THERE ARE, in every year, regular events and seasons we come to expect.

Easter, Christmas, Strictly Come Dancing, and of course that one there isn’t a name for but we are all familiar with. It’s the time of year where Scottish Labour’s kamikaze squad don their helmets and head scarves and push down on the throttle determined to destroy what remains of the party.

Not happy with previous efforts to lead the party to oblivion — Iraq, cosying up to Bush, befriending Rupert Murdoch and the super-rich, Better Together, Jim Murphy etc — they now seem to be pulling out all of the stops to kill the party once and for all.

People who have been central to the demise of Labour over 20 years have decided that none of what went before was their fault but it was all down to the current leader Richard Leonard. Leonard, like Jeremy Corbyn, is a good, decent, principled man, he is not a showman and does not crave the limelight. He is a committed socialist who in a previous role was a trade union official representing industrial workers.

As leader, he has made mistakes, he would be the first to accept that — the main one in my view being he has been too soft with the critics who now seek to kill his leadership. He should have made it clear from the outset that the party was under new management and that the old guard, who have a grossly overdeveloped sense of entitlement, could no longer think that all they had to do was go through the motions and be reselected and elected.

This issue of selection is at the heart of the current battle within the Scottish party. The proposal that will go before the party’s SEC next weekend sees a woman at the top of each regional list followed by a man then another woman and so on.

This means that Leonard critics and MSPs like James Kelly, Mark Griffin, Neil Bibby and others see their list position under threat. They want to change leader in the hope that a new leader, whoever that may be (they’ve told us who they don’t want but not who they do), will change the list system to protect current MSPs.

During the worst crisis to hit the country in peacetime, that is what is taking up Scottish Labour’s energy — not the deaths of thousands of our elderly loved ones, not the appalling situation in our care homes, not the mess the SNP are making of the education system, nor the gross health inequalities, the record drugs deaths, the fiasco of the ferries contracts or the jobs massacre, but internal navel-gazing and self-preservation. It is shameful.

In the polls, Labour is miles behind sitting at around 14 per cent. The critics say Leonard is failing to cut through and there is an element of truth to this. Frankly though Hardie, Attlee, Wilson and Blair would fail to cut through during an era when the only thing that appears to matter to the voters is where you stand on the constitutional question.

How else do you explain how following the exams debacle, with the third worst Covid death rate in Europe and a testing shambles, the SNP’s poll ratings actually rose?

My deeply held view is that Scottish Labour has to finally wake up to its failure to grasp constitutional politics. Leonard’s MSP critics come from a hard unionist position.

They believe we should drape ourselves in the union flag and that any further devolution is a concession to nationalism. They want to bring back the Better Together band and think this will revive the party’s fortunes — delusion doesn’t come close to it.

My view is this — Labour must accept the realpolitik and that a referendum is what the majority of the people want. We must take part in it positively and enthusiastically putting forward a credible and realistic third option on the ballot paper based on maximum devolution and we must campaign hard for this, showing how with a new settlement and a radical socialist government we will transform and democratise our economy and society. This will get us back on pitch with at least a chance of getting a kick at the ball.

People that think that a leadership contest is what Scottish Labour should be doing right now need to put away the evo-stick and go and get some help.

What we need is a new and credible constitutional position communicated to the electorate by a party with new MSPs bursting with ideas and enthusiasm who will support Richard our leader in our joint crusade for a fairer, better Scotland.

Neil Findlay is Labour MSP for Lothian.