Growing up in Saltcoats during the last period of Tory looting in the 1980s, I remember well the hopes invested in the campaign for a Scottish Parliament. Radical currents for a time flowed in the same direction, and a consensus for change was slowly and patiently built. 

The new parliament when it came started well enough, and on subjects such as land reform Labour were finally beginning to right centuries-old wrongs. Alas, parliament now too often seems like the end and not the means for radical ambitions. 

With the devastation of the Covid crisis, there is big talk about a ‘new normal,’ or the more positive ‘building back better,’ but these slogans lose all meaning when they are shared by all parties, across the political spectrum. 

What it screams to me is that it is not a consensus for change we’re witnessing, but a conspiracy of indolence, and of comfort. It is not just the SNP government which is letting Scotland down, but parliament itself. It’s time for a restart, and the election of a new generation of activist parliamentarians to deliver it.

The Scottish Parliament might have been born with hopes that power could be brought closer to the people, but today it is almost as distant in many of our communities as Westminster. After all, if you can’t put food on the table, or can’t give your child a decent Christmas, what does it really matter where the power lies? It isn’t working in your favour.

While it is easy for me to point to the SNP’s unwillingness to act unless embarrassed on issues ranging from the bedroom tax to evictions and welfare, the truth is that the whole parliament has got a little too at ease with itself. It has become the cosy little club, insulated and other.

Is it any wonder that inequality has grown? Or that a young working-class person in Scotland is less likely to attend, and if they do attend, less likely to graduate from university than their cousins south of the border? Why are we surprised that policy doesn’t redistribute power or wealth – and in Scotland that very much means land – when those making the decisions don’t feel the urgency.

With few honourable exceptions, the question of class barely gets a look in during a political game which sees powers not as responsibilities but as trophies to be placed on a shelf and admired, whether won from Westminster or stolen from local government.

It’s not good enough for a government to hide behind legal advice when dictating terms of market intervention to local authorities, nor is it good enough for a parliament anywhere in the world to allow the skills and know-how in places like BiFab and the Caley works to go to waste. 

That workers such as these – who could help rebuild a better and greener Scotland – end up in the job centre for fear of interfering with the free market is a disgusting abdication of responsibility. Who is it exactly that the Scottish government fears being sued by, and why on earth does that fear outweigh the responsibility not just to those workers but the better future they could build? Would a parliament where class mattered allow that to happen?

In many respects, the Scottish Labour Party’s decline has mirrored that of the Scottish Parliament’s ambitions. We have a choice to make; carry on carrying on while the country falls apart around us and allow ourselves to drift into complete irrelevance, or get real and get busy.

The SNP deserves plenty of criticism – after almost 14 years in power they don’t get to claim that falls in educational attainment, crises in the health and social care system, and rampant landlordism were left for them by a bad boy before he ran away. But Labour must also set out our alternative.

We are lucky in that respect. Our policy platform is radical, on everything from a wealth tax to rent control and housing, health and social care, and on land reform. That’s before we even get to the excellent work being done by Labour in places like North Ayrshire, where Joe Cullinane – a socialist leader – has transformed how a local authority works, leading Scotland in community wealth-building. 

He’s pushing the envelope, just as I did when I started the process to deliver a UBI pilot in Glasgow – and that is exactly what we must do in parliament. It’s not good enough to simply say, “if only we could.” It’s our duty to try to show the way forward for working people. 

Did Mary Barbour at the start of the rent strikes say, “well, if only I had the vote.” No, she and countless others won a victory that resounds down the generations by making the case unassailable, by demonstrating in words and in deeds that power doesn’t just lie in the executive. That is still the job of this Labour Party.

Why is it then that the Scottish Labour Party goes into the next election on a genuinely inspiring platform, but lags in the polls? Why is it that a party with a less ambitious plan for the minimum wage than Boris Johnson’s Tories (they offered £10 in two years, SNP by the end of parliament), is widely thought to be to the left of Labour in Scotland, particularly by ex-Labour voters?

The answer is simple, and it’s no use moaning about whether it’s fair or not: Labour’s toxic association with Better Together still looms large in many minds. 

Equally, it’s no use complaining that a party whose sole purpose is to deliver a separate Scottish state is campaigning to do that. Our job is to find a way to concentrate on the social problems that run far deeper than debates over nationalism. 

The symbiotic relationship between Scotland’s two nationalist parties – the SNP on the one hand and Tories on the other – is obvious, and we should leave them to lean on one another and slow dance into the night while we get on with building a better tomorrow.

Not until we learn to trust the people on the constitution, and have some faith in our own socialist arguments to remain in the UK, can we expect it to be returned.

After previous missives in Tribune on this matter, internal opponents have leapt to claims that I am a supporter of independence, with a fervour that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a chorus of ‘burn the witch.’ I do not happen to support independence, but it seems to me that those who do the socialist case for remaining in the UK the greatest damage are those who cannot countenance compromise with the electorate. 

The ‘no and never’ approach to a second referendum is unsustainable, ironically a point made better than I ever could by its proponents with their use of the phrase ‘now is not the time.’ I don’t believe that now is the time either, but surely the point must be that it is not for me, or for the Labour Party, to decide – it’s a question for the people. 

Labour was there when the claim of right principle was agreed. It helped to pave the way for the Scottish parliament. At its heart lies the political and historical convention that the people are sovereign in Scotland. Surely the sovereignty of the people is a fundamentally Labour value? Isn’t the sovereignty of the people at the heart of every single victory that has been achieved by the collective action of the working class?

Rebuilding trust on the constitution must run alongside rebuilding trust in what drives us and in whose interests we seek to serve. The constitutional trench warfare has allowed us to be seen as the party of the establishment state, rather than the party to challenge it and reshape it as a tool to serve the people. Changing that understanding of our party is going to take time, patience, and hard work.

We must behave like a party created to represent working people in everything we do – and have no shame about it. For me, part of that is understanding that politicians are seen as self-serving and focused on working for the rich rather than bringing about an irreversible redistribution of power and wealth to the working class. 

That is why I once again commit myself to taking no more than an average full-time worker’s wage, and putting the remainder of the salary to work in the communities I aim to represent. Will that solve all the ills of those communities? No, I’m under no illusions it will, but neither am I under any illusion that anyone is worth the £64,470 income of a backbench MSP. 

No matter how well intentioned they may be, it is my conviction that it puts a barrier between the representative and the represented that I cannot live with. What I propose isn’t a hair shirt, it is still a decent income. But I want to rise with my class and not out of it. 

That is a principle instilled in me growing up in Ayrshire, and it’s a principle Tribune’s Nye Bevan and Jennie Lee hammered home in their writings and speeches – it’s about trust, it’s about being clear why you get out of bed in the morning, and above all it’s about whose side you are on.