CHANGE. That word got Scottish Labour MPs elected big style last week.

Now the SNP must adopt the outlook fast. Change is how politics will be judged over the next two years – and the SNP have a perception of stasis, mismanagement, whingeing and even corruption to overcome. Maybe that’s not fair, but voters – like customers – are always right.

So, if there isn’t going to be a new leader – and that should be seriously considered before the August conference – almost everything else about the SNP and Scottish Government needs a massive refresh.

But what about new policies?

That will be a problem for the SNP – but a bigger one for Starmer, Sarwar and co.

READ MORE: 'Very tough time': John Swinney says sorry to SNP candidates who lost their seats

Labour’s “new” policies swing them into an adversarial dance space already occupied by a Scottish Parliament they created. And some of their new positions are downright scary.

Take Wes Streeting’s statement that the NHS must stop its begging bowl culture and start driving growth. Totally gobsmackingly appalling.

It’s like English Votes for English Laws after the indyref. A polite, legislative two-fingers to progressive voters suckered into abandoning the SNP.

Worse. Thanks to the great asset sale by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, the NHS is the only big, publicly-owned institution left. The fear of many Scots is that privatisation creeps in despite Holyrood protection. Indeed, that’s why many voted Labour – to expel Tory penny-pinching and privatised defaults from our health system. Tough luck, folks. They never left.

The private experiment has failed in the English NHS, Thames Water and the East Coast train line, but Labour will provide no end to Thatcher’s distorting influence on public services.

What next? Kindergarten urged to abandon play and adopt growth?

Of course, functioning public services do help people get back to work, and back to paying taxes. But there are many ways to deliver. Maybe Streeting could copy Scotland and provide free prescriptions, free personal care and plans for an integrated social care service? That ain’t gonnae happen.

All the progressive measures taken by Scottish and Welsh parliaments over the 14 years England was controlled by swivelled-eyed, Brexiter, free-market Tory loons now sit ignored and rejected – just so many wrong leaves on the line.

And that’s Labour’s biggest problem in Scotland. What’s new for them is old for us.

Take Starmer’s Cabinet – comprehensively educated for the first time ever. That’s not new for Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

The devolved governments have had “normal” Cabinets for a quarter of a century. Government by ministers from a narrow range of elite public schools is an entirely Westminster phenomenon.

Ditto gender parity. The proportion of women MPs is now 40.6% (hooray) which apparently, “surpasses the threshold of 40% for the first time”.

Except women made up 40% of Senedd members in the first Welsh Assembly elections in 1999 and 39.5% of MSPs at Holyrood in 2003. Sure, that was 21 years ago. But Labour women produced these seismic changes – now forgotten in the headlong rush to create superlatives for a UK Parliament that’s largely just catching up.

The same is true of news that Labour has turfed out members of the Lords for non-attendance. Grand – but Starmer will nominate new Labour funders to a House of Cronies he recently promised to abolish. Meanwhile the SNP continues to boycott this corrupt chamber. Retiring a few Lordships is hardly radical stuff for Scots.

Likewise, Labour’s big policy announcements.

Rachel Reeves has removed the absurd ban on onshore wind farms in England – where one objection could scupper a whole windfarm application. But it never applied in Scotland. According to Friends of the Earth, wind and solar on 3% of English land could produce 13 times more clean energy – enough to power all English households twice over.

That’s how crazy this decade-long Tory ban has been. But scrapping it only takes England to where Scotland has been since 2007, when Alex Salmond used planning powers (energy is reserved) to kickstart Scotland’s renewable revolution.

Meanwhile, England’s new Prisons Minister, entrepreneur James Timpson, is tasked with overhauling the dangerously overloaded penal system. Grand. This well-meaning entrepreneur has put his money where his mouth is, employing thousands of ex-offenders over the years.

But in July 2024 he stands exactly where the Scottish Government stood in 2008, when it endorsed the Scottish Prisons Commission report produced by Labour’s Henry McLeish and others like myself.

We had to figure out why Scotland jails had three times more people than other north European states with roughly the same crime rate – and we recommended a switch to community sentencing, modelled on Finland.

But today Scotland’s jails are still overflowing, so what went wrong?

Firstly, sheriffs and other sentencing officials didn’t believe in “community disposals” and wouldn’t use them.

Secondly, a vast clunky and expensive apparatus of community justice authorities was created (now defunct) instead of putting cash directly into community alternatives.

Thirdly, drug-using offenders with chaotic lives often became “no-shows” – repeatedly failing to appear for community sentencing which prompted contempt of court charges that brought them into the criminal system and into jail.

Finally, the snarl-up created by courtroom closures during Covid boosted the vast remand population.

And that’s just the simple version.

Timpson is likely to experience all the above – especially if there’s no new cash.

On housing, one network news programme reported excitedly that Westminster Council is building council houses again.

Whoop, whoop.

The SNP government abolished the right to buy in 2009 and council housing restarted, in a small way. But since the right to buy will remain in Labour’s England, it’s hard to see how the public sector can get involved in genuinely affordable housing.

What’s really hard for Scots to comprehend is that all these relatively modest Labour proposals are the first progressive things to happen in England since 2010.

That’s 14 long years of nothing – except a few progressive measures by councils.

No wonder voters down south are excited by Labour’s policy platform. Their country has been petrified in a lengthy Tory nightmare. It just won’t set the heather alight here.

Does it do much good to point this out? Not really.

For starters “our side” lost. Secondly, no-one likes a smart arse.

Thirdly, despite our earlier start on many thorny issues, Scotland hasn’t exactly cleaned up.

We axed the right to buy but still have a housing emergency.

We changed sentencing guidelines but still have overflowing jails.

We kept Scottish Water in public hands but still have sewage flowing into rivers.

We have free university tuition yet also a class-based attainment gap.

We have free prescriptions but also big waiting lists and an ageing population with chronic health problems.

In some ways Scotland is further along the rocky road to policy innovation. In other ways, implementation has been inept. In yet others, we’ve already reached the limits of devolution.

So, of course it would be tempting to sit back and let Labour come off the rails.

Sarwar and Starmer promised Scotland would be “at the heart of a Labour government”, but only Ian Murray and Douglas Alexander have become ministers.

It’s not clear if Scottish council leaders will attend metro mayor gigs or if our FM will be given equal status to Andy Burnham. New Scottish Secretary Ian Murray suggests GB Energy could force new nuclear power plants on Scotland.

There is already friction aplenty.

And an underwhelming feeling about Labour’s big wows. But that doesn’t alter the reality.

The Scottish Government needs new faces, new advisers, new ideas, new policies, new energy, new openness to outside expertise and above all a new sense of urgency.

A very tall order.

But this side of a dreadful election, that’s the size of it.