Looking into a Labour leadership contest is a bit like looking into a moving aeroplane. You can see all the different parts pulling and pushing this way and that but you are still none the wiser as to how it all works.

That said, I’m going to have a go at looking ahead on behalf of Labour. We may have Iain Gray grappling manfully with Salmond week in, week out (metaphorically, of course) but it is only right to look to the future and to what the next ‘Leader of Labour in the Scottish Parliament’ (LOLITSP) may bring. Or, if Tom Harris wins, the title would become ‘Leader of the leader of Labour in the Scottish Parliament’ (LOTLOLITSP).

I’m getting confused already.

The two frontrunners of the Labour leadership contest are Johann Lamont and Ken Macintosh and, given Johann has considerable support amongst the unions, one could argue that she is ahead by a nose, needing only a win from one of the elected representatives or the Labour members bloc to pull through.

One problem for Labour with Johann winning this contest is that she only commands the support of 7 MPs and doesn’t seem to incorporate relations with Westminster into her strategy, presumably for fear that it will dilute her presence at Holyrood. Not that the picture is much different with Ken Macintosh at the helm, save for several more MPs backing him.

Even under the most extreme short-term result for Scotland’s future (independence), the nation will still have its issues debated and decided cross-border with, at least, defence, BoE and monarchy-related decisions partially taken at the Westminster of rUK and ‘independent’ Scottish decisions taken at Holyrood.

Labour’s route to recovery in the polls and at elections is surely through recapturing the sentiment that they are the party of the poor, the progressive party of the downtrodden and discarded worker. To convince people of this sea change in perceptions, Labour must offer up a combined solution using policies from both Westminster and Holyrood, pensions & social security for the former and employment, education & enterprise for the latter, forging them together into one message.

This in turn necessitates MPs and MSPs working not only closely together but practically in perfect harmony. Any suggestions of a split will be examined and exaggerated by a press that wouldn’t hesitate in chopping Labour back down again.

Let’s be honest though, tensions between Labour MPs and MSPs must be at their most strained since devolution began. The MPs clearly blame the MSPs for the failure of the last election, promising ominously that ‘the same mistakes won’t be made again’ while the MSPs are fortifying their power base by insisting that Scotland is primarily their domain. It’s fair to say, for example, that Labour MSPs have not given Tom Harris a fair crack at the Scottish leadership of late. Not that Tom is just lying down and accepting it of course.

How this tension can lead to positive results is beyond me. After all, when you think that the wolves at the door include members of your own party then you are in trouble.

I could go on to talk about the much-discussed problem that no one knows what Labour is for any more but that is to look beyond Labour’s more pressing problem. Even the building blocks needed to begin to stand again as a viable political party and a significant force against an SNP that is far from infallible do not yet exist. There is no energy around conferences, there is no air of urgency behind Iain Gray at FMQs and there are no policies that are rivalling the SNP’s direction, on either side of the border.

Further to this, and I don’t know if this is through a paralysis from Labour MPs at Westminster or a meek obedience to the direction taken by the coalition, but there is nothing coming out of Westminster that is being communicated through a Scottish prism. We are not independent (not yet anyway) so why are there no details of what Scottish MPs are working on? No news of what is happening at Westminster to improve the lot of Scotland? Surely this is the most important flank of a unionist group who wants to prove its relevance to a nation with an important choice on its hands, not to mention a political party that considers Scotland to be its heartland?

A big dose of teamwork needs to be injected into all of Scottish Labour, between MPs, MSPs and MEPs equally and, coupled with this, the whole Labour movement needs to be cracked open and reconsidered inside and out. That is a big ask of a party that is so scared of its own shadow that it doesn’t even know whether to support or shun a strike from workers and trade unions that support and fund it.

This faction-creating leadership contest appears to be doing the precise opposite of building a cohesive team that will go places and so it seems Scotland must wait even longer for the return of a rejuvenated, relevant and ready Scottish Labour.

More’s the pity.

