SINCE THE 1970s media commentators and right-wing newspapers have demonised trade unions, showing images of rubbish piled high in the streets coupled with references to “the winter of discontent.” 

Well, if they are looking for a phrase to describe the most intense and inspiring period of industrial action since the ’70s let it be defined by our movement, not them. For me 2022-23 is “the year the workers fought and won.” 

Across the economy train drivers, civil servants, doctors, council workers, nurses, firefighters, posties, teachers, physiotherapists, lecturers, railway workers, ambulance crews, airport staff and many, many more have either been on strike or threatened strike action in pursuit of fair pay and conditions. 

Workers across the public and private sectors have had enough of being applauded and told by cynical political leaders what a great job they do one minute and then denied a fair pay increase the next. 

Meanwhile corporate greed goes unchecked, a Cabinet stuffed with millionaires preaches about unaffordable pay demands and the leader of the party founded by the trade unions attacks those who he previously claimed to support. 

Is it any wonder working people feel abandoned by the political class and are taking things into their own hands?

In Scotland, the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon and the pantomime that followed shows how quickly a once dominant political force can see its whole edifice crumble. 

Sturgeon’s abrupt resignation and cobbled-together reasons for going may have fooled some in the Scottish press but none of it stood up to the slightest scrutiny. 

The subsequent leadership contest went from shambles to farce then calamity as the party’s once unbreakable discipline was shattered by a savage and bitter scrap between candidates representing the warring factions. 

Just a week into his leadership the eventual victor, Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s new first minister, awoke to find his predecessor Sturgeon’s house being raided by the cops and her husband in the pokey, helping police with their inquiries. 

As if this was not bad enough, news broke that the SNP’s auditors had resigned and that a campervan they had purchased had been impounded by the boys in blue. “Carry on camping,” indeed. 

So, with all of this going on and Rishi Sunak under massive pressure, the future should look bright for Scottish Labour — but does it? 

Well, the opinion polls would suggest things are on the up and Labour are within 6 to 10 percentage points of the nationalists. This could mean 20 Scottish seats for Labour at the next UK election. 

But … relying on the SNP lurching from crisis to crisis is not enough, nor is hanging on the coat-tails of Keir Starmer. 

For a major breakthrough, the party has to come forward with policies to deal with the massive problems facing Scottish workers and their families — what will it do about the low pay and cost-of-living crisis; the multiple crises in our NHS; the basket case that is the social care system; reversing the decade-and-a-half of centralisation and savage council cuts; the failing justice system and courts backlog; the recruitment crisis in so many public services; the ferries fiasco affecting island communities; the desperate lack of affordable housing and Scotland’s shameful level of drug and alcohol deaths?

All of these issues affect workers and the communities they live in, but what also matters and matters big is for Scottish Labour to have a credible and intellectually coherent position on the constitution. 

This is the mammoth in the room that the party has unfathomably ignored for over a decade. It has always astonished me that successive party leaders, all intelligent people, have had such a gargantuan blind spot when it comes to the national question. 

If the fallout from Brexit has shown us anything, it is that simplistic notions of withdrawing from complex intergovernmental and institutional arrangements are pie in the sky. 

What we need is a new deal for communities where we see all powers devolved to the lowest and most local practical level and powers only retained at the centre or shared by nations and regions when it is in our interest to do so.

Such an approach could see Scottish Labour find allies in the Mark Drakeford in Wales, Jamie Driscoll in the north-east of England, with Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram on Merseyside and and other regional leaders. 

Building such an alliance would provide a real challenge to Starmer’s unprincipled conservatism and might just might bring former Labour voters back to the party. 

The alternative is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result — as a wise man once said, that is the sign of madness. 

Neil Findlay is a former MSP and a director of the social enterprise Unity Consulting Scotland.