JOHANN Lamont has now steered Scottish Labour through three conferences since taking over as leader towards the end of 2011.

Her first, in Dundee, barely three months after landing the job, was simply about getting through the weekend.

Last year, in Inverness, was about building her profile and attempting to establishing herself as a tough, serious, credible alternative to Alex Salmond.

The past three days in Perth have had a much broader purpose: an operation on all fronts to reposition Scottish Labour firmly to the left of the SNP and to reclaim the banner of social justice.

Ms Lamont, in a rapturously received keynote address on Saturday afternoon, said the same as Ed Miliband, who said the same as Anas Sarwar, who said the same as Gordon Brown.

Labour governments in Westminster and Holyrood would raise the top rate of income tax for the rich, they reminded us.

Alex Salmond, as First Minister of an independent Scotland, would not.

Labour would tax bankers' bonuses. The SNP would cut corporation tax.

The message is aimed squarely at traditional Labour supporters (or those who would have been in decades past) who polling suggests are open to Mr Salmond's claim that independence is the only surefire way to remove the Conservatives.

Whether it persuades them to vote No in September - and to stick with Labour in next year's Westminster election and the 2016 Holyrood poll - remains to be seen.

But it's clear from the conference just ended that it has gone down well with Labour's grassroots activists.

As Mr Sarwar claimed during his rally-the-troops, conference-closing speech: this was the biggest and brightest Labour gathering since that crushing election defeat three years ago, that led to a change at the top.

Yet the mood was a long, long way from the kind of pure conference euphoria which preceded the SNP's victories in 2007 and 2011.

Labour's responsibility to deliver a No vote in the referendum weighs heavily and yesterday's ICM poll, showing the gap narrowing significantly. "Dispel any sense of complacency," was Ms Lamont's final message.