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It’s an upsetting experience to be terribly failed by someone you once trusted.

Not let down, like the best friend who doesn’t show up for your birthday party.

Not even just low-level betrayal, like the mate who snogged your boyfriend.

When you value your history together, minor morality lapses are often forgivable and former relationships retrievable.

But it’s a very different story when you find yourself abandoned in your hour of deepest need, when the very person who could be relied upon to step up on your behalf absents themselves.

Worse still, when they know they are failing you, yet shrug their shoulders and get on with what ever interests them more at the time.

And so to the Labour Party.

There was a time when it seemed like the most natural choice in the world to people like me, who grew up in the Thatcher years and knew nothing but a Tory government until we were in our 20s.

The Labour Party was part of our society, integral to our communities, trusted to stand up for the ordinary worker (or the unemployed) against the tyranny of right-wing politics.

And it was our salvation in 1997 when 18 long and brutal years were brought to an end.

I haven’t always voted Labour since then, to be honest. Scotland has changed and grown under the devolved Scottish Parliament which was, in itself, created through a Labour government.

Other parties have brought new ideas and policies to that changed political environment and earned our votes fairly and squarely.

That’s democracy, and the Labour Party was all about democracy.

Still, I always retained an affection for Labour and its belief system: instinctively left-leaning, socially aware, inclusive, internationalist and, more than anything, fair. It represents my default. Or it did.

And that is why it is so devastating to find ourselves where we are now: teetering on the brink of No Deal and allowing Nigel Farage to call the shots with his Brexit-rules-the-waves nonsense.

In the midst of the worst constitutional chaos anyone can remember, a spectacular disaster that is entirely of the Tory party’s making, the nation hijacked by a hardline right-wing faction; when we’re facing the very real prospect of crashing out of Europe in October and witnessing compulsive liar Boris Johnson move into No 10, Labour has entirely failed us.

It should be cleaning up. Instead, it’s left with egg on its face and we’re left feeling foolish for expecting better.

Only after the party collapsed into fifth place in Scotland, its worst election result in history, did frontbenchers start publicly declaring that they’d got the message wrong and the resignations began.

But not Richard Leonard’s, at time of writing at least. He insists he’s staying and he’ll take the flak. Shouldn’t he be taking the hit for meekly accepting the Jeremy Corbyn fudge?

(Image: DAILY RECORD)

In Scotland, nearly 60 per cent voted for Remain parties (SNP, Lib Dems, Greens). What was the Labour Party offering Scotland? No one knew.

Corbyn’s high-handed leadership has exposed us to the very worst of Westminster Tory excess, while woefully failing to deal with the party’s own internal issues.

We now know Alastair Campbell was expelled by email (a decision that’s now being ‘reviewed’) on the very day that a formal inquiry was launched into antisemitism within the party. Even Labour veterans such as former speaker Betty Boothroyd couldn’t bring themselves to vote loyally. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Here, Scottish Labour bangs on about the SNP’s obsession with independence but has arrogantly ignored what the electorate see so clearly and what Nicola Sturgeon is smart enough to capitalise upon…

Independence increasingly seems the only way to protect ourselves from the nightmarish future that a BoJo-led Tory government promises.

Because the Labour Party clearly can’t protect us. Can’t or won’t, I don’t know any more.

And when we feel like that, when we’ve been so failed, it’s going to be very hard to forgive. Even after all these years.