SCOTTISH Labour should see the recent resignation of Johann Lamont from its leadership as an opportunity to change course and win back the millions of working-class voters it has let down over recent years.

Lamont won some sympathy with her resignation interview, and her charges that Labour’s UK leadership treats Scottish Labour as a “branch office” is all too believable.

Since Tony Blair’s concentration of power among a handful of spin doctors and policy wonks in London, Labour has lost its claim to be the most democratic of Britain’s major political parties.

Not just in Scotland but across England and Wales, local needs and local activists have been overruled by edicts from an unresponsive elite at the top of the party — a group whose frequent lack of political principle has been matched by a total failure to understand why the working class has deserted it in droves.

The “Westminster bubble” is real. Any number of issues can be cited to demonstrate the gulf that separates the received wisdom in Britain’s Parliament from the views of Britain’s people.

Only in the shadow of Big Ben are common-sense policies such as renationalising our railways and utilities, scrapping our nuclear weapons and clamping down on the reckless profiteering of the City of London seen as electoral liabilities.

Only the bums on the green benches still seem to think Britain has an appetite for yet more bloody foreign wars. Only they still deny that a 13-year “war on terror” has massively increased the power of terrorism worldwide and put our people at greater risk.

Some say Labour politicians cling to a discredited right-wing vision, despite its lack of appeal across our nations, for fear of a London-centric mass media owned and controlled by billionaires.

There’s some truth in that, though it would be truer to say that the same ruling-class interests which dominate Britain’s daily newspapers — with the exception of the co-operatively owned Morning Star — have also captured the Labour Party leadership.

In that sense, Lamont had a point about Labour dictating unpopular and unhelpful policies to its Scottish members.

But she too bears much of the blame for the party’s perilous position in Scotland — with former first minister Henry McLeish warning that it could risk dying out entirely north of the border.

It was Lamont whose infamous speech deriding universal benefits as part of a “something-for-nothing culture” reminded ex-Labour voters of exactly what they hated about the Westminster consensus.

And throughout her period at the helm she repeatedly allowed the Scottish National Party — a party seeking lower taxes on business and which has failed to use any of the powers available to Holyrood to redistribute wealth — to pose as the left-wing option for Scots.

Only then can we understand why the former Labour heartlands of Scotland voted Yes to independence in September and why young, working-class Scots are joining the SNP and Greens but not Labour.

Jim Murphy, current favourite to succeed Lamont, would do nothing to reverse Labour’s decline.

A Blairite, former chair of Labour Friends of Israel, supporter of the Iraq war and backer of tuition fees for students is not going to win back Scottish workers.

Those who would like to think he has learned the error of his ways since the Blair days might reflect that he was among the first to throw mud at the Unite union when it faced entirely baseless accusations of interfering in the Falkirk election process last year.

Scotland’s problems are not unique — in all our nations Labour needs urgently to reclaim a working-class agenda if it is ever to win again.

But the vacancy Lamont leaves does give Scottish Labour the chance to take the first steps in that direction.