POLITICALLY, growing up as a teenager in the 2000s felt akin to sitting between two tectonic plates pressing together. On one plate rested the ideas and history of the Labour Party, a party that had dominated Scottish politics for as long as I had been breathing (and then some).

Inching toward that plate, with infinite and earth-shattering pressure, was the reality of what Labour had become. There had been a general, society-wide understanding that Labour were “the good guys”. I vividly remember standing in a polling booth for the first time, still unsure who would be getting my vote, with that thought running through my head.

But the image of the Labour Party as the party of the people was not my generation’s Labour Party. We got the Iraq War instead.

The party that had promised to bring power to the hands of the people through public ownership was gone, replaced by Tony Blair and his pursuit of neoliberalism. Civil liberties were on the bonfire as the Labour Government brought in more and more extreme forms of snooping on the public and cracking down on protest. That did not sound like the good guys to me.

The fantasy of Scottish Labour finally, inevitably, slipped below the crushing weight of reality at the earthshaking 2011 election, when the SNP won a Holyrood majority and the Scottish political landscape was definitively altered.

A few years later, after the independence referendum in 2014, I held a degree of resentment towards the Labour Party in Scotland. Team Tory had triumphed, and “the good guys” had once again backed the status quo over radical change. Now, however, I don’t feel any form of resentment. I feel sadness for what Labour once were. Labour gave us the NHS, the minimum wage and even the Scottish Parliament itself. Scotland birthed great socialist thinkers such as Keir Hardie and Jennie Lee, the founder of the Open University, who believed everyone deserves access to the best education regardless of background.

Now Labour are polling at just 13% ahead of next year’s Holyrood election, at a time when the founding ideas of the Labour Party are more relevant than ever.

There was once a saying that you could elect a monkey in Scotland if you pinned a red rosette to it. Maybe that’s what led to the downfall of Labour in Scotland. Eventually there were too many monkeys on the bench, more content to throw faeces around than bring about real change. Maybe that’s why we still have the House of Lords, after 100 years of promises to abolish it.

However, if embracing neoliberalism was the beginning of Labour’s sickness, the party’s inability to engage reasonably with questions around Scotland’s constitutional future is its death rattle. It is unsustainable for Labour to continue plugging its ears to the sound of growing support for independence.

WITH recent polling showing that a sustained majority in Scotland now support independence, Labour have positioned themselves not only against the majority of people

in Scotland, but against

their own values.

The Scottish Trades Union Congress, the voice of the labour movement in Scotland, is preparing to officially back calls for a second referendum while Westminster pushes forward with the Internal Markets Bill.

This blatant power grab on the Scottish Parliament will give way to the worst excesses of capitalism in a destructive race to the bottom on food standards.

Yet there is something about independence, and the SNP, that seems to push otherwise sensible Labour politicians into bizarre and contradictory behaviour. During the Smith Commission, it was Scottish Labour that played an instrumental role in ensuring employment law was not devolved to Scotland at a time when the Tories’ toxic Trade Union Bill was being discussed in the UK Parliament. Now as the Westminster Government works to undermine the Scottish Parliament that Labour were once proud to say they established, the party is actively working to ensure we remain bound to a rogue British state set on weakening devolution.

It’s time Scottish Labour had a grown-up discussion about what remains the defining political questions of a generation. It’s not enough to dismiss it out of hand any longer, not when that would require standing against both a majority of Scots and the trade union movement.

I remember in 2014 hearing the argument that independence would be good for Scottish Labour. I think that remains relevant now. What could Scottish Labour become with distance from an internal clique that actively works to destroy left-wing candidates? What would that party look like outwith the broken and undemocratic British political system?

All of this isn’t to say we need Labour in Scotland. The gap left behind has been broadly filled, and the radical politics that have workers at their centre sit better with the Scottish Green Party now more than anyone else.

However, plurality of voices is important, and there are a few stellar voices within Scottish Labour, chief among them being Monica Lennon. It would be sad to lose them over a party machine that lets ideological Unionism override the values of the labour movement.

In the face of rising support for independence, Scottish Labour has two options: reform or die, and let those voices find a place somewhere else where they can actually do something other than shout from the sidelines.