It is only two months since the Scottish independence referendum but for the Labour Party clinking champagne glasses with Tories and Liberal Democrats at the Better Together victory party must seem like a distant memory. To look at them now you would think they’d lost.

“I quit,” announced a thoroughly demoralised Johann Lamont in Labour’s in-house journal The Daily Record, accusing Ed Miliband and senior parliamentary colleagues of betrayal.

Scottish Labour’s fourth leader since 2007 described a party in meltdown, claiming “Team Miliband” had treated Scotland like a “branch office” of the London party.

She departed after being reduced to a “bit player” in the referendum, “an extra in an epic” as one Labour blogger aptly described her role.

Scottish Labour craved effective political leadership and Lamont proved no more capable of providing it than the equally hapless Iain Gray before her.

Seldom have we seen such lifelessness in Labour ranks at news of her departure. No-one tried to persuade her to stay. Neither did anyone purposefully defend Miliband from her accusations.

Days later the mood of Scottish

Labour members darkened further when two different opinion polls suggested the party could lose all but four of its 40 Westminster seats as a result of leading the No campaign.

And to add insult to Lamont’s injury her nemesis, the East Renfrewshire MP and arch-Blairite Jim Murphy, has emerged as the next Scottish leader-in-waiting.

Barring unforeseen circumstances Murphy will take over and move Labour in Scotland even further to the right

Neil Findlay, the left’s standard bearer in the leadership election, is an admirable man. But he insists working-class people must join Labour, take it back from right-wing careerists like Murphy and then turn it into a socialist party.

The trouble is that no-one is listening. Labour is widely seen as part of the British political Establishment. It is seen as a party of capitalist corporations not the millions exploited by their zero-hours contracts and poverty pay.

The SNP, the Greens and the Scottish Socialist Party are more in tune with the social democratic “centre of gravity” of the majority here.

That’s why 60,000 people have joined the three independence parties since the referendum.

Morning Star readers must recognise that the tectonic plates of Scottish politics have shifted irretrievably. That’s what the opinion polls reflect. That’s what these membership figures reflect. The SNP now has 88,000 members, Labour just 13,500.

Of course, the crisis affecting the Labour Party in Scotland goes far deeper than the failings of individual leaders. It is a party that doesn’t know what it stands for.

Its ideological incoherence is Tony Blair’s greatest legacy. Winning general elections because they were not the Tories could not disguise the fact they had become red Tories.

The implications of all this for the 2015 Westminster elections are profound.

Ed Miliband’s faint hopes of success receded even before his parliamentary colleagues started plotting against him.

Labour in Scotland lies

battered and discarded. Yet its

wounds are self-inflicted. Attacking the SNP from the right is nonsensical and yet unavoidable if Scottish Labour is to keep to the London head office’s political line. So it opposes national self-determination and sets its face against the biggest social-democratic movement Scotland has seen in 50 years.

Moreover, Lamont’s political legacy above all will be describing universal benefits as representing “the something-for-nothing culture.”

How Keir Hardie, George Lansbury, Anuerin Bevan and the late Tony Benn would have winced at that claim.

Scottish Labour opposes the SNP’s council tax freeze by counterposing big rises in a tax that is criminally unfair to the poor. They attack the SNP’s plan to cut corporation tax having pandered to big business’s greed for 15 years themselves.

They even condemn the SNP’s popular commitment to free education and the abolition of NHS prescription charges.

Let’s be clear — the SNP is not now, nor has it ever been, a socialist party. Like Labour, the nationalists are wedded to the economic neoliberalism of the City of London and corporate boardrooms across the world.

Their support for neoliberal economic policies is crystal clear, as their support for an unelected, unaccountable and unrepresentative feudal monarch as our head of state.

The SNP’s failure to take Scotland’s railways back into public hands last month was the first of many disappointments it will undoubtedly inflict on its many new members.

It wishes to cut corporation tax “to give business in Scotland a competitive advantage” but will maintain the regressive and unfair council tax.

It refused to commit to a living wage for public-sector workers in Scotland under its employment and it makes public spending cuts at national and local level and blames someone else for the decision.

These are not the actions of socialists. Those among its 88,000 members looking for a socialist leader in Nicola Sturgeon will be sadly disappointed. But she is to the left of Jim Murphy, that is for sure.

Scotland’s Socialist Party, the SSP, meanwhile has been given a new lease of life by the independence campaign. We have received 2,500 applications to join over the past month or so from within the biggest grassroots movement Scotland has ever seen.

Among the new members are the redoubtable founders of Labour for Independence, Allan Grogan and Scott Abel.

Speaking at last month’s SSP annual conference in Edinburgh Grogan reminded the people of Scotland: “If you are a socialist you should join a socialist party. Don’t build illusions in other ones. You are not furthering the socialist cause by doing so, you are hindering it both in the short term and long term.”

Those 2,500 applications were from people who want to see an independent socialist Scotland. Neither the SNP nor Labour offers that objective.

The SSP is clear that socialism, not capitalism, provides the only answers to the problems facing working-class people.

We back proposals like the citizen’s income and the living wage because working-class people’s standard of living has fallen £50 per week in real terms since 2008.

Our activists, new and old, are out campaigning across Scotland every week to advance the cause of working-class people and the response we receive gets better and better all the time.