ALL THE opinion polls ahead of tomorrow’s Scottish election suggest that not many on the mainstream left share my dilemma about which party to back. Many of those who walked away from Scottish Labour and into the SNP camp in 2011 did so with a degree of sorrow; perhaps hoping that the mass migration would bring the party to its senses.

Five years later though, their numbers have swelled and their animosity towards Labour’s custodians appears to have hardened. It’s estimated that more than 35 per cent of Labour voters in Scotland backed independence and few, if any of them, will be returning to the fold tomorrow. Several factors have combined over the last five years to turn this phenomenon from a temporary mass protest into an entrenched, long-term position. The catastrophic lack of political judgment and wholesale arrogance of the Scottish Labour leadership in standing side by side with Tories to campaign for the Union in 2014 was the biggest one. Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown and Douglas Alexander all predicted that an apocalypse would engulf Scotland if it broke away from the rest of the UK. Only the broad shoulders of the Union, averred Brown and Darling, would preserve jobs and pensions.

In the 20 months or so which have elapsed the UK steel industry has been brought to the edge of collapse; ship-workers on the Clyde have been sold a dummy; the pensions black hole has become cavernous and the extraordinary lengths to which the country’s richest will go to avoid paying their taxes has been laid bare. During this time Darling, Brown and Alexander have all taken up positions with global investment and corporate law firms whose core clientele will pay good money in exchange for advice to, ahem … “protect” or “maximise” their capital.

The appointment of Jim Murphy as leader of the party in Scotland was simply an act of madness by an executive that was lamentably detached from what was happening on the streets. It will take many years to repair the damage that has been inflicted on the Labour party in Scotland, much of it from within.

In any other stretch of modern Scottish political history Kezia Dugdale would be considered to have made a solid start to the recovery process. By stating her intention to allow Labour MSPs a free vote in the next independence referendum she removed a major obstacle in enticing some former voters back. She needs to go further though, and stop displaying such personal animus to the notion of independence.

I’m not suggesting that she suddenly starts shouting “Free by 2023” but given that independence has become the chosen constitutional position of the Scottish left it’s simply good politics not to keep banging on about the benefits of a Union whose shoulders, though they may be broad, might as well be made of chocolate for all the protection they have offered in terms of jobs and pensions.

Her proposal to raise 1p on income tax and to spend it on reducing educational inequality is what we ought to expect from a Labour leader. She is also not Jim Murphy and that ought to have been worth around 10 percentage points to her. She is still however, 10 years away from being Nicola Sturgeon and that, unfortunately for her, has wiped out the “not-being-Jim-Murphy” advantage.

This is the nature of the dilemma facing voters like me, whose Labour roots run deeply and who also yearn for an independent Scotland. We feel it might be safe once more to vote for a Scottish Labour Party which is beginning to arrange its priorities in the right order again. Yet we also know that unless the SNP majority at Holyrood is maintained there will be no second independence referendum. If only we could be sure that a significant number of Labour candidates intended to back a Yes vote next time around…

Then there’s the problem of the SNP itself. The party has been in government for nine years and is set fair for a further five, yet the inequalities in Scottish society still run deep.

In one of Europe’s most affluent countries where thousands of its people earn more than £200k a year and which possesses one of the most insidiously privileged patterns of land ownership in Europe the number of our citizens using foodbanks has risen by 13 per cent and 250,000 children still live in poverty. We have one of the highest jail populations in Europe and there is a 20-year mortality gap in our biggest cities. Nothing the SNP has done or is proposing to do is sufficiently radical to reduce these numbers. In conversation the other day with Jeane Freeman, the SNP’s candidate in Carrick, Cumnock and Doune Valley I was cheered by her commitment to doing something radical but she may only be one out of 70-odd.

THE problem for those of us on the “committed left” though, is that very little of what Labour is proposing for the next five years will really touch the sides of addressing multi-deprivation and inequality either. We’ll still have an out-of-control single police force and a judiciary largely comprising a chinless, privately-educated elite from the scarecrow right.

Our universities will still be out of reach of children from our most disadvantaged neighbourhoods and high-net-worth fee-paying schools will still, perversely, be given tax breaks. Zero-hours contracts, low incomes and energy cartelism will still combine to prevent people from being pulled up and out of poverty. I have no doubt that both the SNP and Scottish Labour sincerely want to improve this situation but, as far as I can see, neither has the cojones to do something radical about it.

This brings me to Rise, Scotland’s self-styled left-wing alliance. Rise stands for Respect, Independence, Socialism and Environmentalism a combination of beliefs which do it for me.

If I do vote for this party, I’d have to hold my nose a little as a couple of their candidates have espoused an opposition to faith schools which undermines their commitment to diversity and respect. My vote, though, might still feel more at home here than with either of the big two. I’ll give it further thought tonight.