LABOUR can return to government at both Westminster and Holyrood if it advocates a transformation of Scotland’s economy and workplaces, Richard Leonard will tell Scottish Labour activists today.

The Scottish Labour leader will use his address to the party’s annual conference to place his party foursquare behind workers fighting for their jobs.

He will say Labour’s “progressive agenda for workers’ rights” can “challenge the gig economy” and shift the balance of power at work.

“Let me start with the Michelin workers in this city, who I met at the factory just a few weeks ago,” he will say. “They told me that Michelin did not close the factory, the market closed the factory.

“Our message to them is that you have the 100 per cent support of the Scottish Labour Party.”

He will describe Dundee, where the conference is being held, as “a city where decent industrious people have been let down by the failed economic system, where too much power rests in too few hands.”

He is expected to warn: “We cannot rely on an automatic disillusionment with the SNP to do the job for us. There is no iron law, there is no inevitability.

“But if we work for it, industrially and politically, we can achieve it. Because I tell you that we make our own history.

“We are getting back to where we always should have been, the party of communities and the party of workers.”

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told delegates to conference yesterday he was “obsessed with tackling the problems people face in their daily lives.”

He said “the real divide in our society” was not over how people voted in the independence or EU referendums but between the many and the few.

“Let me spell it out,” he added, “our mission is to back the working class, in all its diversity.”

Mr Corbyn also blasted recent news that life expectancy is falling in Scotland as “a moral outrage.”

Earlier in the day conference heard calls to intervene to save the long-threatened renewables infrastructure construction yards of Burntisland Fabrications (BiFab) in Fife.

GMB Scotland’s Gary Smith attacked the “rigged system” which has led to contracts for manufacturing energy installations being given to companies abroad.

Unite Scotland secretary Pat Rafferty said: “I had no illusions it wouldn’t be difficult for the BiFab yards.

“Let’s deal directly with the fallacy that BiFab has been fairly beaten to these contracts, and let’s treat it as the rubbish it is.”

He called for Labour to campaign to “secure a future for the BiFab yards for the generations to come.”