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WHAT a mess does not even cover it – Scottish Labour are staring into the abyss.

Polls may go up and down but, in the aftermath of the independence referendum, their message is consistent – Labour have suffered a calamitous collapse in support.

Their only real consolation for next year’s general election is the lack of SNP-Labour marginals as only a few SNP candidates came within touching distance of Labour’s vote in Scotland in 2010.

Even if that represents a firewall against a disastrous wipeout, there is no pretending that – for many of the party’s traditional base – Scottish Labour have become anything other than a brand scarcely less toxic than the widely reviled Tories.

What a tragedy as the British Labour Party are, in part, a child of Scotland.

Lanarkshire-born Keir Hardie was the first leader. His four successors – Arthur Henderson, George Nicoll Barnes, William Adamson and Ramsay MacDonald (who is a hate figure in Labour history for forming a National Government with the Tories) – were all Scottish-born.

It is difficult not to wonder what iconic Scottish Labour figures, like the socialist fighter Jennie Lee, would make of the fate of their party in 2014.

Under-fire Johann Lamont today made a plea for unity

It is somewhat of a myth to portray Scotland as a long-standing Labour heartland.

In the 1950s, most Scots were voting for the Tories’ sister party the Unionists, who adeptly manipulated and benefited from religious sectarian divisions.

But the declining salience of Protestant and Catholic tensions and the trauma of Thatcherism consigned Scottish Tories to near-fringe status.

This decline should have represented a grand opportunity for Scottish Labour to develop a distinctly radical, coherent alternative. But the New Labour project – fashioned by two Scots-born leaders, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – reduced the Scottish party to a husk, even

before the referendum.

At the beginning of Blair’s term in office, the party had over 30,000 members. Today, there are around 13,000 left.

The party allowed the SNP to fill the progressive space they vacated. In their disastrous 2011 Holyrood campaign, Labour’s headline policy was a crackdown on knife crime. Where was the

message of hope?

Under Johann Lamont’s leadership, the party have condemned the SNP for abiding by traditional social-democratic principles such as a welfare state based on universalism.

For my own parents, that was enough. They would have cut up their membership cards if it wasn’t for the lamination. In any case, they left.

Perhaps if the party rested on stronger foundations, they would have better survived the referendum debacle. But rather than setting out a progressive vision based on hope, of a new socially just Scotland within the framework of a federal Britain, they instead formed a catastrophic alliance with the Conservatives.

It cheered on Establishment threats of businesses threatening to pull the plug and other warnings of economic disaster should the Scottish people vote the wrong way.

That they have lost their hold on their own voters was demonstrated by the mutiny in traditional Labour heartlands, such as Glasgow and North Lanarkshire, who voted en masse for independence.

It was precisely those who felt that they had nothing to gain from the status quo – those Labour were founded to champion – who were more likely to opt to build a new nation. Scottish democracy is now flourishing and should be the envy of the world.

At the last UK general election, 76 per cent of middle-class professionals voted, but just 57 per cent of unskilled workers did so.

Contrast that with the Scottish referendum which demonstrated that – if presented with a meaningful choice – voters will engage.

But the thriving of Scotland’s democracy is taking place anywhere but the Labour Party.

The SNP’s membership has more than trebled and the Greens have surged from 1700 to 7000.

Nicola Sturgeon represents a more radical brand of politics than her departed predecessor and groups like the Radical Independence Campaign have inspired and mobilised the previously voiceless.

Scotland is crying out for radical politics. 220,000 Scots children languish in poverty; nearly 180,000 families are trapped on social housing waiting lists and one in five workers are paid below the living wage, forced to earn their poverty.

Another 120,000 Scots are on zero-hour contracts, denied security or basic rights like pensions and paid leave.

But Scottish Labour are hollowed out and have profoundly alienated many of their natural supporters.

They face an existential crisis. Greece and Spain provide examples of how traditional social-

democratic parties – when they turn on their own supporters – collapse and are surpassed by more radical rivals.

Whatever happens, the tradition of working people in the UK uniting against their common enemies – today, bankers, tax dodgers and poverty-pay firms stripping workers of rights and security – must surely be strengthened.

It is up to Scottish Labour to decide whether they will be part of that, or whether the party of

Keir Hardie and Jennie Lee face a long, painful period of terminal decline.

■ Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist and author of The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It.

Read today's Mail Opinion on the state of Scottish Labour