REGULAR readers of this column will know that I’ve never bought in to Corbynmania. Jeremy himself seems to be a decent guy, whose rise to power was accidental rather than planned and executed with the ruthless precision of so many politicians who rise to the top.

Since his elevation to the Labour leadership, he’s struck me as an honest man encircled by a tight team of advisers who are way out of their depth. Corbyn and his deputy John McDonnell seem to be trapped in that post-war political mindset that was summed up in the old slogan of the “British Road to Socialism”.

READ MORE: Labour rebel calls Corbyn ‘completely unfit' to be UK leader

We now live in a different world, one in which global interconnections have outgrown the political structures of the traditional nation state while the impetus from below has been to take back power at highly localised level.

As a result, they have dithered over Brexit and failed to understand the underlying progressive character of the broad movement for Scottish independence.

But I will say this for them. They are loyal through and through to the Labour Party. For 30 years they were banished to the political wilderness as they watched their party being taken over, lock stock and barrel by people whose politics they detested. Yet they stuck with it.

They stuck with it while the cherished Clause IV of Labour’s constitution was ripped up by Tony Blair like a used train ticket. They stuck with it while Peter Mandelson wined and wooed the ultra-wealthy and boasted that he was totally relaxed about allowing people to become “filthy rich”.

They stuck with it while their leaders deregulated the banking system, cut taxes for corporations and the highest income earners and took Thatcher’s privatisation programme to new heights via the infamous Private Finance Initiative.

They even stuck with it when their government duped and deceived Parliament into supporting a murderous war which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and has turned the world into a dark and dangerous place. It’s more than I could ever have stomached. Yet stomach it they did.

If at any time they had walked out of the Labour Party while keeping their parliamentary seats, the mainstream media would have been screaming for them to do the honourable thing by resigning their seats and seeking a new mandate from their constituents.

But as we’ve seen, even the most piously liberal newspapers behave like fanatical football fans when it comes to applying double standards. Yesterday’s editorial in the Observer newspaper may have been expected to praise these centrist heroes to the heavens – this is the newspaper, after all, that was so Blairite that it joined with the likes of the Daily Mail and the Sun in supporting the Iraq War.

But it went further and justified the right of 12 MPs to disenfranchise, for the next three years, hundreds of thousands of people who voted for them just two years ago – not despite their party allegiance, but because of it. And the newspaper editors wonder why there is widespread cynicism towards the so-called metropolitan elites.

Those who have walked out have cited two key reasons for their walk-out: Brexit and anti-Semitism. But let’s be honest here. Even before the EU referendum, and before anyone would have dreamed of accusing Jeremy Corbyn of anti-Semitism, there had long been talk of a breakaway. It was an open secret that sections of the New Labour wing of the party were gutted when Corbyn exceeded all expectations in the snap 2017 General Election, and their opportunity of restoring the old order was snatched away.

I don’t personally know any members of The Independent Group – indeed I’d hardly heard of most of them until these past few weeks – so I won’t speculate on their individual motives, which I’m sure vary from one person to the next. But I do take issue with their politics, and with their portrayal by sections of the media as brave freedom fighters leading the charge against Brexit and racism.

Centrism is not the solution to the political disaffection that has allowed right wing populism to flourish. It is a huge part of the problem. In yesterday’s Herald one columnist made a valiant effort to rehabilitate the memory of Tony Blair by stressing the achievements of New Labour in comparison to his Tory successors, by for example introducing a minimum wage and making inroads into child poverty.

As a party whose primary support base has historically been from the working classes, Labour governments have always come under more pressure from below to deliver reform than the Tory Party whose roots have always been in the richer soil of society.

But let’s not forget that Blair inherited a prolonged world-wide economic upswing, when there really did seem to be a magic money tree. Blair and Brown may have reduced poverty, but they also increased wealth at the top by a far greater magnitude. The paradox was that while poverty fell, inequality grew exponentially in these boom years, leaving a gap between rich and poor wider than ever before.

And that was what paved the way for mass resentment against the elites when the banks collapsed, and the debt-fuelled upswing exhausted itself to usher in the age of austerity.

In the age of Trump, Putin and Farage, centrism might seem at first sight an attractive option. But across the English Channel, that arch-centrist Emmanuel Macron, after two years in power, is already struggling with poll ratings that make Theresa May look like a popular messiah. Like an umbrella that’s no longer water-proof, centrism only works in times of economic sunshine.

The SNP should be wary of false prophets from a bygone age preaching the virtues, of softy softly, step-by-step moderation. Timidity did not win the party an outright majority in 2011, and it certainly did not break the densely populated Labour strongholds of Glasgow, Lanarkshire and West Dunbartonshire in 2014 and 2015.

Convergence on the soggy centre ground is not what Scotland needs. If we are to win independence, we need fire, not a hot water bottle.