A guest from Kirsty Connell, former Labour candidate and Vice Chair of the STUC’s Young Workers’ Committee.

From Caesar’s “Veni, Vidi, Vici” to Obama’s “Yes we can”, via the cry of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” coined in the French Revolution, the history of the greatest political victories can be traced through looking for those able to distill ideology into mantra.

Capturing the zeitgeist in a pithy phrase isn’t just a mechanism of spin, or simply a clever advertising jingle drawn up to then crawl into voters’ heads and guide their hand in the ballot box. Any idiot can come up with a slogan. But for the one line to work, to be compelling, durable, persuasive, it needs to encapsulate the political narrative of the candidate. To take the ideology, values and attitudes of that politician or party, tie it up with the emotions and beliefs of the voters, and state in very few words what making this choice will mean to you, your family, your country.

It’s disappointing, but unsurprising, that Scottish Labour appears to have dismissed the whole of the above as something they just don’t need to do.  Speaking at the first Leadership hustings, Johann Lamont said: “In the last election we lost our way, we lost our confidence, and we lost Scotland. People tell us we need to find a narrative. We don’t need to find a narrative, we need to remember our story.”

She couldn’t be more wrong. Scottish Labour has never needed more urgently to find and explain its narrative to the voters. Preferably in as few words as possible.

To continue James’ explanation a few posts back of Strøm and Müller’ model of coalition building, there is little in political marketing that I despise more than candidates who openly  sell themselves as “office-seeking”. To me, Tom Harris’ Twitter bio of “Campaigning to be Labour’s next candidate for First Minister” insults voters by assuming the purpose of leading a political party is the office itself, with no reference to the policies or campaigning that need to come first to get you into that office.

And sure, the point can be made that it’s only governments that get to do anything, so winning the office has to come first in order to deliver those policies. But I still think any candidate should do voters the service of telling them what their time in office would look like, what it would do and how it would change things.

Narrative matters in politics. It is not a sexy buzzword bandied about by political consultants selling snake oil. If you don’t have a dialogue with voters to discuss with them who you are, how you got here, and where you’re going, you’re not going to go anywhere.

Scottish Labour can’t hope to sit around as the default, waiting for the Scottish electorate to realise what utter idiots they’ve been putting the SNP in power and so decide it’s high time to come home to Labour.

Lamont was right in one part of her soundbite: Labour did indeed lose its way in 2011, although I think it was lost long before.  But Labour lost its way, its confidence and Scotland because it lost its narrative. Apart from the independence bit, nobody could really say why voting for Scottish Labour would be different from voting for the SNP. Policies were broadly similar, attitudes to the Tory government in Westminster mostly aligned. But Salmond and the SNP have their big picture and they have found the best way to tell everyone what that big picture looks like and means. Scottish Labour were left looking like they were working on a scribble on an envelope of a big bad Tory government and a bigger, badder SNP First Minister.

But like a Rembrandt abandoned in an attic and slightly water damaged, Scottish Labour still has about two-thirds of a big picture. And it can be restored and revitalised.

I still think the party and its members know who it is and knows what the beautiful words written on the back of membership cards mean.  I think Scottish Labour, for all the casting about for scapegoats and excuses for the 2007 and 2011 debacles, does know in its heart how it got to where it is today. So I don’t think any of the three of Scottish Labour’s leadership candidates need to be scared about constructing the third part of the narrative, to tell the voters about where Labour is going to go.

Lamont, Harris and Macintosh just need to start asking what the purpose is. About everything. Is it Scottish Labour’s purpose to be the party of aspiration? Is it Scottish Labour’s purpose to defend the union? To defeat the SNP? To defend working people against the cuts?

Scottish Labour’s purpose could be any, or none, of the above. But its next leader needs to  be clear and coherent about why Scottish Labour exists, stands candidates, and wants to win. It needs a narrative. It’s not good enough to assume the raison d’etre for Scottish Labour is intrinsically known and understood by the electorate. Get that right, and I promise the mantra will just trip off the tongue in 2016.

