JEREMY Corbyn’s big promise was that he’d be different. He’d be special. He wasn’t a money grasping Tory in Labour drag like the previous New Labour leadership. He had an allotment shed not a tax shelter. Jeremy was going to do all these things that the rank and file of the Labour party had always wanted, all those things like the abolition of the House of Lords, nationalisation of the railways, taxing the rich to pay to the poor, things that Labour promised its members and the voters when it was in opposition but which always seem to slip its mind as soon as it got a snifter of power.

Finally, after 100 years of broken promises, the glorious new dawn of British socialism was going to be delivered. It would come with a new leader riding on the back of a llama hand reared by a collective of indigenous Bolivian peasant women.

Back in 2015, during the leadership campaign for the Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn made the promise that party policy would be made by the membership and not by him. He forgot to add the rider, except when the party membership disagreed with him. It’s very easy to pose as a leader who listens to the commonfolk when the commonfolk agree with you. It’s not so easy when the membership want something that doesn’t accord with Jeremy’s route plan for the British Parliamentary road to socialism.

The party llama is spitting in Jeremy’s eye, but he’s whipping it along anyway. The Labour party leadership hasn’t changed its ways. It’s simply found a new way to lie.

Right now, the membership of the Labour party, and indeed many of the party’s MPs, disagree with Jeremy about Brexit. A large majority of Labour voters and Labour members want another EU referendum, but the Labour leader is not for budging in his determination to find yet another obstacle to put in the way of allowing Labour members to determine his Brexit policy.

He’s behaving exactly like all those Labour party hacks of previous political generations that he’d sworn to be different from. If the Labour leader has a spirit animal, it would be one of those old stuffed llamas in a museum. It hasn’t displayed any movement or flexibility since the Bolshevik revolution. It’s not that Jeremy is stubborn, it’s just that he thinks his way is the only way.

Scotland’s handful of Labour MPs have had the square root of hee-haw’s influence on the party leadership. The shadow Scotland Secretary doesn’t even have the public profile of one of the Z-listers who get voted out in the early rounds of Celebrity Big Brother. Ask the average person in Scotland who Lesley Laird is and you’ll get a blank look in return and a shrug of the shoulders. This is the person who is supposedly representing Scotland’s interests in the shadow cabinet.

I asked one relative who Lesley Laird was, and the reply was, “Isn’t she that actress who played the snobby man-eating neighbour Dorien in Birds of a Feather?” That was Lesley Joseph. But Dorien would make a better job of standing up for Scotland. At least people know who she is.

The Labour party isn’t representing the wishes of its members, and it’s not representing the wishes of Scotland. The Labour party in Scotland has made less of an impact on the public mind than a defunct sitcom. Unlike the Labour party it was occasionally funny on purpose and its clownish behaviour was deliberate.

The Conservatives have never had the slightest interests in standing up for Scotland within the UK, notwithstanding the self-aggrandising claims of Ruth Davidson prior to the General Election. Those Tory MPs might have been elected as representatives of Ruth Davidson’s Scottish Conservatives™, but they’ve proven to be indistinguishable from the mass of Tory MPs.

The notion that they’d vote as Ruth’s proxies as a pro-Scotland bloc to defend Scotland’s interests within the UK have proven as risible as just about anything that comes out of Ross Thomson’s mouth whenever he’s confronted with a reporter.

It was the Labour party that adopted the mantle of the party of devolution, and traditionally it was the Labour party to which much of the electorate in Scotland looked to provide a bulwark for Scotland against Tory depredations. It was the Labour party which was supposed to stand for Scotland within this so-called Union. However the Labour party has failed dismally to represent Scotland’s interests in the Brexit process.

Scotland, like London, returned a strong remain majority in the EU referendum, but unlike London Scotland is a constituent member of this supposed Union, and unlike London Scotland had an independence referendum during which the Labour party told it that the only way to ensure it remained a part of the EU was to vote against independence. You’d think that would mean that the Labour party has a clear and binding moral obligation to strive for some sort of comprimise that at least met some of Scotland’s objections to Brexit.

But Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t think so. He’s more interested in a Bolivian peasant collective than he is in what we’re always being told is a member nation, a founding member no less, of this so-called United Kingdom.

The majority of Scotland’s MPs are ignored and marginalised within the two party system which dominates Westminster, and neither of the two main UK parties has the slightest interest in acknowledging the special situation of Scotland within what they are always telling us is a family of nations.

Scotland is isolated, alone, unrepresented, and voiceless. We have less influence within the UK than any other nation which is already independent of the UK. This is the punching above our weight that we were told we could achieve if Scotland voted to reject independence in 2014.

Scotland has no means of influencing the course of events of Brexit, no means of defending Scotland from English nationalism. We have all of the disadvantages, but none of the advantages, of being outwith the Westminster system. There’s only one other nation in these islands which has successfully ensured that its voice gets heard and its interests met during this Brexit mess, and that’s the Republic of Ireland. Labour won’t stand up for Scotland. Only an independent Scottish Government can.

Only an independent Scottish Government would have standing up for Scotland and representing Scotland’s interests as its sole aim.