Louise Gilmour: Starmer has been an anchor on Sarwar’s progress

Sir Keir Starmer with Anas Sarwar after delivering his speech during the Scottish Labour Party conference in Glasgow.

Jessie De La Cruz, the late, great farm workers’ organiser, once insisted “hope dies last”.

Well, it’s not dead down by the Clyde as Scottish Labour gathers there this weekend, but it has looked better.

Delegates at the party’s conference at Glasgow’s SEC remain bullish but that might be shell shock after being whiplashed from landslide jubilation to vague disappointment in six months or so.

The careering highs and lows seem to have convinced many the kaleidoscope will soon be shaken again. A few wins for Sir Keir Starmer’s government, they confidently predict, and the needle will jerk to the right again.

Maybe, but when polls suggest Scottish Labour is heading for its worst results since devolution in next year’s Holyrood elections, there might be a better strategy than closing your eyes, clicking your heels and whispering “things can only get better”.

Labour returning to power at Westminster should have helped, of course, when Starmer, who will arrive on the Broomielaw today, promised Scotland would run through his government like a stick of rock.

Axing winter fuel payments almost before he had unpacked his pyjamas in No 10 was not only bad politics, however, but instantly suggested Scotland, where temperatures are lower and pensioners no less likely to hold a grudge, was an afterthought.

Breathless announcements about new runways at Heathrow and Oxbridge growth corridors did not spark many street parties 400 miles north either.

Yes, we’re promised GB Energy will be based in Aberdeen, but the tickertape will probably stay in the box until the new publicly owned energy company can explain what it might actually do and when. Of course, ministers could deliver real change right now. They could, for example, build energy policies rooted in reality and shaped by the absolute certainty that the UK will need oil and, especially, gas for decades.

They could construct an industrial strategy capable of fully exploiting the manufacturing opportunities of green energy while, at the same time, underpinning offshore industries, supply chains, and the 200,000 jobs that rely on them.

As our union will propose at conference today, they could stop our rigs and refineries powering down, greenlight new exploration offshore, offer reassurance to an industry that badly needs some and hasten the drive towards lower emissions.

While it wasn’t doing any of that, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar had hoped the UK Government might be the wind in his party’s sails, not an anchor on its progress.

The delegates in Glasgow this weekend are right, though. Recent tumultuous months have shown anything can happen and suddenly.

Mainstream politicians are only now beginning to understand just how scunnered people are – how many, here and around the world, will vote for almost anyone.

That is why Reform is polling at 15% in Scotland on the back of a two-bob website and little else and is one reason why one in two Scots support independence. They don’t know what it will be, but it won’t be this.

Like the joke about the man asking for directions in the Highlands only to be told that he “shouldn’t start from here”, Sarwar must, in quiet moments, wonder where to begin.

Well, he can start with radical, reforming policies. This is no time for tweaking but for transformative change, for ideas that Scots can understand, imagine and get excited about.

And he should start today. Scottish Labour has plenty of time but none to lose. Hope isn’t dead, it’s just sleeping.

Louise Gilmour is GMB Scotland secretary