SCOTTISH Labour is heading for another leadership election. Kezia Dugdale, the deputy leader, threw her hat in the ring to succeed Jim Murphy yesterday and Ken Macintosh, the Eastwood MSP, swiftly followed suit.
The contest will begin officially when Mr Murphy steps down next month. In reality, the process of lobbying colleagues, persuading, promising, positioning and arm-twisting has already begun. For Scottish Labour, this is a familiar routine.
The party is looking for its sixth leader since 2007, when Jack McConnell stepped down in the wake of the SNP's first Holyrood election victory. The woman who succeeded him, Wendy Alexander, launched her leadership campaign with a pledge to "renew the party organisation, reform the policies, and reconnect Scottish Labour with its electorate". Since then Iain Gray, Johann Lamont and Jim Murphy have each taken turns in the top job but today's candidates will still say much the same as Ms Alexander did back in 2007.
They will set out their priorities and perhaps proffer the odd policy or two in hustings up and down the country. They will also hope the process raises their profiles, for neither Ms Dugdale nor Mr Macintosh would count themselves household names.
Ms Dugdale, who starts the race as the overwhelming favourite, will tell her story as the "new generation" candidate.
The 33-year-old only became an MSP in 2011 after working for former MP and MSP Lord Foulkes. She became deputy leader in December, a role which has given her the platform of challenging Nicola Sturgeon each week at First Minister's Questions. She is a member of the powerful Unite union but occupies Labour's centre ground.
Mr Macintosh is seen as being on the centre-right of the party. The former BBC journalist, a father of six children, has been an MSP since 1999.
He challenged unsuccessfully for the leadership in 2011, when he won the biggest share of vote among ordinary party members. However, he lost out to Johann Lamont who polled more strongly among parliamentarians and members of affiliated trade unions, the two others sections of Labour's electoral college.
He is hoping the party switches to a one-member-one-vote election, a reform Mr Murphy aims to push through as his final act as leader before stepping down.
We shall hear much more about both candidates during what now promises to be a summer of public soul-searching for the Labour tribe.
But before all that starts, the pair do not have to look far for advice. In contrast to the referendum, which inspired surprisingly little analysis from Yes campaigners about their defeat, Scottish Labour's General Election thumping has prompted an outpouring of anguished commentary by party bigwigs and grassroots activists alike.
Some of the wisest counsel was offered by Duncan McNeil, the veteran Greenock and Inverclyde MSP, in a blog for the Labour Hame website. Needless to say, it has already been ignored.
He saw his party hurtling towards a leadership election, rulebook changes and a debate over whether it should shift to the left or the right and urged colleagues to pause.
"These are the tramlines we got onto after being defeated in 2007 and 2011. It didn't work then and it seems even less likely to work now," he wrote. "We are in uncharted waters. We need to do something new and surprising or our party may never recover."
He argued Labour gradually stopped listening to the people it professed to represent over a period of about 15 years, while the SNP was busy befriending those same folk.
"We need to get out in the streets and communities of Scotland and rejoin the people we come from. In Scotland's new political landscape, what do they need us to be? We need to ask them," said McNeil.
"We do not have long to do it but we need to get it right. And we should avoid personalising it around a leadership campaign. We need to be focused on ideas not personalities."
The MSP expressed the hope Ms Dugdale, as acting leader, might preside over a "summer of transformation" when Labour would decide "what we are about".
He believes Labour has only a short window of opportunity to undertake a radical rethink of what it stands for and how it operates. He and his colleagues will hoping it hasn't slammed shut by the time their new leader is chosen.
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