IN the 117-year history of the party, it’s difficult to think of a more depressing moment. That was the damning verdict of a senior Scottish Labour figure after what he described as an "election disaster".

Yet the leader who took the party to this catastrophic low apparently "wants to stay on". “It’s nonsense,” was the senior Labour man's withering conclusion. A perfectly reasonable and rational response to such a humiliating result.

But the contest in question was the 2015 General Election, not this year’s European elections, and the words came from Labour MSP Neil Findlay.

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In his book Socialism & Hope – available on Amazon like all good socialist tomes – Mr Findlay described the loss of seats as staggering and expressed incredulity that Jim Murphy wanted to stay on after taking the party to just 24 per cent.

So what should happen if Scottish Labour plunges to a pitiful nine per cent? That, of course, is entirely different. In this scenario, Mr Findlay believes people should be "coming together to support" the leader.

The sophistry in Mr Findlay’s resignation letter was something to behold. If anyone knows all about "eternal, internal fighting" within Labour, it’s the man who wrote the book on it.

Yet, truth be told, Scottish Labour will miss him. He is a formidable campaigner.

His work to expose the scandals of mesh implants and blacklisting in the construction industry, to name just two fights he took on, has transformed lives.

And while Scottish Labour will miss him, the SNP certainly won’t – testament to his robustness in the debating chamber.

I’m confident we will hear a lot from Mr Findlay from the backbenches before he stands down from parliament in 2021, not least on the issue of Brexit where he can continue to freely promote his own Euroscepticism.

He shares that long-standing conviction of Euroscepticism with his close friend, Jeremy Corbyn, which was on display yet again this week.

The UK leader still wants Labour to magically secure a better Brexit deal, refusing – even after his election humiliation - to commit to campaigning for a People’s Vote.

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He remains the liability for the party that he was before May’s election. The Corbyn Project has failed, and nowhere is that clearer than in Scotland.

It has been obvious for some time, even though some in Labour pretend otherwise.

The 2017 General Election campaign saw a revival of sorts for the party in Scotland despite Mr Corbyn’s attempts to scupper it.

Messaging that was targeted, clear, and distinctly Scottish won voters back, only for the UK leader to repeatedly hit the reset button with his failure to stick to a basic script on the constitution.

The six gains the party made north of the order could have been twice as many if it wasn’t for Mr Corbyn.

When constitutional politics divides the country, you have to pick a side - even if you despise those divisions and desperately want to end them.

I couldn’t put it better than the senior Scottish Labour figure who predicted: “The post-rational politics in the aftermath of the [independence] referendum will see divisions grow as people maintain allegiance to one side or the other, dismissing fact as propaganda and for that we will all lose out.”

More wise words from Mr Findlay, written before he decided to run an irrational political campaign.

The 2019 election campaign was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish, and nearly everyone in Labour knew it. The party offered nothing but ambiguity on the one issue that the overwhelming majority of people were voting on.

The shambolic decision-making process hit home when the party’s free-post leaflet landed on doormats, emblazoned with a photo of Jeremy Corbyn - a leader whose woeful performance is rated worse than even Theresa May’s by voters in Scotland.

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Those who support Mr Corbyn have claimed that Labour suffered because its message was "complex". What an insult to voters. People understood it perfectly well – they just didn’t like it and they voted against it.

As for Scottish leader Richard Leonard, he insists he is too long in the tooth to be a Corbynista. If that’s the case, why has he aligned himself so much to Mr Corbyn that the phrase branch office is no longer just a jibe from the SNP, but a fact-based statement?

It doesn’t look like Mr Leonard is going anywhere, and he at least has the advantage that so few voters know who he is that he can restart his leadership.

Within hours of the election catastrophe, he swung behind a People’s Vote. It goes without saying it was too little too late, and I suspect many voters will not believe the sudden U-turn.

There must be a genuine commitment to it if there is to be any hope of stemming the flow of supporters towards the Lib-Dems.

The proof will come when Mr Leonard stands up to Mr Corbyn and calls him out for his failure to support a final say on Brexit. That should probably start, well, yesterday.

Mr Leonard also needs to recognise that too many people who act in his name only really care about the doomed Corbyn Project. They are not helping him – they are driving people away from the party, which of course is precisely what they want: a purge of the moderates.

It’s time for Mr Leonard to be his own man and to use the hard-fought autonomy that his many predecessors demanded and eventually won.

A lot can change before the next Holyrood elections in 2021. But if Scottish Labour doesn’t change, then it will be extinguished as a force in Scottish politics.

Brexit has exposed fault lines in the United Kingdom that have placed the Union under incredible strain. The fate of the Union will largely lie in the hands of the next Tory Prime Minister, with Boris Johnson by far the greatest risk to its survival. The SNP will not miss a gift-wrapped opportunity like that.

The Referendum Bill put forward by the nationalists this week is nothing but a charade, as political reality means there will not be another independence referendum before 2021.

If, however, the SNP stands on a clear mandate and secures a pro-independence majority at the next Holyrood election, the Prime Minister of the day will probably have little choice but to grant the referendum.

The steeper the decline of Scottish Labour, the greater the chance of an SNP landslide.

If the party of socialism and hope wants to avoid the splintering of the UK, it needs to dramatically change.