New Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy yesterday sought to unite the party with a pledge that his challengers Neil Findlay and Sarah Boyack would have places in a reshuffled shadow cabinet at Holyrood.

The Blairite MP won the ballot for Labour’s Scottish leader with 55 per cent of the electoral college saying he wanted to “rediscover the Team Labour approach.”

Mr Murphy said he would run Scottish Labour from Scotland and pledged: “I will be in the Scottish Parliament in 2016 and Labour candidate for First Minister by 2016.”

Left-wing MSP Neil Findlay, who took 35 per cent of the overall vote, told the Morning Star his team had run a ­“tremendous” campaign and

urged Labour to embrace his radical agenda.

“There is little doubt we set the agenda on policy, had the most energetic campaign team and the best ideas,” Mr Findlay said.

“I want to assure my party colleagues and the trade unions who supported me that I will be doing all I can to ensure that the policy agenda that I set on social housing, the attack on wealth and health inequality, low pay and PFI is put at the heart of the Labour Party’s agenda.

“I also want to ensure that the 1,000 volunteers who have given so much, many of them young people, continue to develop within the Labour movement.

“With their commitment and ideas I am confident that the future is bright.”

Pat Rafferty, Scottish secretary of general union Unite, which backed Mr Findlay in the leadership contest, said his share of the vote showed that his “popular policies have resonance among working people” in Scotland.

“Arguably, Jim Murphy recognised this appetite for real change during the hustings, because as the campaign progressed his arguments became bolder on issues like taxation and a living wage,” Mr Rafferty said.

“Jim now needs to turn words into action if he wants to start the process of rebuilding Scottish Labour.”