JEREMY Corbyn will today attempt to kill off once and for all the notion that the Scottish party is a “branch office” of Labour’s London HQ by insisting there is no question that Kezia Dugdale is fully in charge of Scottish Labour.

The party leader, on his first visit to Scotland since securing the UK Labour crown, will meet Ms Dugdale and Labour MSPs at Holyrood before travelling to Glasgow for talks with Scottish trade union leaders and party activists.

The autonomy of Scottish Labour was seriously called into question when former party leader Johann Lamont famously suggested that her authority had been undermined because the party north of the border was treated like a “branch office” of the party’s London headquarters.

But today Mr Corbyn will insist there will be “no interference” from him in the operation of the Scottish Labour Party, as he makes his first visit to Edinburgh and Glasgow as leader of the UK party.

Ahead of his visit, he said: “Under my leadership there will be no question about who is in charge of the Scottish Labour Party. Kezia Dugdale is leader of our party in Scotland and I will be working alongside her to win back support for Labour.

“Kez has said that she wants to make absolutely clear what the Labour Party stands for and who we stand with. That is also my mission across the UK. Too many people have told me that they think the Labour Party lost its way. We need to win back their trust by showing them exactly what difference a Labour Government would make to their lives.”

Declaring the stakes were high for Scotland, Mr Corbyn added: “People can’t afford a Tory Government whose policies are making people work harder for less or an SNP Government that is intent on having the arguments of the past rather than looking to the future. It’s time for a Labour Government that would put our young people first and make sure that we are narrowing the gap between the richest and the rest.”

Earlier, he explained how he and Ms Dugdale – who was initially sceptical about his leadership – were “working fine” together and stressed how Scottish Labour was a “very strong organisation”, which set out its own election manifesto and direction for its MSPs.

He revealed how he would have discussions when he attended the Scottish party’s conference in Perth at the end of October about whether or not the whip for Scots at Westminster should be controlled by him or Ms Dugdale.

Although following the near wipe-out of Scottish Labour MPs at the General Election, there is now only one, Ian Murray, at Westminster, introducing a Scottish whip controlled from Holyrood would be an attempt to underscore the autonomous nature of Scottish Labour.

Separately, Mr Corbyn put Labour's collapse in Scotland partly down to its collaboration with the Conservatives in the cross-party Better Together campaign, which had alienated many traditional Labour supporters.

Asked what went wrong for Labour in Scotland, Mr Corbyn told the BBC: "What went wrong was the Better Together campaign," adding that another contributory factor was the “UK-wide failure to oppose the principles behind austerity in the last two general elections".

Mr Corbyn, who has described himself as “a Socialist not a Unionist”, also argued that politics in Scotland was not about Nationalism versus Unionism but "the opportunities for young people to go to school, to go to college, to go to university, the issue of who owns and runs public services, the issue of health inequality, the issues of poverty".

But Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader, said she would be challenging him during his visit to Scotland to “make clear if he backs Kezia Dugdale's position that Labour MPs and MSPs would be free to campaign for independence in future or if he will ensure that Labour will fight for a No vote if there's ever another referendum”.