Labour needs new relationship with London - and the SNP

The Scottish Labour Party's policies weren't the issue at the last general election, leadership candidate Ken MacIntosh claims. No single policy, nor indeed the manifesto as a whole cost them victory. "People wouldn't even listen to us," he said, at his campaign launch.

He is right and his framing of the issue is surely more constructive than its inversion, as advanced by former leader Jim Murphy and others, that SNP support was akin to that of a quasi-religious cult.

Voters in Scotland, once tribally loyal to Labour, have stopped listening to the party to such an extent that the phrase 'Labour heartlands' can only now be used with the prefix 'historic'. Regaining the ear of the voters will be no small task.

Kezia Dugdale will launch her bid to lead the party today, and the election will be decided on a one-member one-vote system under reformed rules put forward by Mr Murphy last week. This reform can only be the beginning.

The crucial question is how much autonomy Scottish Labour should seek from the UK party. It is the lack of anything convincingly Scottish about Scottish Labour that has, more than anything else, led it into two consecutive Holyrood defeats and a general election wipe-out.

Outgoing leader Mr Murphy insists the Scottish Party should not be separate from the UK party. But it cannot continue to be so slavish to the party in London, especially when the economic dominance of London is so unhelpful to Scotland, and especially when the party is so weak in the UK that London is the only place it remains politically dominant.

Mr MacIntosh proposes a hybrid solution - an autonomous party making a positive choice to remain within the UK Labour Party. It will be interesting to see what Ms Dugdale has to say on tackling Scottish Labour's status as a' branch office'. What Mr MacIntosh is proposing would seem to be the bare minimum if the party is to assert its own personality.

Scottish Labour has to take a new approach to the SNP. The attitude of party activists has appeared both complacent and offensive to too many voters for too long. The assumption that after a flirtation with 'the nationalists' the Scottish electorate would return to the Labour fold. The inability to see that it was on policies and competence, not the promise of independence, that the SNP was pulling ahead. These have been the fatal errors of Labour strategy, disproven finally when despite voting against independence, the public elected SNP MPs across the country.

Labour almost certainly faces more pain at the Scottish Parliament elections next year and there will be no instant recovery. But Scottish politics needs a strong opposition, an alternative social democratic voice to represent those who voted to stay within the union, and to challenge the SNP in areas where its record is questionable such as further education and the NHS.

Whoever emergesto lead Scottish Labour, there must be an end to talk of cults, to the sour-grapes disapproval of Nicola Sturgeon's ability to fill stadia, and a less patronising engagement with the views and demands of voters.