For all the talk of bright futures — or apocalyptic dystopias — which dominates the independence debate, the Scottish political scene is rather fond of revisiting the fights of its past.

Just this week, flamboyant SNP MP Tommy Sheppard, the founder of the Stand comedy clubs and a London Labour councillor in the 1980s, was put on the spot.

In a debate on “strengthening the union” at Westminster, the Edinburgh MP was reminded by Labour’s Ian Murray of how the SNP had voted to “bring about 18 years of Conservative government that decimated Scotland.”

He was referring, of course, to the vote of no confidence in James Callaghan’s government in 1979, which brought about the election of Margaret Thatcher.

Sheppard retorted: “Given that the administration were on their last legs, the SNP MPs decided to withhold confidence from them. In retrospect, I would have done exactly the same thing.”

It was the perfect opportunity for Scottish Labour to make hay. “To suggest that Thatcherism was a price worth paying to inflict a defeat on the Labour Party removes all pretence that the SNP are a party of the centre left,” deputy leader Lesley Laird stormed.

Some were less than impressed with this approach. “The youngest people who could vote in 1979 were 57 earlier this year,” esteemed labour historian and Glasgow-based party activist Ewan Gibbs tweeted.

“Scottish Labour would be better served arguing for economic democracy and finally putting forward radical federalism than sounding like some old boy havering on at the back of a lonely boozer.”

It was hard not to agree. Attempts to smear Jeremy Corbyn as an IRA sympathiser or Czechoslovak agent have failed so spectacularly not simply because of their absurdity but also because the issues brought into play seem utterly irrelevant to Corbyn’s youthful support base.

True, SNP behaviour in 1979 is historical fact and not dishonest conjecture, but it is likely to have as little currency as the cold war smears on Labour.

Besides, Labour has no need to delve so far back. The SNP, let’s remember, spent decades attempting to position itself as a left alternative to New Labour. When SNP MPs voted against the Iraq war, detention without trial and public service privatisation, this claim felt credible enough.

The youngest and arguably most famous SNP parliamentarian, Mhairi Black, said in her maiden speech that she came “from a traditional socialist Labour family,” asserting that it was “the Labour Party that left me not the other way about.”

In the same speech, which predated the Corbyn leadership, she acknowledged that her party was “not the sole opposition,” offering “a genuine hand of friendship” to Labour.

Yet as soon as Labour elected a leader who had proffered the same opposition to New Labour’s failed neoliberal and warmongering policies, the SNP became scared it would lose its mojo.

In January 2016, Nicola Sturgeon said a Labour government was not “a credible notion in any sense.”

And in the i newspaper this week, former SNP justice secretary Kenny MacAskill launched a vicious attack on Corbyn, describing him as “missing in action.”

He accused Labour of “absurd nonsense that’s unleashing xenophobia” and “empowering the hard right.”

I won’t dwell on the wartime politics of former SNP leader Douglas Young, as that will resonate with even fewer voters than Labour’s digs over 1979, but truly astonishing is MacAskill’s conclusion that “Corbyn can’t change, but there are good people in Labour and now’s the time for them to come to the aid of the party.”

He attacks Labour for a lack of principle and yet he gives an outright endorsement to the tin pot coup-plotters who advocated selling off state-owned restaurants as a deficit reduction strategy (Chris Leslie), branded Owen Jones “you Iranian hangmen [sic]” (Graham Jones), and — if you don’t recall who this was, you’re missing out — claimed to have a 29-inch penis?

Besides the bankruptcy of their politics, these “good people” couldn’t run a bath, let alone an opposition.

There’s an even further irony in MacAskill — and, on countless occasions, Sturgeon — attacking Corbyn over his resistance to off-the-shelf membership of the European single market.

Many of the SNP leading lights once shared Corbyn’s principled Euroscepticism and yet now they champion one of the most reactionary EU institutions in a clumsy, opportunist cod progressivism.
 

MacAskill claims he was initially prepared to give Corbyn a “fair wind,” but, in reality, the SNP has been waiting for him to fail since day one.

What troubles them most is the fact he has not.