Wee Ginger Dug: This is the change Scottish Labour really need to make

You might have thought that, after going through nine leaders since the opening of the Scottish Parliament, the Labour Party might have twigged that its problems will not be solved by finding a 10th new leader out of a much diminished pool of possible candidates but you would, of course, be wrong.

Labour in Scotland will continue to batter their heads against a brick wall because they cannot bring themselves to believe that it’s not the wall that’s taking a beating. When your organ is knackered, you don’t fix it by finding a new monkey.

Reportedly, Richard Leonard’s resignation came after a Zoom call involving UK leader Keir Starmer and a number of important party donors, who made it clear they no longer had confidence in the Scottish leader. This is what happens when you base your Scottish policy on the advice you get from Ian Murray.

READ MORE: Grassroots anger at deal that guarantees Richard Leonard Holyrood seat

In fact it seems that, if anything, this latest change of leadership is only going to make things worse. One of the candidates, Anas Sarwar, is strongly linked to the Unionism do-or-die faction in the party, and should he become leader, what’s left of Labour in Scotland will double down on their opposition to independence and opposition to another independence referendum.

This is not going to help them attract back the 35% to 40% of remaining Labour voters who opinion polling tells us are likely to vote Yes in a future independence referendum. A Labour who say they are going to focus on tackling poverty and social exclusion are going to have a difficult time constructing a coherent and convincing narrative when at the same time it is insisting that Scotland must remain shackled to and subordinate within a sclerotic UK political structure which regularly foists majority Conservative governments on a Scotland which has not voted for a Conservative government at Westminster since the 1950s.

Some prominent voices from south of the Border, such as Andrew Adonis, who served as transport secretary in Gordon Brown’s government, have suggested that the Gordosaur himself would be the ideal leader to rescue the Labour party in Scotland from its apparently terminal malaise. It’s a ludicrous idea, one which could only have been made by someone who has as much insight into Scottish politics as Jacob Rees-Mogg has into how fish feel about their nationality.

Gordon Brown has no credibility left in Scotland. He’s the man who told Scotland to vote No in 2014 after promising he would personally hold UK party leaders to account in order to ensure they delivered the closest thing possible to federalism within three years of a No vote.

However, within weeks of that vote being delivered he was reduced to calling on Scots to sign a petition to beg then prime minister David Cameron to keep those promises on devolution that Gordon Brown had been insisting before the referendum vote were a done deal.

Then he did nothing while the Conservatives restricted the voting rights of Scottish MPs at Westminster and reduced the promises of “the nearest thing possible to federalism” to some tweaks to income tax which David Mundell, secretary of state for Scotland at the time, openly boasted were being designed as a trap for the SNP.

Yet apparently were Gordon Brown to take over as leader of the Labour branch office in Scotland, we are going to believe his assertions that this time he really means it when he tells us that the UK is going to fundamentally reform itself in order to become a federal state.

We will magically overlook the fact that the Westminster Government is hell-bent on grabbing powers back from the devolved administrations and there is no appetite at all in England for fundamental constitutional reform merely to help the Labour Party out of its electoral problems in Scotland.

Neither can we have any great confidence that the Labour Party are capable of unseating the Conservatives at a General Election which isn’t due until 2024 when it is unable to build a convincing lead in opinion polling over a Conservative Government which is the most inept and corrupt in living memory.

This lack of confidence is compounded by the fact Labour’s leadership has resigned itself to Brexit, will not seek to rejoin the single market or customs union and is in no mood to revisit the question of the loss of freedom of movement.

READ MORE: Did Richard Leonard’s defiance of Keir Starmer on Brexit lead to his demise?

Yet even if they were able to build such a lead and Labour then actually delivered this time, we’d just be back on the same merry-go-round and the Conservatives would seek to undo the changes the next time that they held majority power at Westminster just as they are currently seeking to neuter the devolution settlement that was supposed to protect Scotland from the malignant effects of Conservative governments that Scotland didn’t vote for.

Yet this woeful state of affairs is the very best we can hope for with a Labour Party who prioritise opposition to independence over the absolute right of the people of Scotland to choose the form of government best suited to their needs without being subject to a veto from politicians who do not possess a specifically Scottish mandate.

In any event, it is vanishingly unlikely that Gordon Brown would be interested in rescuing the Scottish branch office from its self-inflicted woes. Scotland is not big enough for the North Briton’s ego.

What is most likely to happen is that Richard Leonard will be replaced by Anas Sarwar, or some other member of the hard-line Unionist faction, Labour will then try to fish for votes from the same pool as the Tories and the party will fail dismally at attracting back those supporters who have defected to the SNP in order to bring about another independence vote and independence as the quickest possible route back into the European single market and customs union.