SCOTTISH Labour’s Westminster electoral base has been destroyed, but Jim Murphy’s resignation provides the Scottish Labour Party with an opportunity. Now it can develop the kind of politics that will begin to build the support for its return as the trusted agency of social and political change in Scotland.

Murphy, despite what his supporters may say, would not have resigned had there not been pressure from union leaders like Unite’s Pat Rafferty in Scotland and the Scottish Labour Campaign for Socialism, which held an open meeting last week calling on him to go.

Over 100 members from all over Scotland attended. Reports of the Scottish executive committee meeting made it clear that the views of Labour Party members expressed that night were influential in the tight vote in favour of Jim Murphy — so tight that it was clear his position was untenable, hence the resignation.

However, I agree that we cannot simply attribute the entirety of Scottish Labour’s crisis to Murphy, and nor can we say that it is a recent phenomenon. But we can, I think, ascribe it to the political current that Murphy represents.

The full frontal assault on the working class and its institutions began, as we know, in the late 1970s. The Tories began to drive down the share of wealth that workers earned — at that point some 65 per cent of GDP — by attacking trade union rights and by financialising the economy, effectively destroying our manufacturing base.

By the time the Tories left office in 1997 the workers’ share of GDP had declined by 12 per cent to 53 per cent.

While the incoming Labour government’s introduction of the minimum wage helped stabilise the workers’ share of GDP, foreign wars, the failure to facilitate the recovery of trade unions by reversing anti-union laws, the continued decline of manufacturing, the deregulation of finance and increase in personal debt meant that the financial crash saw the victory of the Tory/Lib Dem coalition.

They won because voters falsely believed that it was public spending and not inebriated finance capitalism, with Gordon Brown giving free drinks at the bar, that led to the crisis.

And under the coalition government we had the continuation of the inequality and privatisation that was encouraged under New Labour. We also had austerity, welfare cuts, zero-hours contracts, in-work poverty, benefit sanctions and the proliferation of foodbanks.

It is in this context that we have to understand the rise of the SNP. As in many other European countries, people looked to politicians who could offer a simple answer to a complex problem, especially a solution that did not require a challenge to the dominant ideology of big business and their media backers. In Scotland that was nationalism and the SNP.

That is why we had the march of the futile 56 to Westminster. They are futile because there is no minority Labour government whose arm they can twist for more powers as and when they feel that they can cope with them — a primary objective of the SNP’s election campign.

The SNP’s retreat from full fiscal autonomy, the very demand they wanted on the ballot paper at the referendum as the third option, is instructive.

While during the referendum campaign the SNP said independence could be delivered in two years, it now tells us that it will take seven years to implement full fiscal autonomy. This is a tacit acceptance that without British solidarity (to the tune of some £7.5 billion) Scotland’s public spending would be in serious crisis.

But the SNP is futile at a more fundamental level because the SNP too has bought into the notion that capitalism is not the problem — it’s how you manage it. So we can change the name of the pub from “The Old Cock and Bull” to “ We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s Bairns” but it will still be the same rich gits at the bar getting drunk at our expense.

The problem with Jim Murphy was that voters in Scotland saw in him not someone who could challenge this crisis of capitalism but someone who personified the deformed version of the Labour Party that had helped deliver it.

The truth is we cannot begin to transform the Labour Party in Scotland and reach out to the wider working class until we rid ourselves of New Labour ideology and all that it stands for. We need to be the party that rejects austerity, Trident, PFI and privatisation; that wants public ownership of rail and energy; that is absolutely committed to the principle of redistribution. 

All of these things are actually popular.

But many of these things are not deliverable if we stay in the EU, and like the Labour Party, the SNP is not only committed to the EU but is so committed that its leader, Nicola Sturgeon, has said that a decision to exit the EU by Britain would trigger demands for an independence referendum in Scotland.

It is surely extraordinary that the EU, where legislation can only be initiated by the unelected EU Commission and the right to sanction legislation rests with the Council of Ministers — none of whom are accountable to the country they came from — is seen as preferable by the SNP to Britain, where all politicians are subject to the judgement of the ballot box.

Jim Murphy has just been dumped by his constituents. Can anybody tell me how we get rid of Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission?

The crisis of Scottish Labour can only become an opportunity if party members decide to challenge the economic and political orthodoxies that have dominated all the main parties in Scotland and Britain and led to the decline of working-class power expressed through strong trade unions and the consequent immiseration of millions.

According to my Labour Party card Labour is a democratic socialist party. So now can we please have some democracy and can we please have some socialism? And while we are at it can we please have a Scottish Labour leadership that really believes in both?

• Vince Mills is chair of the Scottish Campaign for Socialism.