IT is party conference season and even in our strange times we have seen some semblance last week and this that the two UK parties are trying to get back to some sort of their version of normality. We are looking forward, if that is the right phrase, to a speech from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week, but last week we had the Labour Party in Brighton to behold.

I’m biased of course but it struck me as a pretty unedifying spectacle and still very much a gathering of warring tribes than any unified organisation likely to scare the Tories any time soon.

A disclaimer: like many folks in the SNP and Yes movement, I used to be a Labour supporter. It was just what you did. When I was a student in the mid-90s in Nottingham I volunteered a day a week for the local Labour MP. When I was living in London in 1997, having just joined the SNP, I still voted Labour and rejoiced, not just at getting rid of the tired and sleazy Tory government but also the new sense of optimism and change that the Labour administration brought.

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The recreation of our national Parliament in Scotland remains one of the biggest step shifts on Scotland’s journey to independence and one of the things we should, even still, give due credit to Robin Cook, John Smith, Donald Dewar, Gordon Brown and, yes, Tony Blair. Much as they were not trying to help the cause of independence they were trying to help the cause of Scotland.

In Stirling, we run the local authority in an SNP/Labour coalition and it works pretty well, same in Edinburgh. Take away the constitution and Labour and the SNP are actually pretty close and should be sister parties united against the Tories and their anti-devolution, power-grab agenda.

But how things change. UK Labour’s conference proved to me they don’t get Scotland (and with it a good chunk of their supporters in Scotland), and to my mind they don’t get the UK either.

I watched the Keir Starmer speech and there were two standout phrases for me in amongst all the boilerplate and flannel: “Make Brexit work” and the flatly odious line “As Gordon Brown said recently “when a Welsh or a Scottish woman gives blood …she doesn’t demand an assurance it must not go to an English patient”.

Let’s do the easy one first – making Brexit work is an English project and is aimed at English voters, to the consternation of the Scots. It endorses the Tory

shambles Brexit was always going to be and it neuters any future Labour criticism of it.

I don’t believe in opposition for the sake of it but I do believe you should put forward your agenda and your proposition. It is clear from those three words that Labour will continue to be posted missing and won’t be bringing forward damn all of any significance any time soon on the second biggest question of our times in Scotland (after independence). In England it is actually the biggest: how should the UK interact with our wider continent.

When Mr Starmer was elected Labour leader I thought it was a good move. He’s a serious person, a good antidote to the deeply unserious Prime Minister and a steady centrist manager who could, perhaps, get Labour back to electability in England. A couple of years on, the dearth of serious policy is the problem, not the presentation. On the big issues, there isn’t a Labour prospectus at all. They have consciously chosen to be mini-me to the Tories on Brexit, and on independence they have no answer – and can’t out-Brit the Tories and can’t “out-nat” the SNP and Greens.

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Worse, the only way UK Labour can process the raise of the SNP and pro-independence sentiment is to pretend to themselves that it is somehow predicted on antipathy to England. The line about blood donation is flatly offensive to almost everyone involved. Of course we don’t care where a blood donation is used, or who it helps, so much so we don’t draw the lines of that act of solidarity with the current frontiers of the UK, unlike, presumably, Mr Starmer.

It is as bone-headed an argument as it is doomed to fail, because Brexit and Scotland’s demonstrably pro-EU internationalist vote flies in the face of the Brexit project Mr Starmer has now committed to inflict upon us. Brexit is an ongoing rejection of international solidarity and multilateralism, and Mr Starmer accuses us of narrow nationalism while sidling up to it himself.

Then, the ultimate counsel of despair – Gordon Brown is to lead a Commission “to settle the question once and for all”. I’m reminded of the chewing the fat sketch: “Is he, aye?”

There might be a case for yet another commission, there might have been a time when there was an appetite for that sort of Devo-max or whatever other name they invent for it. But that time has passed and that commission assuredly cannot credibly be led by Gordon Brown – he’s hardly an impartial arbiter.

Scotland has a choice of two unions, it is binary, there is no middle way or fudge that will satisfy. Both the UK and the EU exist in the real world, both come with rights as well as obligations and are both there for us to judge which bundle of rights and privileges will suit us best.

UK Labour has proven this week it isn’t interested, and will imitate the Tories, not just on Brexit but on independence.

It’s time for Scottish Labour to cut them loose. If they care about the lives of the people of Scotland, ditching Brexity Tory-lite UK Labour and getting behind independence in Europe could reanimate them. A lot of us will welcome them with open arms.