I've known Corbyn for years. I think he could help us to independence

The UK political landscape is fracturing. Labour won a Westminster landslide last year on only 31% of the vote. The Hamilton by-election showed that part of Scottish society is not immune from Reform. There are now six electorally significant political parties in Scotland, and a Corbyn party could make it seven.

There is massive disaffection in Scotland with Starmer's Blue Labour regime in Westminster. Austerity, benefit cuts, more nuclear weapons, anti-immigrant measures, banking deregulation, authoritarianism and complicity in Genocide: What kind of Labour voter wanted these?

Scottish Labour have been completely ineffective in distancing themselves from Starmer and are hampered by the uncharismatic Anas Sarwar. Scottish Labour are in absolutely no position to handle a serious popular challenge from the left.

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Meanwhile the SNP are going nowhere. They once again comfortably lead the polls by default and will almost certainly be the largest party in Holyrood next year. But what good will that do the cause of independence?

The SNP level of support now hovers at only about 60% of the level of support for independence itself. Many voters have – entirely rationally – lost belief in the SNP's connection to independence.

If the SNP were to declare that victory in the Holyrood elections would be followed by a declaration of independence by Scotland's parliament, I would stop typing, go canvas for the SNP and not stop till election day next year.

But in fact Swinney has no plan whatsoever to progress independence and his chosen advisers talk in terms of decades.

There is precious little hope on the horizon. Alba show no signs of breakthrough. In a recent poll in which Alba was, for once, prompted as an answer, they still only showed 1% on the list vote.

That is why non Reform-style change is welcome. Change brings possibility. It shakes the kaleidoscope. The key to progress is to embrace change and direct it towards Independence.

The left in Scotland is overwhelmingly pro-Independence. Unionist socialists exist, who hanker after a cross-Union vision of working class solidarity. But they are few and declining. Even George Galloway has shifted.

The realisation from the brutalist approach of Starmer, that Labour at Westminster will never again bring a left-wing UK government, has been key in stripping the delusions of “socialist Unionists”.

By contrast, Unionism is Scotland is overwhelmingly right wing, increasingly to a worrying extreme. Hatred of immigrants and support for genocide in Gaza are now a permanent feature of the most prominent Unionist social media accounts.

The conclusion is that any new, genuinely left-wing Scottish political party must be pro-independence.

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It is a crucial fact that consistently in opinion polls, up to 40% of Scottish Labour's actual voters support independence; a fact that party has ignored to their peril.

I have known Jeremy Corbyn for decades. I am confident that his view will be that it is for the new party in Scotland to determine the party's position on independence. (Which, when you think about it, is consistent with his stance when Labour leader, when he never challenged their branch office's view).

It is also true that, in all the creative chaos surrounding the mooted formation of the new party, neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Zarah Sultana said anything about Scotland.

Meantime we are told there is a rather mysterious steering group here. The only public name seems to be the poet Jim Monaghan. So far as I can learn, it seems to be in practice the anti-Sheridan SSP, the SWP and a couple of people connected to Bella Caledonia.

This is fine. But bluntly it would not fill a church hall anywhere in Scotland without Corbyn's name attached; and still might struggle.

I have been in touch with many of the respected and better known figures on the left in Scotland and not one of them has had any contact from the group. It is all peculiarly closed.

A Google search on Collective Scotland brings up only the feminist consultancy of that name. There appears no public method of joining the group ahead of its launching as a political party. But I do predict that, if Corbyn indeed launches it as his new party, a mass membership will materialise very quickly.

An opinion poll on Tuesday put a hypothetical Corbyn party on 15% in the UK as a whole. Political idealism is very short in the market at present.

I believe in Scotland they would certainly cross the approximately 7% threshold needed to get into Holyrood.

My own view is that Scotland's real left, which is independence-supporting, should pile into any new Corbyn-led party that emerges, should ensure internal democracy and make it an outright Independence vehicle.

The unpalatable truth is that both the SNP and Alba have lost between a third and half of their membership over the last few years. That is an awful lot of disillusioned activists out there.

The Collective – hopefully under a more sensible name – could succeed. It could rip off from the Labour Party the hundreds of thousands of genuine socialists and independence supporters in Scotland who voted Labour at the 2025 Westminster election.

Ultimately it could destroy malignant, right-wing Scottish Labour and further consolidate the working class vote behind Independence. Think on it.