YOU have to feel sorry for the Labour party in Scotland. It’s got so bad for Labour that when a stranger chaps at your door you’re more likely to invite them in for a wee natter and a friendly cup of tea if they’re a Jehovah’s Witness than if they’re a Labour canvasser. Things have got so bad for them that they’ve been reduced to awarding their canvassers medals for chapping on doors. It’s the only way that they’re going to win anything.

But let’s not be churlish, it must take a lot of bravery to go out on a cold winter’s evening only to get door after door slammed in your face, and to be chased away by irate grannies who are still angry that you lied to them about pensions and jobs the last time. The Labour party have decided to recognise the indefatigable courage of their last remaining canvassers, most of whom are bussed in from down south, with their Dugdale Award for Persistence in the Face of Derision.

There are precious few triumphs in Labour these days, so they’ve decided to settle for the triumph of hope over expectation. Like modern schools where children are rewarded for participating, not for winning, Labour gets a medal for finding the mental strength to crawl out from under the duvet each day to howl SNP bad at the moon. It’s the taking part that’s important. Besides, they need to offer something to all the activists they’re going to have to bus in from England because the party in Scotland is dying on its feet.

If Labour was to give its canvassers a gold medal for every time a door was slammed in their faces, there wouldn’t be any need for them to propose raising income tax. With their canvassers doing the A-Z of Glasgow schemes they’d have saved up enough gold medals to make up for all the Tory cuts long before they’d got past the shops in Arden, and still have enough left over to pay for three new Edinburgh tramways.

Meanwhile Jim Murphy has come out from under whatever rock he’s been hiding under since his cold dead hands were prised off the leadership of the Labour party in Scotland and has penned an article for the New Statesman in which he critically examines the SNP campaign so far. He managed to shoehorn in a reference to how he slept in a drawer in Arden when he was a wean, but managed to avoid any mention of how it’s because the bottom of the drawer has fallen out of Labour’s support in places like Arden that Labour is in such a mess now. And equally he neglected to mention his own role in Labour’s downfall. In Jim’s world Labour is doing badly because of the SNP mind control waves which are fooling the public. This may explain the party’s new-found enthusiasm for medals – they need all the tin foil they can get.

There have been calls in the Unionist media for the SNP to read Jim’s article carefully and to learn from it because Jim Murphy is such a master of political strategy. In much the same way I now call on Andy Murray to learn from my experience as a tennis player because when I was eight I once actually managed to hit a ball back without it getting caught in the net. I didn’t lose the ball. That makes me more successful as a tennis player than Jim Murphy was as a politician.

Labour has fallen off a cliff. From a position of absolute dominance in Scottish politics they’ve thrown it all away in the most self-destructive behaviour since Nero set fire to Rome.

They’ve gone from being the only Scottish Westminster parliamentary contingent that mattered to the Honourable Member for Red Morningside, dependent on Tory votes to keep the SNP at bay. In May they face the loss of every single constituency MSP in a Parliament where they once had 53, and only the list seats that they once scorned will permit them to retain a toehold in Holyrood.

Next year Labour is likely to lose its grip on the last Scottish local authorities that they still control. In Glasgow, their once impregnable bastion, the local party is more engrossed in fighting among its various factions than in mounting a serious challenge to the SNP. It’s so bad that the leader of the council isn’t even communicating with his own director of communications. Glasgow has a director of communications who is incommunicado. Labour can’t even talk to its own communications guy, no wonder they can’t talk to the electorate.

While Labour gives its few remaining canvassers fantasy medals, the political reality is a party that is already beyond saving. Labour has been brain dead for years now. We’re just waiting for the voters to pull the plug and put them out of their misery.