He does not have a job and needs the money normally works.

I expect like Farage labour in Scotland will ask him to stay on since he is both right leaning and left all rolled into one.

Except that the post of Labour leader doesn’t pay.

During the entire period of Labour’s rise in Scotland during the Thatcher years they actively talked down action. They never took any course that would hinder the UK government’s negative effect on Scotland and never made any comment on what use was being made of revenues from Scottish territory.
Labour in Scotland has been a void. The plan for a Scottish parliament was pushed on an unwilling labour Party not granted. They made many attempts to weaken and diminish its power and reach. That was the most active I ever saw Labour politicians. You know on the 5th floor of Meridian Court in Glasgow Cadogan Street. Where Dewar had an office in the south-east corner and a new desk that cost more than £12k. The offices had just been renovated for the purpose of writing the Bill by Chesterton Surveyors. All glass cubicles as I remember.
The conversations I heard there and the deep contempt expressed by Labour MP’s for the people who voted for them, told me then that Labour is rotten at the core.
So it doesn’t matter who is the local convener because the party is a sea shell worn by a hermit crab or a mask by a fraud like Davidson or Murphy.

Well, at least he’s not an MP anymore. Given the somewhat sizeable expenses he routinely claimed perhaps there should be an increase in the Barnett consequentials for us saving the Exchequer all that money 🙂

From the referendum campaign on, Scottish Labour have made the mistake of attacking Yes supporters as being thugs, fascists etc and the attacks carried on throughout. The idiocy of this was that many people voting Yes did so with some balance, but also many voted No, only on balance.
Many of those No supporters will have family who voted Yes, who joined the SNP after the referendum. To continually label those people as beyond the pale was to push them away rather than attempt to persuade them back. Throughout the campaign, Scottish Labour obsessed with providing negative messaging about the SNP – though the polls continued to move towards Sturgeon, the offensive (word chosen carefully) carried on with no sign of deviation. It was inept and self-defeating and the damage it has caused will take some time to repair.

Of course Scottish Labour were hardly helped by the constant bad-mouthing of Scotland (not just the SNP) in England, but blindly Labour nationally kept feeding the Tories’ secret weapon by monstering the SNP themselves. What was presumably designed to placate the English voter, did precisely the opposite (they did not believe the line anyway) and simultaneously pushed angry SCots further towards the party offering Scotland ‘a voice’.

TO move forward Scottish Labour needs to take a few steps.
1. Bscome a completely separate party to that in England and Wales. Able to tailor its policies to speak to Scots and move beyond the ‘Branch Office’ tag.
2. Stop attacking the SNP just for believing in independence. Accept that belief in independence is acceptable. You do not have to agree with it, just accept that it is as honorable to believe in it as it is to feel Scotland is better off in the Union (having done that, it is much more potent to attack the numpties that call Union supporters quislings etc.)
3. Be positive. Stop being negative. Go into Holyrood elections with a positive, progressive message. Don’t whine on and on about a referendum. Make the election about a vision for Scotland’s future.
4. Actually have a positive vision for Scotland and make it a bloody good one.

I gather the SNP got ~ 45% of the vote at the last Scottish elections. Independence got 45% of the vote at the referendum. Why is everyone shocked that they got just over 45% at the general election? Surely this was to be expected. Why would a supporter of independence not vote for the SNP?

All that has happened is that nationalist Scots have started voting for the SNP in Westminster elections, as well as Scottish ones. And since the unionist vote is split amongst three parties, the nationalists naturally sweep every seat.

As Thomas says in his quote

During the entire period of Labour’s rise in Scotland during the Thatcher years they actively talked down action. They never took any course that would hinder the UK government’s negative effect on Scotland and never made any comment on what use was being made of revenues from Scottish territory.

I don’t know about Scotland, but if the behaviour of Labour councils in England is anything to go by, then they would have done their damnedest to make their constituents suffer in the perverse belief that everything is about maintaining a hatred of “The Tories”. Well, now maybe they’ll learn that a party can’t just define itself by who it’s against, but that it needs to define itself by what it’s for, and this means trying to help your constituents rather than amplifying the effects of Conservative policy in the hope of winning the hate-vote.