MAYBE it’s an age thing, but I do remember elections being more colourful affairs back in the day. Rosettes, balloons, posters competing on every lamppost for prime position.

The mutlicoloured arms race of freebies in the ’90s and noughties kept the kids happy for a while, but they’re all grown up now and the world is falling apart.

Yo-yos, frisbees and flags once provided cover for politics’ retreat, but now the bigger parties have cut to the dullest of ambling chase scenes.

In Scotland, the result has been known for months. A government which has survived on being marginally less bad than the worst Tory government in history has now been refreshed by recycling a leader and the advent of — without any shadow of a doubt — the worst Labour leadership since Ramsay MacDonald.

MacDonald was eventually expelled from Labour altogether, a fate unlikely to befall Keir Starmer, but demands of his expulsion from Downing Street have at least united the leaders of every party contesting the Holyrood election.

Unity on that is one thing, but it’s the strange unity on others that concerns me.

In her last few months in elected office, finance minister Shona Robison announced that 11,000 public-sector jobs (others have estimated as high as 20,000) would be axed over the next term to bridge a £5 billion gap. That this can be stated by the party of government months before an election is astounding.

Even more astounding is that it has barely featured in the election campaign that has followed. SNP and Labour aren’t talking about using tax powers to bridge any gap, they’re both instead talking about efficiencies and waste.

When people hear this — for years — while looking around at a crumbling public realm, it’s little wonder they look to a businessman to show how it’s done. That’s certainly the Reform’s hope. A man who boasted on TV about having six houses is now favourite to become leader of the opposition, and hold to account a government which presided over the housing emergency.

My expectations from the next five years of Holyrood are nil, but I suspect I’ll still be disappointed.

Hope lies elsewhere, not the fairy stories about migrants coming over here to steal what we don’t have anyway, or the daydreams of pulling up the drawbridge.

Last week I attended a Glasgow Trades Council hustings in sunny Govan.

Reform never turned up. Some there didn’t either. Labour’s Paul Sweeney was at his best when he dispatched the vagueness of his party’s manifesto for the detail he revels in, Workers Party of Scotland’s Yvonne Ridley at her best on Gaza, the Greens’ Patrick Harvie spoke well on transport.

I remain none the wiser about the SNP representative, who seemed completely at sea — not least when an Unite Hospitality worker asked him why John Swinney had crossed their picket line last month.

He and Harvie will almost certainly be elected anyway, that’s how it works, but one other speaker caught my eye. Liam Mclaughlin of the SSP. He may be unlikely to be elected, but that has little to do with his ability. Young, unashamedly working-class, anti-cuts without equivocation and he could actually communicate.

I put this to Richie Vention, an SSP veteran, as we talked about their Holyrood campaign.

“We have policies that relate socialism to everyday life as an alternative.

“We’re hoping that working-class people sickened by careerism, corruption and capitalism which spawns these ills will see that different vision.

“People tend to take the line of least resistance, it bedevils working-class people and has them embracing their own worst enemies.

“When they get this narrative that the reason for the housing shortage is all these immigrants or asylum-seekers, that sounds an easy explanation in comparison with the fact that, no actually in Scotland there are only 7,000 asylum-seekers, they did not cause 250,000 people to be on the social housing waiting list.

“It’s the lack of council house building since the right to buy, and the fact that in the 12 months until last September only 4,122 houses were built in the social sector.

“When the SSP advocates 100,000 council homes, that is also a simple solution, but it doesn’t get the airtime the way stories about migrants do.”

In a swipe at the SNP, he added: “They’re happy with their ministerial Mondeos, settled into a comfort zone of devolution, complaining about its restrictions, while doing nothing to burst that asunder.

“They are a party of administering capitalism draped tartan.”

Across the country in Edinburgh, the Communist Party’s regional candidate, Chris Cullen, has been blazing his own trail at the capital’s hustings.

“The Establishment politicians agree on the confines of the things they want to talk about and what they want to talk about is, basically, nothing,” he said.

“If you are there to say ‘hold on, all of you from Lib Dem to Reform are basically in agreement’ on things like taking away phones from schoolkids to penalties for kids that act up.

“What they don’t want to talk about are the fifth of Edinburgh children that are in poverty.

“They only ever talk about symptoms and never the root cause.

“They willfully ignore it because the cause is the pursuit of capital above all else, to the detriment of children, to the detriment of our communities.

“An awful lot of what we see is performance, leaving the far right to talk about material conditions, even if they do it in an untrue way.

“When someone is complaining about a migrant hotel, they are not angry about the migrants, they are angry about the lack of housing, at GP waiting times, at the destruction of the services within their local communities.

“They’ve been sold the lie that these issues are down to the migrants in their communities.

“The ruling class are able to make these cases because they are not being challenged on it.

Arguing were failing to turn up to histings not because “they’re not running scared, but because they’re running comfortable,” he continued: “They are sitting with levers of power over housing, transport, police and healthcare, but they are gathering dust because they don’t do anything if it affects their handlers in the capitalist class.”

Cullen conceded he didn’t expect to “upturn the party political class and the money that’s behind them” this time, but insisted: “Gaining a seat isn’t the point at all.

“We’ve sent out over 200,000 leaflets with class politics on them, and that can’t be bad.

“We’re not just going round kissing babies.

“We’re running foodbank collections and talking to people about why foodbank collections shouldn’t exist.

“We’re doing housing advice stalls, telling people how to fight rent increases, how to stop evictions, and civic work like telling people who their ward councillors are and how to contact them.

“We do that while talk about the broken system and why we need a planned economy, and we’ve had a great response.

“We serve the people first, we’re not simply chasing votes.

“If we get them, great, but we are going forward to take forward class politics and help people.

“If you’re not helping people you’re just trying to be correct.

“A revolution takes more than just being correct or it would have happened long ago.”

Hard to argue with that.

The election battle-buses will be returned to the garage on Friday as a precious few make the leap back on to the gravy train.

While the big wheels keep turning, it’s over to the rest of us to realise and regain our class power.