DOES anyone know what Labour policy is on anything any more, except that the SNP are bad, very bad? That’s the only policy that Labour have displayed any sort of consistency over, and the only policy capable of uniting a party that’s got more cracks in it than the egg that got splattered on Jim Murphy’s shirt.

While we know that in the opinion of the Labour Party the SNP are badder than the villain in the country and western song who pushed the blind orphan in the wheelchair off a cliff and then sold their tastefully decorated house for a profit, we don’t actually know what Labour itself stands for.

What we do know is that whatever issue arises, Kezia Dugdale will pull a concerned face and demand that Nicola Sturgeon does something about it. This does explain why Labour are doing so poorly in the polls; after all, why bother voting for the woman who only ever demands that Sturgeon does something when we can make our own demands on the SNP ourselves. We can do that by voting for their manifesto at an election.

Absolutely everything is the fault of the SNP, up to and including the inability of the Scottish national fitba team to make any progress in any international competition with the possible exception of the gaun hame early tae greet tae yer maw cup.

They have the word national in the name, so clearly Nicola is to blame. Although if there was an international tournament for passing the buck and blaming others for your own misfortunes, Scotland would have world-class performers in the shape of Kezia and her team.

Even so, despite the best efforts of Kezia and the Labour Party, they can’t blame Sturgeon for the unmitigated disaster that currently passes for Labour Party policymaking. Labour’s policy procedures make the Chernobyl disaster look like a careful piece of planning. Two weeks ago, in a bid to portray himself as a responsible deficit-cutting politician in the mould of deficit-cutting politicians who aren’t subject to a constant barrage of abuse in the media – in other words, anyone who’s not a Tory or a Blairite – Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell announced he was going to support George Osborne’s publicity stunt to introduce a fiscal charter.

The charter would effectively write permausterity into law, but McDonnell was still prepared to go along with it because he thought it wasn’t serious.

It was going to provide the opportunity to have a few laughs at Osborne’s expense, and Labour could avoid being assaulted by the Tory press like a Ned with a baseball bat up a back alley, for not tackling the deficit.

But now he’s had second thoughts and has decided to oppose it after all, citing the need to oppose the SNP as one of his reasons.

This means we are now in the situation where a supposedly socialist shadow chancellor has been forced to adopt a more left-wing position by a political party that the self-same socialist shadow chancellor’s party decries as being right wing.

Speaking on the BBC, Kezia claimed she’d spoken to the party leadership in London over the weekend, and hinted that she was partially responsible for the policy reversal.

That’s reversal in the same way that battering a ripe pumpkin into a pulp and then flushing it down the toilet is a reversal of its growth from a seed.

Kezia may, or may not, have been instrumental in getting the policy changed because Labour want to lay claim to the unique selling point that it’s the only anti-austerity party in Scotland.

The problem with this claim is not that it is merely untrue, there being two other parties in the Scottish Parliament – the SNP and the Greens – whose anti-austerity credentials are far stronger than Labour’s; the real problem is it was only a few short weeks ago that Labour failed to oppose some of the most brutal of the Tories’ austerity measures.

It’s not just that Labour came late to the anti-austerity party and now they’re claiming to be its sole organisers, it’s that half of the Labour Party have refused to attend. And they’re being as vocal about their displeasure as Jim Murphy was about the violence caused to him by that egg.

But John’s also got other reasons, it seems. He’s belatedly realised that opposing George Osborne in Parliament isn’t a joke after all. He went on a visit to Redcar and discovered that people are suffering grievously due to the effects of Tory policies.

Which does kind of make you wonder if he is, as he claims, a left-wing anti-austerity chancellor in tune with the desires of the working classes, then why didn’t he realise this earlier? That’s an excuse that’s as plausible as Gordie Broon telling us he couldn’t supervise his vow after all because he was busy saving the world.

The Parliamentary Labour party is now a seething mess of plots, hatred and bile. To be fair, this is what it’s normally like – put a pair of Labour MPs in a room and immediately you’ve got two stabbed backs, three plots, and four slapped faces – but this time it’s all being done in public.

The biggest problem that Jeremy Corbyn faces is that he was a serial rebel under previous Labour leaders, so now he’s the leader himself everyone else feels perfectly entitled to rebel against him.

This is Labour’s version of reaping what you sow. While the low paid see their incomes shrink, the disabled are strangled in work assessments and an ideological chainsaw slices through the support once given to the poor and vulnerable, Labour are only interested in turf wars and media positioning.

Labour are the perfect Westminster party, self-absorbed, short-sighted, selfish, and ultimately useless. As Labour tear themselves apart, there’s only one effective anti-austerity party at Westminster. And it’s the party that tells Scotland we have no future under Westminster. Labour’s ineptitude only confirms that assessment.