THE numbers unearthed by Labour’s internal polling, revealed in The Herald yesterday, suggest that only the final obsequies require to be read over the corpse of the party in Scotland. No matter which way you choose to look at them, the figures indicate that Labour in Scotland is girding its loins for an apocalyptic event later this year.

According to the leaked data, around one-quarter of Labour’s support has migrated to the Scottish Conservatives since 2015 while the party is expecting to achieve a mere 15 per cent of the vote at the local elections in May, some 10 points behind Ruth Davidson’s party and 30 per cent behind the SNP.

It will thus have overcome the last remnants of Labour resistance holding out in west of Scotland town halls. Any party stalwarts still standing beyond the May harrowing will thus be rendered as forlorn and scattered as Japanese soldiers in the South Pacific after the surrender of the Emperor in 1945. Glasgow, long coveted by the SNP, would finally be its. In such circumstances it is unthinkable that the leader, Kezia Dugdale, would be able to continue as leader and already supporters of a handful of senior members of the party are beginning to position their men as her replacement after the council elections.

One Labour source quoted in yesterday’s report in The Herald said: “The internal polling also tells us there is no such thing as a core Labour vote anymore.” One activist I spoke to last night put it more bluntly: “This is the inevitable consequence of more than a decade of shambolic leadership and an arrogant disregard for our most loyal supporters.”

If the party hadn’t been hollowed out by incompetence and nepotism it ought to have been targeting 2017 as the year when it could begin to recover some lost ground. For the first time since gaining a majority at Holyrood in 2011 the SNP is facing a year without a national election or a major constitutional plebiscite. The council elections notwithstanding, this year the SNP Government would be unable to retreat behind the sound and fury of big electoral campaigns as the NHS lurched from one crisis to the next and the educational attainment gap continued to widen.

After 10 years in government, the big-ticket issues by which Ms Sturgeon has asked us all to judge her tenure remain stubbornly beyond her ministers’ ability to repair.

Earlier this week both she and her Health Minister, Shona Robison, indicated that 2017 would be all about pressing the UK Government on the terms of Brexit. “The truth is,” wrote Ms Sturgeon in The National this week, “Brexit and its economic fallout haven’t even properly begun yet.” There can’t be anyone in Scotland who doesn’t already know this, just as there can’t be many who don’t know that there are serious problems in health and education.

But while the terms of Brexit will be disputed for several more years the gaping holes at the heart of the delivery of healthcare in Scotland and the educational inequality in our most disadvantaged communities need to be addressed now. There is a limit to how long Ms Sturgeon can use Brexit’s wide canopy to camouflage serious problems nearer home.

A rejuvenated Labour Party in Scotland brimming with fresh ideas and a renewed sense of purpose after several years of “learning lessons” could have made life very uncomfortable for a party that all too palpably lacks the enterprise and courage to do anything meaningful with the four terms it was gifted.

Instead, all Ms Sturgeon has had to deal with at Holyrood is a Tory opposition led by a woman who, curiously, talks about a second independence referendum more often than the SNP. The party Ruth Davidson leads at Holyrood is a bizarre confection of part-time, 19th-hole reactionaries who crept into Holyrood via the list and a few “scarecrows” from the zoomer wing of the party. Ms Davidson though, has fetishised the Union and successfully used this to play on some ancient and tribal fears in Labour heartlands. What she hasn’t yet achieved is finding a meaningful line of attack with which to probe a vulnerable government.

The story of 2017 in Scottish politics, though, will be the fate of Labour in Scotland. Any modern re-working of Dante’s Divine Comedy would have to have added an extra circle of hell to house the torments endured by the former people’s party in Scotland.

The party’s failure to construct an adequate response to the constitutional question led first to a haemorrhaging of support to the SNP followed by that 25 per cent who now appear to have fled to the Tories. More than two years after the independence referendum, the party leadership is still in denial about how it sickened many of its supporters with its conduct during that campaign.

Writing in yesterday’s Herald, the former leader of Glasgow City Council, Stephen Purcell, said: “When Labour’s Alistair Darling got a standing ovation at a Scottish Conservative party conference it told many of our traditional supporters to choose another party.”

The damage wrought by Mr Darling, Gordon Brown, and the various lords and barons who, in their ermine, seek refuge in an unelected upper chamber is incalculable. That the opinions of these individuals are still given house-room inside the Labour Party in Scotland is akin to picking at a festering wound.

The clumsiness of the present leadership in its opposition to that of Jeremy Corbyn has not helped either. With the departure of a large chunk of its former core support to the SNP you are left with the impression that it is now in the hands of a rump of Blairite right-wingers led by a woman who thought it was a good idea to take a few days off to work as an intern for a candidate in another country’s election. Senior party figures I’ve spoken to recently feel their only hope of staving off electoral annihilation at the council elections is to embrace Unionism as much as the Tories.

This would be the party’s last meaningful mistake; the one that would finally tip it over the edge and into eternal electoral oblivion. Labour should instead begin to divest itself of the fierce and tribal loathing it has developed for the SNP and which is manifest daily all over social media.

Its only chance of maintaining any foothold in Glasgow lies in the council leader Frank McAveety going it alone and using his considerable authority to ignore the dead hand of the Edinburgh leadership and begin to do what Labour does best: oppose the forces of Conservatism.

Ironically, Labour’s internal polling indicates that the long-term survival of the party in Scotland can only be guaranteed by independence. Councillor McAveety should make his peace with this concept early in the New Year and thus give himself one last chance of staving off disaster in May.