ON MY last visit to Westminster earlier this month I met up for a beer or two with an old acquaintance who has become one of the SNP’s fabled 56. Ever since I’ve known him he has been committed to the cause of Scottish independence and, despite having had a very successful career in his chosen profession, he was caught up in the great Nationalist adventure which brought independence to within touching distance in September 2014 and which subsequently annexed almost the entire country last May.

His decision to put a financially rewarding career on hold for a shot at Westminster paid off as he was swept into his seat by the SNP tsunami that has turned Scottish politics on its axis. He is well aware of the risks of swapping a solid and rewarding career for an uncertain one as a servant of the people. But, like many others, he probably sensed that Scottish independence was a cause whose time has come and that there was a sense of vocation about being part of the drive towards the Promised Land.

In some respects it doesn’t really matter what drove him into Westminster as part of the SNP’s new model army; his constituents have now got a very good MP representing them, and far more diligently than the previous incumbent. Whether that will be enough for them to ask him to extend his stay in London on their behalf may well come down to political currents that are outwith his control.

When you’re wandering around Westminster’s great halls and concealed alleyways it’s not difficult to sense the torment of the Labour Party in this place. You see their members hurrying by, their eyes hooded and their gaze averted as they try to suppress the silent scream inside them. “There is outright hostility bordering on hatred from Labour’s backbench MPs towards Jeremy Corbyn,” my friend told me. “It’s actually quite ugly and distressing to see close up.”

And then he recounted to me the tale of the prominent backbench Labour MP who had been rebuked sharply by his own constituents for failing to support Jeremy Corbyn. Instead of hurrying back home to address their concerns, his response was breathtaking in its arrogance. “How dare these people threaten my livelihood,” he declared. In those seven words, perhaps, can be seen the ruination of Labour: the sense of entitlement; the detachment; the arrogance and the disdain for the people who put them there.

Similar dubious attributes could be seen in Scottish Labour’s Gadarene rush to campaign for the Union during the independence referendum and, seemingly, at any cost. I still have grave doubts that many Labour MSPs were as wedded to the idea of the United Kingdom as they purported to be and that their adopted positions owed as much to an irrational hatred of Scottish Nationalism. Yet still, they were willing to share ideologies and platforms with the Conservatives, a party whose core values lie in subduing the people who are the lifeblood of Labour.

And I wonder if I am alone among those from traditional Labour-supporting backgrounds who have been more than a little perplexed at the employment choices of some of our recently deposed and retired former Labour grandees.

Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown have opted to join multibillion-pound global financial houses whose primary objectives, it would seem, are to make lots of money for people who are already rich. Gregg McClymont, the richly talented Cumbernauld lad who was the party’s shadow pensions minister is now working with Aberdeen Asset Management, a firm broadly in the same business as the new employers of Brown and Darling. Tom Greatrex, deposed Labour MP for Rutherglen, is now chief executive of the Nuclear Industry Association.

Douglas Alexander, another of Labour’s brightest and best, is now a strategic advisor to global corporate law firm Pinsent Mason’s, although this followed a stint as U2 frontman Bono’s personal, ahem… world poverty tsar. Who knew Tony Blair, the richest former Prime Minister of all time, had left such an enduring legacy among his former acolytes?

Perhaps I’m being unduly curmudgeonly and judgmental here about the employment choices of former Labour politicians. After all, at this weekend’s SNP spring conference in Glasgow you could walk barely 100 yards without observing former Nationalist spin doctors now agitating for the interests of naked capital. But is there not something that jars about so many former Labour politicians who were sworn representatives of the people and enemies of privilege and inequality, so quickly embracing big business at a time when Labour values have never been more important?

You don’t expect anything better from Tory MPs, several of whom use Parliament as a conduit to priceless corporate contacts for their post-political career while taking backhanders for providing access while they’re there.

Maybe it’s just me, but I would have thought that the expertise and experience of Brown, Darling, McClymont, Greatrex and Alexander could have been deployed wonderfully in other types of paid jobs outside of politics. Each of them would have had outstanding attributes to give to charities and anti-poverty campaigners fighting the Tories’ most insidious attacks against society’s most vulnerable people.

I’m not saying that former professional politicians are not entitled to make a living and provide for their families as much as the rest of us. For me though, socialism and Scottish independence are lifelong causes that demand a degree of loyalty. The Labour Party gave each of these men an international platform and an opportunity to attain high office at the most exclusive political club in the world. The people they represented and the issues about which they purported to be passionate have rarely been more sorely afflicted under this Tory administration.

In a column for another newspaper in the run-up to the Westminster elections I challenged Scottish Labour MPs who seemed set to lose their seats if they might be willing to come to the aid of the stricken Holyrood party. It now appears that I’ve been given my answer.