There's a hoary old gag about Glasgow City Council as Scotland's Kremlin. Its leadership must now be feeling a bit like the Politburo when the Berlin Wall fell and Communism crumbled around it.

As the SNP next week wrap up what all anticipate will be a hat-trick of Holyrood triumphs, the quest to topple Labour in its last great bastion kicks off.

And with the city's current regime beset by policy inertia, a guerilla war against its own officers and a perennial narrative of fratricide, it's shaping up to be a year of whimpers not bangs before the 2017 council elections. The impression many have is Labour has already chucked it.

Now well into his second term as leader, there is still no indication of what Frank McAveety's message to Glasgow is, eight months of largely wasted opportunities to add another flank of attacks on the SNP when some decent opportunities have arisen.

When John Swinney strong-armed councils into accepting their toughest cash deal in a generation, the best the city could muster was wisecracks comparing the finance secretary to a Mafia Don.

For many comrades, those in charge also often exude unsophisticated laddishness, obsessed with enemies who rarely happen to be called Nicola Sturgeon or Susan Aiken.

Meanwhile, Glasgow Labour is bereft of shiny stuff to tantalise the electorate as officers, the crucial component in the generation and implementation of good ideas, retreat to their own bunkers and keep their heads down.

There is even a sense senior management are more interested in the post May-2017 policy ideas of an SNP "administration-in-waiting" than what the current incumbents want brought to the table.

Where the odd bit of decisive action has occurred, in the longer term it has arguably done more to smooth the potential transition to a Nationalist administration than benefit the current lot.

Former spin doctor Colin Edgar was removed as his reputation as an "operator" connected to the wrong Labour factions wasn't to the taste of the leader's top table. The SNP felt the same.

Similarly, Mr McAveety took deserved credit for protecting more than 1,000 jobs when he merged council-owned spin-off firm City Building with massive social landlord Glasgow Housing Association

But the partial dismantlement of City Building, with its history of deeply entrenched Labour Party connections, means a new regime can bask in good news about jobs, apprenticeships and opportunities for the disabled without the concern of a Fifth Column within the "council family".

(The move also was symbolic in that it effectively ended the council's 120-year reign as the city's omnipotent fixer and fulcrum of local power networks as it ceded considerable power to what is effectively its former housing department.)

When your luck is down, as Labour's is, things go against you. Everything the council does, from parades to outdoor dining is laid, often unfairly, at politicians' doors. While Edinburgh lurches from calamity to disaster perceptions persist that Glasgow is the wrong'un.

Whether or not the SNP has the personnel, talent and skills to take the reins at several major councils in such financially tumultuous times is one for later.

But right now it seems the Glasgow Politburo is waving a white flag not the red one.