose was meant in the same sense as the screw they believe is loose in Scottish voters’ heads.

That screw is currently rattling around in the void that passes for the party’s sense of purpose.

Johann swore blind that under her, Labour in Scotland was totally autonomous, right up until she resigned, claiming she was treated like a branch manager. Johann was fed up that London HQ allowed Labour in Scotland as much freedom as a parent allows a hyperactive toddler with a fusebox, and for much the same reasons.

Without adult supervision, Labour in Scotland can’t be trusted with a plastic spoon.

After Johann finally got tired of Jim Murphy making statements calling on members of the party to stop smearing one another while he smeared his way into her job, Jim told everyone that he was the man in charge in Scotland. I make all the decisions, said Jim, as he stood on his Irn Bru crate and dictated policy to party HQ in the pages of the papers.

The act lasted as long as it took Chuka Umunna to chuck Jim under the wheels of Labour’s battlebus during the election campaign. Jim did successfully free Labour in Scotland in one respect; he freed it from almost all its Westminster seats.

Then the party had to free itself from Jim, who was clinging on to his non-job with all the determination of a Labour MP in search of an expenses form.

For the past four years, Labour in Scotland has been claiming that it’s got all the autonomy it could possibly need.

Now we discover Kezia is claiming that Labour in Scotland is autono-mouser than ever. Autono-mouser than a cat with its own catflap, it still drops presents of proposals deader than a decapitated rat as though they were something we really needed and wanted.

So is Kezia admitting that all this time Labour in Scotland hasn’t really been autonomous at all? The cat’s got her tongue.

Kezia has even produced a hand-signed document that Jeremy Corbyn has also signed up to.

It’s just like Gordie’s pre-referendum Vow, and just like Gordie’s Vow, Kezia’s is a vacuous list of vagueness that doesn’t promise anything in particular. There’s nothing specific in the document that’s been paraded in the press, which means its signatories can claim it’s been fulfilled because it has been designed not to mean anything concrete at all. It’s just a last-gasp bit of window dressing to pretend that something significant has happened when everything remains exactly the same as before.

So exactly like Gordie’s Vow, then.

KEZIA'S cunning plan is that it’s Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party that’s going to attract Scottish voters back to Labour , but only if Labour in Scotland is independent of Jeremy Corbyn. Kezia wants her party to make progress in Scotland by promising things the UK party isn’t going to back, which means there is zero chance of them ever being put into law.

Even if Labour in Scotland was to decide it was opposed to Trident renewal after all, Scotland would still be overruled by MPs from the rest of the UK and we’d get Trident imposed on us anyway.

The real reason Jeremy Corbyn has signed up to the Scottish autonomy plans is because it means that’s one less screw up for him to be blamed for.

He’s already carrying the can for plenty of those as it is. He really doesn’t need to be responsible for James Kelly’s charisma bypass or Jackie Baillie’s tangential relationship to the truth as well.

The Holyrood elections next May look like being as much a disaster as last May’s Westminster election. There’s a very real possibility that Labour will lose all its constituency seats and will be left only with the list seats once disdained by the party hierarchy.

The Corbyn Bounce in Scotland has had all the success of a space-hopper full of crap. But that’s not a nice thing to say about George Foulkes.

If Labour in Scotland really wanted to restore its credibility, it needs to divorce itself completely from the UK party and stand on a platform of devo max. That’s real devo max, and not the Gordie Broon variety. But there’s as much chance of that happening as there is of James Kelly discovering a personality or Kezia Dugdale getting through an interview without managing to say how bad the SNP are.

For all Labour’s constant renewal and renovation, we’re still stuck with the same old faces spouting the same old ‘SNP bad’ lines.

After spending the referendum campaign banging on about solidarity, the plans have not been well received by some of Labour’s English MPs, who have reacted to the proposals as though they were being asked to oppose the Tories properly instead of just abstaining.

They’re afraid that if the Scottish party gets autonomy it might abstain differently and put them in a bad light. Although if Labour in Scotland is capable of putting you in a bad political light you’d be as well heading off to a clinic in Switzerland.

The only way that this plan could represent something radically new would be if Labour in Scotland was able to present different policies from UK Labour during UK elections. But in order to do that electoral law says they’d have to be a different and distinct party. That’s not going to happen.

Labour in Scotland has always been able to determine its own policies on devolved matters, so what’s being proposed now is nothing new, just more window dressing the shelves of which are bare and whose customers have already gone elsewhere.