HAD someone of the rhetorical flair and passion of, say, Tony Benn made Richard Leonard’s speech to Scottish Labour’s Spring Conference on Saturday, it would have been front-page news across the UK. This is not to pick fault gratuitously with Mr Leonard, the Scottish Labour leader, for his lack of charisma.

True, he is not a great platform orator and his TV interviews are often cringeworthy. But, style aside, if you take the time to look at the content of Leonard’s conference speech, it has shifted Scottish Labour further left politically than at any time since the early 1980s.

And that should interest the SNP and the wider Yes movement in the run-up to the 2021 Holyrood elections.

Labour is trailing third in the polls in Scotland. At a UK level the party has nose-dived despite the abject incompetence and heartlessness of a Tory Cabinet full of nonentities such as Chris Grayling, Jeremy Hunt and Karen Bradley. If Labour can’t see off Theresa May’s Government, what Tory government can it defeat?

Yet we said the same when the snap election was called in 2017, when the Tories had a massive 20-point lead over Labour. Labour’s moderately radical election manifesto – cribbing free university tuition fees from the SNP – nearly closed the gap with the Conservatives in just four weeks. Don’t imagine it can’t happen again if we get too complacent north of the Border.

Which is why we must look more closely at what Richard Leonard said on Saturday. First and foremost, He gave substance to Labour’s demand for an end to austerity by proclaiming: “Scotland needs an annual wealth tax.” He went further by implying this should be levied on land ownership. Leonard is drawing on ideas prepared by an internal party commission chaired by Christine Cooper, the Marxist accountant – not an oxymoron – and professor at the University of Edinburgh Business School.

UK Labour have dabbled with a wealth tax but never fully committed themselves. Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 manifesto was classically ambivalent: “We will … consider new options such as a land value tax, to ensure local government has sustainable funding for the long term.” Parties always “consider” and “review” when they wish to hint at radicalism but are unwilling to frighten middle-class voters. Leonard has gone a bit further. Should we give him the benefit of the doubt?

To date, Scottish Labour have employed the tactic of blaming the SNP Government for “passing on Tory austerity”. Successive SNP governments have, in fact, found numerous creative wheezes to offset Tory cuts, thus mitigating the bedroom tax and avoiding university tuition fees. However, nobody claims a Scotland trapped in the Union can escape all the Tory cuts – thanks of course to Labour’s self-interested campaign to keep Scotland in that Union in 2014.

Sensible folk laugh when Scottish Labour come up with an endless list of things they would spend money on, if Leonard and Co ever got elected. We all know that Scotland’s devolved revenue base is just too small to squeeze extra public cash, short of raising income tax on middle earners such as teachers and nurses.

Besides, every time an SNP government has tried to be creative in finding new tax revenues, it is the supposed firebrands in Scottish Labour who cry foul. John Swinney’s plan to tax supermarket monopolies (the “Tesco tax”) was opposed by Labour, as is giving local authorities the right to surcharge private car parking. Incidentally, the latter piece of Labour opportunism gives the lie to Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to the conference, which cited the need to reduce emissions to zero as “a socialist priority”.

Scottish Labour’s lamentable track record of failing to support actual, real tax rises on capitalist monopolies should make us suspicious of Richard Leonard’s ultimate commitment to a wealth tax. It is the sort of policy that is easy to promise when you are third in the polls. On the other hand, Leonard is correct to flag up that the only realistic way of increasing public receipts is via such a wealth tax.

According the official UK national balance sheet, 51% of all assets (by value) are held in the form of land – it is an even higher percentage in Scotland. That’s greater than the average in the other G7 industrial countries, where only 39% of wealth is held as land. In Germany, it is a paltry 26%, because they prefer investing in making things over owning grouse moors. Let’s tax this unproductive wealth and put it to use.

With SNP, Green and Labour votes combined, a wealth tax could sail though Holyrood. The SNP government should establish an all-party commission to draw up the practical details.

I expect that the more conservative Labour MSPs will take fright. In fact, I’m rather doubtful that Leonard has a majority in his Holyrood team for the proposals he made on Saturday. Why don’t we help him find out?

Leonard went beyond a wealth tax to call for full-bloodied socialist planning and nationalisation: “We need a plan for the economy which goes beyond the market … we simply cannot be neutral on the question of ownership …” By way of example, he proposed not only taking all bus services in Scotland into public ownership, and giving young people free fares, but also manufacturing green buses locally.

We haven’t heard this sort of language in the Labour Party since the 1950s. It is proof that the ideological wind has shifted. Neo-liberal capitalism has failed, as the new Labour Prime Minister in New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, said last week (SNP Growth Commission please note). We need a new economic paradigm. But I worry that Leonard – with his trade union bureaucrat background – is still working with a top-down, command approach that has failed too often before.

Leonard’s bureaucratic version of socialism is evident in his toxic aversion to Scottish independence – to the point of rejecting indyref2 even when it commands a popular mandate. But popular democracy, self-management and de-centralisation surely lie at the heart of any genuine socialist movement. If he can’t live with people voting, if he insists on a Stalinist version of socialism run from the same Westminster power centre as before, how can we believe Leonard will deliver a genuine alternative to capitalism?

Rather, a genuine socialist would argue: “Scots have a right to self-determination, which in practical terms means the right of their elected parliament to call a referendum when it wants, with the rest of the UK accepting the result.

“Let’s agree that obvious democratic point and move on to cooperating on introducing a wealth tax and public ownership as fast as we can.”

Under Leonard, Scottish Labour has moved leftwards – ostensibly at any rate. The SNP and wider Yes movement must respond rather than ignore that fact. You do not respond to sectarians by being sectarian. We answer best by offering a sharper programme of socialist reform and challenging socialists in Labour to join us in implementing it.

Globally, the terrain on which politics is being fought has shifted dramatically leftwards. An independent, socialist Scotland would be an extraordinary beacon of hope for the world. That is the real prize.