In the aftermath of the independence referendum the Labour Party should address some key questions.

But above all it must ask itself “Whatever happened to Red Clydeside?”

From the beginning of the 20th century to the era of the 1971-72 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work in, Glasgow has been a bastion of left-wing socialism and working-class solidarity. It produced titans of the labour movement like John Maxton.

But in the referendum, working-class support for Labour collapsed. And the great Labour Party bastion of Glasgow swung behind independence. Notably working-class Labour voters were more heavily pro-independence than the middle classes.

It is clear the Labour supporters of independence in Glasgow and elsewhere were not blood-and-flag nationalists. Nor were most of them personal admirers of Alex Salmond.

Instead too many of the poorest of the poor in post-industrial Scotland appear to have given up on the Labour Party as a means of securing social justice.

Nobody could have explained the problems with currency union more lucidly than that smoothest of Edinburgh lawyers, Alistair Darling. But still Labour voters in the west of Scotland were moving to supporting independence. It took Gordon

Brown delivering thundering speeches on social justice, in the authentic tones of a son of the manse to stem the tide.

It also helped that the British business and political elites threw everything except the kitchen sink into terrifying Scottish voters. There were very real issues about the currency, which actually made it debatable whether Scotland would have been genuinely independent.

But the more apocalyptic threats were just that, threats.

Had the campaign gone on any longer I fully expected claims that independence would have been accompanied by an Ebola epidemic.

I served on the national executive of the Labour Party in the 1990s. Then new Labour’s justification for ignoring core Labour voters, like the voters of Glasgow, was that “they had nowhere else to go.”

More recently Scottish MPs warned Ed Miliband that our position on issues like welfare risked alienating Scottish voters and handing an advantage to the SNP. They were told in no uncertain terms that the priority was the voters of Middle England. It would seem that strategy nearly lost us Scotland.

In the short run there obviously need to be powers for London and other great cities which parallel those being handed to Scotland.

In the medium term the far-reaching constitutional change needed cannot be the subject of a hurried parliamentary stitch up at the “fag end” of a discredited administration. There needs to be a Britain-wide constitutional convention which involves civil society.

But it would be a mistake if activity about constitutional matters crowded out the issues about poverty and social justice raised by so many of the working-class voters in Glasgow and across Scotland. Socialism is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

That is ground that we should never have ceded to the SNP. And these are concerns raised by working people across Britain.

It is time to ensure that our agenda for the 2015 general election is not just chasing the votes of a few swing voters in marginal middle England seats.

We have tested that strategy to destruction. We need a genuinely progressive agenda in 2015. Only in this way can we be sure of victory.

Diane Abbott is Labour MP for Hackney North. This article first appeared on www.leftfutures.org