‘You take the low road and I’ll take the high road and I’ll be in bonnie independent Scotland afooooore ye.’

Now, these warbling words will not form the opening line of Alex Salmond’s set piece speech at this weekend’s SNP Conference but they might as well do. The half a year since the storming election result in May has seen the Nationalist camp calmly and diligently go about their business, simultaneously advancing their cause of independence (as proven by favourable polling evidence), while the various unionist parties have squawked and clucked directionlessly as if the sky is about to fall on their heads. Which metaphorically it may well do when the independence referendum comes around, if a Yes result is delivered.

The latest strategy from the unionist camp is to hold the Scotland Bill up as being the most significant transfer of powers from Westminster to Holyrood in 300 years, a boast that they hope will distract Scots away from the underlying question of full independence by demanding attention is paid to the tax changes that are still being ironed out.

It won’t work.

Scots are proving remarkably pragmatically nonplussed when it comes to delivery of extra powers to Holyrood from Westminster, almost to the point where an expectation exists that such powers continue to arrive over the border on the conveyor belt of devolution. This situation has ensured that the SNP will always have the consolation prize of further independence by stealth, as opposed to its preferred result of full independence by referendum.

However, what I don’t understand, and this is what I do hope Alex Salmond will explain in his speech, sung or otherwise, is why the SNP is offering its backpocket consolation prize alongside its prized objective of full independence on the referendum ballot slip. Surely a straight up and down Yes/No to full independence is more likely to return a Yes vote if Scots didn’t have the option to split the difference, compromise and vote for Devo Max. Give anyone a choice of more than two options and they will almost always select one from the middle; it’s a proven conjuror’s trick and it’s something that the SNP should bear in mind if they are offering three futures rather than only two.

I suspect that Salmond has shied away from the risk of putting everything on the table and ending up going backwards. There is a danger to the SNP that decades of hoping and years of planning may well result in one terrible word from a one-question referendum – No. The wind could be knocked out of the SNP’s sails and the momentum could be momentarily lost but with monumental repercussions – a bitter leadership contest, factions emerging, back to the dark days of the 80s etc etc.

But is that safety first approach of guaranteeing a little bit of extra momentum worth the risk of missing out on the 2-3% of yes votes that could make all the difference? That’s one for the SNP to consider and answer.

Don’t get me wrong, SNP activists will be going into this Conference pinching themselves at the position they are in and full square behind the First Minister as their leader. I remember well the evident delight that party members had during Inverness 2009 and Glasgow 2009 when the party fortunes amounted to little more than a wafer-thin minority Government and a referendum that was situated somewhere between a hope and a prayer away. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t be surprised if some Nats have just a niggle of concern at the extra question being offered in the coming referendum.

When I took part in the Guardian’s blogging panel considering the future of the ‘Disunited Kingdom’, I was harangued, quite understandably, for not being fundamentally pro-independence enough, despite admitting quite freely that I’ll probably be voting Yes to full independence when the referendum comes around. The irony, quite possibly lost on my detractors, is that the satisfaction that I have with even a federal UK is seemingly one that I share with Alex Salmond himself, though I daresay even the most devout Nationalists wouldn’t say Salmond wasn’t pro-independence enough for any forum. Not yet anyway.

Alex Salmond once promised, and delivered, a political earthquake in the unlikely hunting ground of Glasgow East. Across all of Scotland, through hedging his bets with a second question, Salmond is already backpedalling on what can be delivered through his independence referendum and I just wonder if, far from the earthquake of independence, the wheels will come off the hefty SNP juggernaut as a result of not being brave enough. Nick Clegg went for the ‘miserable little compromise’ of AV in the end, is Salmond doing the same with Devo Max in the eyes of the SNP faithful?

After all, when a nation’s independence is at stake, is there really a middle road to be taken? It must be the strategic high wire road for the SNP or it will be the high jump for full independence.