NEIL FINDLAY, list MSP for Lothian, began his address to the Campaign for Socialism conference on Saturday October 25 with a story that got a tense gathering laughing.

As reported in the Morning Star, the meeting was standing room-only and took place the day after Johann Lamont resigned.

There was an atmosphere of hostility toward the Westminster careerists who had manoeuvred against an expectation that the left might just field a candidate in the leadership contest.

Talking about the attitudes he had encountered during the referendum campaign, Findlay recounted how while on holiday after the vote a disappointed No-voting Scots couple — let’s call them Alick and Nicki — surveyed the breakfast menu in a Turkish seaside bar.

“See,” said Alick. “This is always happening to us.” He pointed angrily at two options available. One was a full English — two lira (56p) cheaper than the full Scottish, perhaps because of the inclusion of square sliced sausage.

Attempts at assuaging the raging Scot by the owner were counterproductive.

Findlay’s use of that anecdote shows why he will win the contest for the leadership of the Scottish Labour Party. He understands the psyche of working-class Scots. Everybody laughed at his story — Yes and No voters alike.

Of course that is not enough. What Findlay also shows is a grasp of the seriousness of the situation facing Labour and the left in Scotland. He is a member of the Campaign for Socialism, formed exactly 20 years ago, because he understands that the unstated ambition of the Blairites was to transform the Labour Party from a party of the working class into something much closer to the US Democratic Party. Something with no affiliated unions, no left wing worth talking about and completely committed to capitalism as an ideology.

Twenty years ago the campaign warned that if Labour pursued this route and abandoned the working class then ultimately the working class would abandon it.

And that is what Scottish Labour experienced in the referendum campaign.

The loss of traditional Labour areas — Lanarkshire, Glasgow, West Dunbartonshire and Dundee — to populist nationalism is the latest in a long line of cries of anguish from the Scottish working class.

Austerity is biting and if Labour will not defend them they are open to look elsewhere, even if the promises of the Yes campaign and in particular the SNP are empty because they do not address the roots of the problem.

This is because so far no-one has articulated a credible alternative — the big opportunity for the Scottish Labour left.

Just such an alternative is what Findlay offered in his article in the Morning Star a few weeks ago, showing an acute awareness that if ever there was a time for transformational politics, it is now.

And yet, as he is wont to point out, transformational politics are common sense for working people — we need full employment, a living wage, more housing, a good health service, equality embedded in every facet of our lives, quality care services. All of these are dependent on healthy and safe working environments underpinned by trade union rights.

This is Findlay’s offering to Scotland’s working class. Compare it to his main rival, uber-Blairite Jim Murphy. Murphy, in case you need reminding, espoused the very neoliberalism that created the material conditions for the rise of populist nationalism in Scotland in the first place.

Neoliberal ideology encouraged deregulation that led to the banking crisis, it built a debt-fuelled economy instead of ensuring decent wages through effective trade union bargaining, while supporting forms of workfare. It supervised the continued collapse of our manufacturing sector.

And while Britain poured millions of pounds into foreign wars, which Murphy wholeheartedly supported, millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money lined the coffers of the privateers through privatisation and PFI-PPP.

While Blair was arguing that in Westminster in the early 2000s, his “mini-mes” in the Scottish Labour Party mimicked his cries.

While Findlay’s other rival for the leadership Sarah Boyack MSP — environment, planning and transport minister in 1999-2000 and then transport minister in 2000-01 — was promoting PFI-PPP for all she was worth, then enterprise minister Wendy Alexander was telling us that the state had no role in tackling unemployment.

It could only provide a “trampoline,” on which the victims of capitalism could “bounce back” into work.

If the Scottish Labour Party is to be relevant to working people, it has to start speaking in the language of the working class again — jobs, houses, health, equality and social justice and a good joke.

And that reminds me of the hapless bar owner in Findlay’s story. He suggested that Alick perhaps add some sauce to his overpriced full Scottish breakfast to spice it up and presented him with a bottle of HP.

“Right,” said Alick, “and you can shove your Westminster Parliament sauce right up your…”

Vince Mills is a member of the Red Paper Collective (www.redpaper.net) and a contributor to Class, Nation and Socialism: Red Paper on Scotland 2014