I am clearly not alone in sharing a sense of deflation at the election results UK wide. While in Scotland there was some degree of recovery it was from an appalling position. It is sobering to note we are now the sixth party in Scotland. We should bear in mind too that our gains in the Highlands and islands were aided by the ferry fiasco which the SNP has overseen. Ferries are the lifeline of not simply the islands they serve but integral to the economies of the communities from which they leave. The scale of utterly avoidable devastation to peoples lives and to the economies of rural areas cannot be overstated. That Labour’s sole gain in Scotland came in the Western Isles backs this up.

Bruising as it may be to our ego we – and this holds for all bar the SNP – are not a national party but a series of local redoubts – Fife, the Highlands, Orkney and Shetland, Edinburgh, while remnants of electoral strength remain in the Borders and Grampian. In the UK as a whole not far shy of 50% of the electorate voted for insurrectionary parties. It was disappointing to hear Ed’s branding them, and by extension those who voted for them, as ‘extremists’. It is not a description likely to convert those so described.

The reality of the situation is that people are, to use that good Scottish word, scunnered. Scunnered of politicians, scunnered about a failing system which no longer delivers for them, and most of all perhaps scunnered at being ignored by politicians whose only real listening seems to be to other politicians. We are as guilty of this as others. Instead of talking the same talk and walking the same walk as other parties (however much we might protest that we don’t) let us do something radical and different in how we present ourselves. We are, or should be, after all the party of true democracy and localism.

Instead of ‘national’ messages and ‘national’ campaigning let us simply issue a short manifesto stating our principles and use them to inform a series of local manifestoes turning those principles into clear and concrete actions that local communities can see and understand. For instance our group of Highland MPs and MSPs could build a Highland manifesto with housing, land reform and ferries at its heart. Edinburgh would have a different suite of priorities etc etc. In this way we become the party representing localities and communities of Scotland against an arrogant, mediocre and complacent centre.

That we have allowed the SNP, one of the most centralising and inept administrations Scotland has ever had, to get away with the endless trope that somehow they represent ‘Scotland’ is a failure of us all to get home the real truth. Nor need a local manifesto be a list of unaffordable promises.

On the Scottish islands the simple act of proposing to place real power over their transport links in the hands of the communities who are being failed would be revolutionary. Of course it could be objected that we had proposals going some way towards this in our Scottish manifesto. But that was a small section buried in a wordy ‘one size fits all’ document. In a Highland Manifesto it would be the Front Page. It would have another important effect too. It would force our elected politicians, rather than sinking themselves into the bubbles of Holyrood or Westminster, to ‘think local’, to know that at all times they have to be ‘different’ in how they speak and think from those still thirled to the top down making of policy.

The great Highland historian, Jim Hunter remarked to me of Gladstone’s 1886 Crofting Act that ‘seldom can one piece of legislation had such long lasting electoral consequences’ even into the 21st century. It is time our party once again used localism as its route to the national rather than vice versa. In campaigning the same way as other parties, merely varying the messaging we are in the end doomed to re-enact F E Smith’s famous quote on Austen Chamberlain ‘He always played the game and he always lost’.

* Hugh Andrew is Managing Director of Birlinn Ltd, one of Scotland's largest publishers. He served as Convenor of the Scottish Policy Committee.