A frisson of relief may have run through the SNP yesterday as the Unite leader, Len McCluskey denied speculation that he was going to stop funding Labour and start part financing the SNP;

not that there would be anything objectionable or undemocratic in a trades union donating to the party.

More than half of Unite's members in Scotland are thought to have voted SNP. It is more the structural role of Unite in the Labour Party that has become somewhat toxic, nowhere more so than in Scotland where Jim Murphy, in his resignation speech, effectively blamed the trades unions in general and Mr McCluskey in particular for causing Labour's crisis. He said that no one man should be deciding who is Labour leader in Scotland.

Of course, the trades unions created the Labour Party - it was originally called the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 - and that is why they played such a prominent role in the party constitution. They hold one third of the votes in the electoral college that selects the Scottish leader.

Now that there is speculation about the Scottish Labour Party becoming formally distinct from the UK party, that looks set to change. Voters are suspicious of parties that appear to be in the pockets of special interests and one member one vote is really the only way to make that clear.

The SNP show how it is quite possible to finance a party without formal trades union links by having an active and vigorous membership. With its 105,000 members paying subscriptions the SNP do not need Mr McCluskey's money.

Ironically, it is his favourite UK Labour leadership candidate, Andy Burnham, who set the independent Labour story running. He said on the BBC's Marr show that there was a case for a separate Scottish Labour Party (SLP).

The trouble with this, however, is that we have been told by the previous two Scottish leaders that the SLP is already autonomous. Johann Lamont made great play of how the Scottish leader is now the Scottish leader in fact and not just the leader of the MSPs in Westminster, as was previously the case.

Jim Murphy went further with his new "Clause Four" of the party constitution asserting that the Scottish party was its own boss and had "total devolution of policy making" . He even picked fights with London Labour MPs such as Dianne Abbot over the use of mansion tax money raised in London.

So if the party is to become truly independent in Scotland, what can that mean? It could become formally a federal branch party, as is the case with the Liberal Democrats. They not only have their own conference but have their own policy agenda.

Mind you, this independence is more apparent than real. It hasn't prevented the Scottish LibDems being connected in the voters' minds with the party of the same name in the UK. Restoring tuition fees, for example, was opposed by the Scottish LibDems but they were still nearly wiped out anyway.

Neil Kinnock's son, Stephen, has suggested that the Scottish Labour Party should be renamed the Scottish Democratic Labour Party. A name change is a good idea, but this might sound too like the Social Democratic and Labour Party that stands in Northern Ireland. Labour wouldn't want to be connected even in terms of nomenclature with the politics of the province.

Really the only serious contender must be the Independent Labour Party. There's a strong sense of Scottish tradition in this because this was the party of John Maxton, John Wheatley and Manny Shinwell.

Originally pacifist, the ILP effectively split from the official Labour Party in 1931 over the austerity regime of the National Government of Ramsay MacDonald (who, ironically, had been an ILP member himself).

The ILP faded after the war but it is remembered with some affection in left-wing circles. The main objection might be that it would sound too much like the SNP because of the word "independence". But of course the old ILP had nothing to do with Scottish independence, which simply wasn't an issue in those days.

Nevertheless it was a party with profound Scottish pacifist, socialist and anti-imperialist principles. If the Labour Party in Scotland is serious about change it has to make a serious change. It seems to me that becoming the ILP and having a one-member-one-vote structure is the only way Labour can get back into the game: independent from UK Labour and independent from Mr McCluskey.