‘I CAN’T wait to hear Jeremy Corbyn’s speech,” Fiona Lynas tells me as we finish chatting during the first day of the Scottish Labour conference and before the UK Labour leader arrives in Dundee.

Lynas, a retired community support worker, and her friend Hayley Griffin, a legal secretary, joined the party after the MP for Islington North became party leader in 2015, and are committed Corbynistas.

They both firmly believe they will again see, and before too many years have passed, a Labour government in Scotland. Not long into our conversation, the chat turns to the SNP, which they see as advancing “a narrow nationalism”.

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Griffins believes Scotland is not wealthy enough to be independent – a view expressed to me by Labour members at the party’s conference in Perth in 2017.

She sees a parallel between people who want independence and those who back leaving the EU.

Independence made sense 40 years ago when Scotland had a shipping industry, had a coal industry and burgeoning oil and gas industry and all these things, but forgive me, the arguments for independence are the same ones as the Leavers make for leaving Europe,” she tells me.

I point out that what Yes supporters want is for Scotland to be an equal nation in the EU and not an unequal one in the UK.

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“That’s a point, but there are only five and a half million people in Scotland and … social justice for just five and a half million people is not social justice at all.

“I know the arguments, they keep voting Tory, but they don’t – but they keep getting Tory Governments too,” replies Griffin.

Despite the party moving into third place at Holyrood and recent poor polling results, Lynas and Griffin are upbeat and welcome the “call for unity” message which Lesley Laird, the Scottish party’s deputy leader, delivered earlier in her address.

But others are worried. Ahead of the conference a Panelbase poll found just 37% of Labour voters could identify Richard Leonard as Scottish Labour leader.

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One long-serving member tells me he is puzzled about Thursday’s line of questioning by Leonard at First Minister’s Questions, quizzing Nicola Sturgeon on the SNP’s currency plans under independence, rather than sticking to industrial concerns, in particular the plight of workers at the BiFab plant in Fife.

A BBC report said on Thursday that BiFab is believed to have lost out on a vital order for offshore platforms to rival yards in Belgium, Spain and the UAE.

Unite and the GMB described the failure to place any of the order for 100 steel jackets in Scotland as a scandal. “There is a sense of apathy. We don’t know which way we are heading. The UK party is doing well enough, but the Scottish situation is different,” says the former shipyard worker.

“Richard Leonard doesn’t seem to be getting to grips with things. At First Minister’s Questions he should be asking questions about Bifab, not about the SNP’s currency plans.”

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A big issue among the grassroots is party divisions and what members see as disloyalty.

Following eight MPs leaving the UK party to set up The Independent Group in the Commons, there has been speculation whether there would be any such moves in the Labour group at Holyrood.

So far, none of the MSPs have left, but the group is far from united. Earlier this week former party leader Kezia Dugdale accused Leonard of censoring a conference report on Brexit by former MEP Catherine Stihler and MEP David Martin. Leonard was forced to apologise to Stihler, who is due to speak at a fringe event today.

But what some outside the party may see as Dugdale speaking up to criticise a report to water down Stihler and Martin’s anti-Brexit views, some members see as not standing by party discipline.

“Sometimes I just feel I could give my party a good shake,” says a member now in her 80s, who joined Labour as a teenager.

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“People say things and I just think, ‘that sort of thing would have been better kept to yourself’. We need to keep the party together and get back into power.”

Former Labour MSP Elaine Murray, now leader on Dumfries and Galloway Council, and on the Corbyn wing of the party, shares that view.

“What concerns me most is the loss of discipline. When Tony Blair was leader of the Labour Party there were many things I didn’t agree with him about, but I would not have run around discussing my disagreements in public. I was loyal to the leader the party had chosen.

“Until the Labour Party has sorted out its discipline issues we’ll continue to have difficulties in gaining the respect of the electorate.”