AND so it begins. Again. Scottish Labour is now looking for its 10th leader since the creation of the Scottish Parliament. That figure wouldn’t be so damning if the previous nine had fizzed and whizzed through their tenures, as impactful and short-lived as fireworks lighting up the night sky.

Instead, the party has endured a series of flops who have tried to rebuild the party after successive electoral failures and found that they, like their predecessors, weren’t up to the job. With every new leadership contest and each bold promise to unite the fractured party and start “listening’’ to voters, Scottish Labour has become increasingly demoralised as the ambition has made contact with reality.

It’s easy to blame Richard Leonard for Scottish Labour’s most recent woes. He was an ineffectual leader who never quite managed to rally the troops after the bitter leadership contest he fought against Anas Sarwar.

He was – and remains – largely anonymous among ordinary voters. In truth, he should have resigned after the December General Election, when it was clear that his party had lost what little confidence it had in him.

In their farewell statements, his allies and foes alike have been keen to point out that Leonard is a thoroughly “decent’’ man. Outside of politics, decency is a desirable thing to be thought of among your peers. And in it too: Scottish politics could do with a bit more decency. But it also smacks of being damned with faint praise.

The Labour Party in Scotland are going to need more than decency to reverse the decades-long decline of its standing in Scottish politics.

So, it’s easy to pick fault with Leonard’s leadership over the last three years, for all he has done and failed to do. But as the party has seen many, many times before, a new leader will not in and of itself solve Labour’s myriad problems. With each passing election, its MSP talent pool has dwindled. There has been little opportunity to inject new life and energy into the Holyrood group and we can now see the consequences of that as they once again go about choosing a new leader.

At the time of writing, Anas Sarwar was the only candidate to have put his name forward. By the time you are reading this, others may have done so. All eyes are on Monica Lennon to see whether she decides now is the time to make her bid.

If she decides to hold off, we could see a coronation of a new leader, rather than a contest. Or somebody could do as Michelle Ballantyne (remember her?) did and put their name forward purely as a mechanism to allow the party to debate and scrutinise the leading candidate.

Not that any of this matters all that much. If front-runner Anas Sarwar does become Scottish Labour’s newest leader, he will have very little time to reverse the fortunes of the beleaguered party ahead of the Holyrood election.

READ MORE: Monica Lennon joins Anas Sarwar in race to become Scottish Labour leader

It would be of little surprise if his first strategic act as leader was to go hard on the recent mutterings that the May election should be postponed. To do so would send a message that Scotland, unlike all the other countries that have held elections during the pandemic, is somehow uniquely incapable of pulling off such a feat.

Whoever “wins” the worst job in Scottish politics will have their work cut out. It’s like getting a job as a postman but before you can actually deliver any letters you’ve got to write out every address in Scotland, plot them on a map, and sort out a 10-year backlog of undelivered post. Over the coming days we will hear a lot from Scottish Labour politicians about what Scotland wants.

We’ll hear this most often in response to questions about how the party intend to reconcile the growing support for independence with Scottish Labour’s current strategy of ignoring the electoral reality of the need for a second referendum.

To this question, they will say “What the people of Scotland really want is ...”

Then they will offer a list of priorities: health, education, dealing with the pandemic and economic recovery.

In dodging the question, they will inadvertently highlight why the outcome of the leadership contest that they have been booked to talk about won’t make any difference to the party’s fortunes.

Ignoring the sustained and growing majority support for independence won’t make it less real. When the new leader sets out their centre-left domestic agenda, who are they pitching it to?

Scottish Labour can’t out-Unionist the Scottish Tories and however progressive its Holyrood 2021 manifesto is, the party dosn’t have a hope of winning back former Labour voters while it is so set against the idea of a referendum on independence, let alone independence itself.

For as long as Scottish Labour continues to tell people in Scotland what they want, rather than listen to the votes and voices that show what they want, its downward trajectory will continue.