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Listening to the spin of some Scottish Labour figures on polling day last week was like inhabiting the twilight zone.

People who should have known better predicted the party’s Scottish tally of MPs would rise from seven to nine, no doubt bolstering a majority Labour government.

In the end, Richard Leonard’s creaking vessel leaked 200,000 votes compared to the 2017 general election and the party fell from seven seats to one.

Oh, and Corbyn got hammered.

Against this backdrop of repeated electoral failure, it should come as no surprise that some in pro-Union Scottish Labour want to question core assumptions and start afresh.

Monica Lennon, the shadow health secretary, believes her party should back Holyrood, not the UK Government , having the final say on indyref2.

Ex-MP Ged Killen agrees and MSP Neil Findlay has made similar noises. Senior councillor Alison Evison has gone further by supporting a second referendum.

It is a sign of how far Labour has fallen that the key political organisation behind Better Together is even having this debate. The angry reaction to these calls - some party members are threatening to quit - shows how sensitive the issue is internally.

However, Scottish Labour’s problems are so deep that it would be wrong to think that a policy change on indyref2 is a panacea.

The facts don’t lie. Labour has gone backwards in every Scottish Parliament election since devolution. In 1999, they won 56 seats and over 900,000 constituency votes.

Seventeen years later, the numbers were 24 and 514,000.

At Westminster, Labour has gone from 45% of the vote in the Blair and Brown years, to 18% and a single seat in Edinburgh South.

Leonard’s Labour slumped to fifth place in the European election - polling 9% - and came fourth last week. He is his party’s ninth leader in the devolved era. The figure stands at three for the SNP.

Scottish Labour’s woes long predate the independence referendum. The party selected duds as MSP candidates and was too cautious in Government in Edinburgh.

Timidity and complacency led to the Nationalists winning a landslide in 2011.

The independence referendum, which realigned Scottish politics along constitutional lines, accelerated Labour’s decline north of the border. Brexit has turned the screw even more.

Everyone has their own share of culpability for the party’s collapse: Old Labour; New Labour; Unionists; soft Nationalists; pro-Europeans; anti-Europeans. No one has clean hands.

Constant deference to the UK party - which led to the “branch office” jibe being coined - is another running sore. Scottish Labour allowed Corbyn’s team to dictate the message for the European election - and got wiped out.

The same thing happened after Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell seized control of the indyref2 policy for the general election.

One of the most sensible calls of the last few days was made by Labour MSP Colin Smyth. Clearly having a dig at McDonnell, he said the referendum policy should be determined by the party in Scotland, not London.

Labour’s key problem is an absence of credibility.

As Nicola Sturgeon brutally put it during the election campaign: “Labour is not strong enough to beat the Tories in Scotland.” The Scottish party resembles a high street retailer on the verge of collapse.

This is why party figures should be sceptical about quick fix constitutional solutions. If Labour backed indyref2, some of their remaining supporters would switch to the Tories and very few would defect from the SNP.

If their Unionism was ramped up, would anyone believe it was sincere?

Insiders believe Labour faces two obstacles even bigger than indyref2. One is a growing disconnect between the party and its remaining supporters.

Leonard and his fellow Corbynistas are said to have a romantic, sentimental view of working class voters that is increasingly out of date.

The second barrier is the leader himself.

Leonard’s public utterances are peppered with references to Keir Hardie and Mary Barbour, historical figures of importance to the Labour movement, but strangers to anyone outside the party bubble.

Leonard gives the impression of being in love with the past, ignorant of the present and bewildered by the future. The hallmark of his undistinguished leadership is paralysing nostalgia.

Holyrood 2021 is about survival for Scottish Labour, not growth, with some senior figures believing they could return fewer than 15 MSPs. A new position on indyref2 is unlikely to arrest the decline.