Don’t panic CyberNats!  Pete Wishart MP has not defected – this is his imagining of the kind of speech he’d like to hear the Scottish Labour leadership contenders make:

“Ladies and gentlemen, comrades, members of the press. Today I announce my candidacy for the leadership of the Labour Party of Scotland. These are exciting and challenging times. After that crushing defeat in May, it is time to rebuild and renew, to slay sacred cows and chart a new way ahead.

Yes, we were beaten in May because of poor leadership and badly thought-out policies. But the real reason we were beaten so comprehensively is because of a more fundamental problem, and that is for the past ten years the Labour Party has been at least ten steps behind the ambitions of the Scottish people. We have tried to disparage that ambition, neuter it and hold it back. With me as your leader, we will never be put in that position again.

Instead I want to lead that ambition, to work with its flow, to realise its potential. I want to lead a new Scotland, secure in its own skin and dependent on no-one but ourselves.

This is why comrades, that one of the first things I will do, as your leader, will be to commission a new internal body to look at our historic opposition to Scottish independence. As your leader, I will ask that body to look at how we could become a new voice for independence in Scotland, and how we could have a new 21st century relationship throughout these isles based on equality and mutual respect.

It is time comrades, to put our opposition to independence aside, to look at the national interest, and to work for a new and better future for all the people of Scotland.

It was the Labour Party that delivered the Scottish Parliament. It is the Labour Party that has throughout the decades championed the values of social justice and equality. Comrades, are we seriously saying that we cannot build on these fine founding principles in an independent Scotland? An independent Scotland that could be moulded in the Labour tradition?

The alternative is to have a Tory Government in Westminster continue to govern in Scotland, unwanted by the Scottish people and alien to our values. Are we really saying that it is preferable to have a Tory Government running all these reserved responsibilities rather than have them returned to Scotland and put under the democratic control of the Scottish people in ours, in Scotland’s, Parliament?

The alternative is unthinkable. To be lumped in with the Tories, once again, saying no to Scotland. To invent reasons why the Scots aren’t creative enough to make a success of their independence. We’ve done that before and it does not work. I will not talk down my fellow Scots any longer.

Comrades, our illogical and pathological hatred of the SNP has blinded us to what is right for the people of Scotland. It is now time for that to come to an end, to be on the right side of history and to do the right thing.”

(,,,,and a pig was seen flying past the window…….)