SIX WEEKS on from the general election which saw the Tories returned as a majority government, Labour is wallowing in uncertainty about its own future rather than that of the country and its people’s prospects. So, where now?

Well how about a wee bit less of the snapping and sniping at each other, while Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne plan their next austerity assault on us all, particularly targeting our low-paid, disabled and disadvantaged fellow citizens as they go.

As we’re all aware, the SNP won 56 out of the 59 Westminster constituencies in Scotland and has set out a programme which will aim to oppose austerity cuts and cut Trident from future budgets — as we say here: “Bairns, not Bombs.”

That’s a policy direction that’ll strike a chord with electorates across these islands, not only in pro-independence heartlands such as Clydeside and Dundee.

So it rings hollow for Yvette Cooper, in her bid to win the Labour leadership contest, to say that she will never countenance a deal with the SNP. Who is she reaching out to by saying that?

Surely not to those under threat from further Tory attacks on ordinary people’s living standards, the welfare state and workers’ rights. Can it merely be an attempt to convince the right-wing elements of the press and media that the “sweaty sock” Scots won’t be pulling the strings of any future Labour administration she may be in control of, no matter what the electoral arithmetic?

For those of us who are, quite rightly, not influential in Labour’s selection procedures, it does seem that lessons may not have been learned following last month’s results. The idea that there’s just been some hiatus in the natural order, where the Tories are elected to vandalise society and that Labour can come in and tweak it back to some semblance of consensual normality, is wrong in so many ways.

There needs to be a re-evaluation of left politics in Britain; one that will lead to a rebalancing of expectations rather than one where the slow drift towards the US system of right-wing or further right-wing is all we can expect.

I would be loath to put the Mark of Cain on Jeremy Corbyn, but I’ll name him as a better option for his party’s leadership as I believe that he is not alone in that party in desiring to challenge the Tory austerity plans and in wanting to see an end to the madness of another 50 years of the Trident project.

I would hope that in the months and years to come a clearer-minded approach to co-operation between parties of the left and with a belief in society will become the norm.

If not then when future elections and referendums come around we will remember which parties and leaders failed to put the people first.

• Bill Kidd is SNP MSP for Anniesland.