IF you are watching the Corbyn-Smith show and pondering whether Scottish Labour's future hinges on its outcome you might be tuned into the wrong channel.
Far from the weekend's madding crowd at Labour's Liverpool conference, the Scots party is readying itself for the latest instalment in its trilogy of survival battles. The MP networks have been wiped out, the Holyrood contingent critically injured and the council guys are now left to turn around a rearguard action or see the party's traditional Scottish grassroots taken out.
For what it’s worth I don't think all is lost for Labour in the looming local elections. But a kicking in May and they may well lose everything.
Read more: Labour MPs to urge longstanding members ‘don’t quit’ as they reject split
The troops on the ground know this. Amid some discontent with the stewardship of Labour's national strategy for 2017 at least one significant council area will fight an exclusively localised campaign to retain power. Others will follow.
In North Lanarkshire, the new leadership under Jim Logue will continue in the months ahead to create more clear water between itself, the previous regime and the lurking ghosts of Monklands. When your SNP rivals are the most dysfunctional and fractious group in Scottish politics you have got to think your chances are fair.
In Renfrewshire, council leader Mark Macmillan, an earnest and sincere man, is enjoying a potentially career-saving profile boost and even if, as some claim, he is yet to prove his ambitions match his talents he too will find solace in the quality of his opponents.
Read more: Labour MPs to urge longstanding members ‘don’t quit’ as they reject split
Across the Clyde in West Dunbartonshire, for several years the country's worst performing council, Labour's Martin Rooney has steadied the ship as the bitter infighting which characterised the previous SNP administration has started to re-emerge at precisely the same time as another sniff of power.
Glasgow, of course, is the big one. Here, as in some other areas, the SNP still has the luxury of pitching itself as the 'change candidates', with Labour in power for all but a few years in the last half century.
The tendency to see political murk in even the most innocuous of corporate policy is deep rooted.
But working-class Unionism is strong in the city, the organisations promoting that such as the Orange Order have some capacity to maximise voting transfers and mobilise support, which would, in a low turnout context, suit Labour.
Despite their denials, Glasgow Labour know the lie of the land and would jump at the chance to reach an accommodation with an expected small group of Tory councillors if their very political existence depended on it.
There is a defiance amongst some Labour folk right now, an unwillingness to accept what many cast as their certain fate and self-belief in their message of a Scottish Government taking the hatchet to local services.
Read more: Labour MPs to urge longstanding members ‘don’t quit’ as they reject split
But an acceptance too that for the first time in a council election the SNP has the local networks which have so successfully delivered for their own team in the past. And the finances to back them. The SNP's replacement of Labour appears on course for total completion.
If that happens expect the very structure and nature of Scottish local government to begin to change. But that's another story.
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