IT’S just 15 months since Richard Leonard took over the leadership of Scottish Labour. While his claim that the party was back on the road to power seemed pretty far-fetched to most people, myself included, I expected that they would recover at least some of the ground lost under Jim Murphy and Kezia Dugdale. After all, how could things possibly get worse?

But get worse they did. And if the Wings Over Scotland/Panelbase poll released last week is accurate, Labour is now on course for its worst General Election result since 1910, before the introduction of universal male suffrage. That surely explains the air of desperation about Richard Leonard’s ever-more extravagant promises.

For some time, I’ve suspected that the main activity of the Scottish Labour research department consists of trawling through old Scottish Socialist Party election manifestos to see what they can plagiarise and repackage as original policies. At its spring conference this weekend, Leonard pledged universal free bus travel for all. Call me cynical, but when the SSP called for free public transport in 2007, it attracted not one word of support from any Scottish Labour politician, left, right or centre. As I recall, the policy was universally ridiculed by the then governing party of Scotland.

And that was before the banking collapse and the age of austerity. That was back in the days when UK chancellor Gordon Brown was sitting on a UK Budget surplus of £18 billion. That was back at a time when the Labour-LibDem coalition at Holyrood underspent its budget year on year and amassed a surplus of £800 million.

So when the money was there to reduce public transport fares, build council houses, and enforce equal pay for women in local government, the Labour-led Scottish Executive hoarded its cash like a reclusive miser. Yet now, when funding is being cut to the bone by Westminster-imposed austerity, Scottish Labour fantasise about the lavish spending spree it will indulge in when it returns to power. I use the word fantasise because the party is never going to get anywhere near power in Scotland anytime even into the remote future. In that sense, Scottish Labour is in the same position the SSP has been in for the past 20 years. But at least the SSP in the past actually explained how free public transport could be phased in over five years, and how it could be paid for. Scottish Labour, in contrast has become a party of empty slogans.

Yet I fear that there are many in and around the SNP who will draw the wrong conclusions from Labour’s weakness. It is not the left-wing rhetoric of Corbyn and Leonard that has left Labour high and dry in Scotland. It is, first of all, their shambles over the European Union – adeptly summed up at the weekend by Gary Smith, the Scottish leader of the GMB trade union. How can Labour claim to represent the Scottish working class, he asked, when it refuses to stand up against a Brexit that was rejected by a resounding majority in almost every constituency on this side of the Border?

The second problem for Scottish Labour is the mess it has got itself into over anti-Semitism. A combination of the determination by the Blairite wing to stop Corbyn reaching Downing Street at all costs and ineptness by the party leadership has led to this epic shambles. Again, as Gary Smith pointed out, a complaint of anti-Semitism in the SNP was dealt within six weeks, while Scottish Labour has dithered for a year dealing with similar allegations.

The third and most serious problem for Scottish Labour is its visceral hatred of independence. If Labour abandoned its Unionism and argued for a left-wing policy programme for an independent Scotland, it would become a force to be reckoned with once again. But that looks as likely as Nigel Farage joining the People’s Vote campaign.

The Panelbase poll, however, also has a warning for the SNP. They are way ahead of the rest of the pack – and that’s a substantial achievement after 12 years in power. But they have lost ground – 4% in the constituencies and 9% in the regions compared to the landmark 2011 Scottish election. It’s not scaremongering to suggest that Holyrood could lose its pro-independence majority in 2021.

That could be pre-empted by an independence referendum next year, and the reactivation of the mass movement that five years ago became bigger than anything that the SNP could ever have mobilised on their own. An independence referendum moves the focus away from the problems of the present to the potential for the future. And it will unite all who want to build a new Scotland in a way that a party political election campaign can never hope to achieve.

Failing that, Nicola Sturgeon would, in my opinion, be seriously mistaken to approach the next Holyrood election with a manifesto that allows Labour to brand the SNP as a pro-austerity party. Richard Leonard won’t be Scotland’s next First Minister for sure, but for the next two years he will inflict damage on the SNP and the independence movement by criticising it, relentlessly, from the left.

If there is one lesson the independence movement should learn from the EIS dispute it is not that the teachers are a bunch of greedy Unionist stooges but that working people in Scotland, including many who support independence, are becoming impatient over falling living standards and squeezed public services. And if there is any hint that an independent Scotland will mean further years of austerity, a slightly more bearable version of the UK, I fear it will become very difficult indeed to deliver independence.

Contrary to some of the mythology now circulating, the SNP have not shifted to the right. The 2013 White Paper was more right-wing than anything on offer now. It included, for example, a 3% cut in corporation tax, a pledge of no rise in higher rates of taxation and “fiscal stability” for business and industry. It promised very little in the way of reform. As Mhairi Black has said: “I hated the White Paper and told people just to ignore it.”

The difference last time is that the SNP could not be attacked from the left by Labour politicians because the Unionists were all huddled together in one tent. The political centre of gravity has since shifted leftwards, and the SNP have to move with it. In this political climate it’s not enough to stand still somewhere on the vaguely left-of-centre political ground. The SNP needs to move left. The cautious and conservative will always stick with the devil they know. These are not the people who will deliver independence.