THE LORD alone knows when reality will bite and Scotland’s Conservative commentariat are forced to admit that, far from rendering a second independence referendum a more distant prospect, last week’s election results brought it a step or two nearer. Though, in their current euphoric state, Conservative commentators will also tell you that The Almighty, if he’d had a vote, probably went one and two for the Tories on His celestial voting slips.

Once they have all calmed down and finished their toasts to Monsieur Victor D’Hondt for giving them an income while they do their crosswords most Conservative MSPs will wonder what all the fuss was about. After a third successive electoral victory for the SNP in which they polled an unprecedented one million-plus votes, Scotland, it seems, has still not reached “peak-Nat”, to use Ruth Davidson’s hubristic phrase. Indeed, for those of us who have encouraged Nicola Sturgeon’s government to be a little more adventurous on social reform, last week’s results constituted a win-win scenario: the pro-independence interest at Holyrood still enjoys a comfortable majority and the Greens’ success offers the possibility of forcing the SNP to match their honeyed sentiments on making Scotland a fairer nation with some action.

Recent posts from the devastated camp of the Labour Party in Scotland are also encouraging in this respect. The prevailing wisdom in the days following the Holyrood results has suggested that Labour were squeezed out in a straight fight between nationalists and Unionists, and that the party now occupies a constitutional never-never land in which it is destined to wander for all time. If recent comments by a trio of senior Labour figures are anything to go by though, it is the Holyrood Tories who can become squeezed into utter irrelevance. Such a desirable outcome however, depends on some adroit back-door diplomacy between the SNP and Labour as well as each of them deploying a grown-up attitude.

Henry McLeish, Labour’s former leader in Scotland, who once described himself to me as a ‘reluctant Unionist’ yesterday held out the beguiling possibility of his party developing a much more dynamic and proactive strategy on the constitutional question than anything they’ve previously had on this issue. His comments immediately followed those of Alex Rowley, Labour’s Scottish deputy leader, who cited the party’s failure to embrace genuine Home Rule as the principal reason for its latest electoral collapse. On Sunday, Anas Sarwar, one of Labour’s new MSPs and a former deputy leader of the party in Scotland, admitted that they had under-estimated how much the constitutional question would loom over the Holyrood 2016 campaign.

McLeish said: “We should be offering up a referendum on a new alternative of real home rule. I can’t see an alternative way forward [for Scottish Labour] and if we’re serious about Scotland’s future people deserve choices. We are not going back to the old days and I like the idea of the absolute sovereignty of the Scottish people.”

McLeish, who was Labour First Minister between 2000 and 2001, said that Scots should have a Real Home Rule option alongside one for full independence. If Labour in Scotland was to adopt this policy – and the comments of Rowley and Sarwar suggest that this will be the dominant theme in the party’s post-election inquests – it will achieve two things. Most significantly for Labour, it permits them the opportunity to put a dog in the constitutional fight. Just as importantly, it allows the party to align themselves more with the pro-independence parties without having to support fully the cause of independence. As such, a powerful and unbeatable tripartite Independence/Home Rule alliance would emerge in Holyrood and leave the Scottish Tories looking like vegans at a Highland Show.

There is no appetite in the Labour Party in Scotland to replace Kezia Dugdale as leader amidst widespread recognition that she fought a good election on sound socialist principles in a political landscape that had left her party marooned. Dugdale though, must make good her second chance. I would hope that Messrs Rowley and Sarwar had accorded her the courtesy of giving her advance notice of their comments and that McLeish will be offering to expound on his own theme to her in more detail. Just as the SNP’s main challenge before the next independence referendum is to develop a much more robust and properly-researched position on currency and revenues so Scottish Labour’s is to establish a more intellectually dynamic position on the independence question. And they must never, ever repeat their catastrophic mistake of 2014 which saw them sleep-walking into adopting an unthinkingly hostile attitude to Scottish independence. This prospect should hold no fears for them and could even offer them salvation as a meaningful political force in Scotland.

It is also vital that the party utterly rejects the advice of Unionists such as John McTernan and Brian Wilson who have each suggested that the party move back to re-occupy a Blairite, centrist position; to do so now would simply risk them being regarded as Tory-lite. The left in Scotland has now gathered around independence or authentic devolution and this is where Labour in Scotland also needs to be, preferably with a clear message of its own. They must also push the SNP to move for a referendum sooner rather than later. For, it is only after Scotland’s constitutional future is settled one way or another that Labour in Scotland can begin to recover.

Nicola Sturgeon must also heed the lesson of last week’s electoral outcome. Independence is still the only game in town and she can’t wander through the next five years speaking airily of still being “committed to independence” or “seeking to build the case” for it. If Labour in Scotland does the wise thing and moves clearly towards independence or much greater devolution she must be ready to receive them and then be prepared to strike out for self-determination. She could do so in the knowledge that Labour in Scotland will not repeat the folly of Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown and permit itself to be used as an instrument of Westminster’s pro-Union propaganda.