IT HAS been, by common consent, Wendy Alexander's worst week since she became leader, worse even than the row over her dodgy donations. She began it defying Gordon Brown by calling for an early referendum on independence, making it look as if the prime minister had lost control of Scotland; she ended it with a humiliating U-turn, pretending she didn't really want a referendum after all. The press has pronounced sentence of political death. But before she goes to the gallows, perhaps we should look at what she was trying to do. There was method in her madness.

The situation Labour faces in Scotland is dire and Alexander is not the only one in the party who believes something drastic has to be done to stop the Alex Salmond steamroller. There's little point in Labour sitting on their hands and watching the SNP attract more and more voters to its cause as Salmond runs a highly successful devolved government - the kind of government Labour should have run when they were in office.

Not only is Salmond's personal popularity an astonishing 70% ahead of the Labour leader's, the polls indicate that the SNP would probably return with a landslide if there were an election tomorrow. And in recent polls, such as System Three's in the Sunday Herald three weeks ago, there have been signs that the Nationalists are beginning to win the argument for independence. Doing nothing isn't an option.

Most of Scottish Labour's political problems arise from their image as poodles of London Labour. Labour's former first minister, Jack McConnell, always seemed to be looking over his shoulder at his political masters, and was, we now know, often treated with casual contempt by the "godfather", Brown. McConnell was widely criticised for failing to assert himself on issues like Iraq, Trident, nuclear power, attendance allowances and detention of asylum seekers. The SNP taunted Labour's inability to "stand up for Scotland".

Now, there really only is one way of standing up for yourself, and that is to get up off your knees. And to give Alexander credit where it is due, that is what she has tried to do, even if she has been knocked back down again by a great clunking fist. But there really was no other way; you can't rebel by consensus.

There is huge frustration in the Labour Party at the SNP being allowed to introduce a raft of popular social-democratic policies such as phasing out prescription charges, ending ring-fencing of local government funding, curbing right-to-buy and kick-starting council housing. Labour had to get the SNP off their turf by forcing Salmond to start talking about nationalism again - about scary things like currencies, borders, national debt, separatism, Europe. One way to do this, clearly, was to attempt to bring forward the independence referendum and force the SNP to show their hand, instead of allowing them to shelve the issue until 2010. Hence the "Bring it on" declaration on The Politics Show on Sunday.

That much had been agreed with London. However, it was when Alexander started talking about holding her own early referendum that things started to go pear-shaped. Over the past week she has been in almost daily contact with Brown, but it seems the messages got confused.

It seems Brown thought she was merely challenging the SNP to put their referendum bill before Holyrood now instead of waiting until 2010, not proposing an independence referendum as a matter of principle. Brown told the Tory leader David Cameron at Prime Minister's Question time on Wednesday that Alexander had not called for a referendum on independence "now", when she clearly had. And she repeated it the next day at First Minister's Questions at Holyrood - as clear and unequivocal an act of defiance as anyone could have expected.

It looked as though Brown had lost control of his own Scottish turf. The exchanges of letters with Cameron, did nothing to clarify matters. There is simply no way of reconciling what the prime minister said about the referendum and what the leader of the Scottish Labour group at Holyrood said. Something had to give.

As we report today, Team Wendy suggest that it was Brown who bottled it and simply couldn't bring himself to call for a referendum in front of Cameron, largely because the PM didn't want to be taunted about his reluctance to hold a referendum on the EU treaty. It was a case of Brown playing Macavity again - trying not to be at the scene of the crime.

Grumbling erupted almost immediately on the Labour benches at Westminster, where Alexander was being compared to a "suicide bomber" determined to destroy the credibility of the UK Labour party for her own selfish interests. Is this what Alexander is about? Is she determined to blow Labour's UK credibility to smithereens just so she can portray herself as the new Madame Ecosse?

Well, some in Team Wendy believe that Brown has already blown himself to bits and has effectively lost the next UK general election. This would leave Salmond holding his 2010 referendum against the backdrop of a Tory administration at Westminster. This could turn the referendum into a vote, not on the constitution, but on the restoration of Tory rule in Scotland, which is why it seemed imperative to force the referendum issue sooner rather than later.

What began as a reasonable strategy for undermining the SNP turned into a clash of authority between Alexander and Brown. Scottish secretary Des Browne has been left in an impossible position, trying not to say anything at all while being pursued by the Scottish media. If he backed Alexander he risked the wrath of Brown; if he backed the PM he risked forcing Alexander's resignation.

We are told Alexander has now been told to "pipe down" and that the "men in grey kilts" are preparing to give her her marching orders. However, I am not sure there are any men in grey kilts, and I don't see any obvious replacement for her as Scottish leader. And she is unlikely to break the habit of a lifetime and stop talking.

However, she has now destroyed what credibility she had left by agreeing to yesterday's abject U-turn and by pretending that she hadn't been serious about calling for a referendum in the first place. The whole exercise has only confirmed that Labour in Scotland simply cannot go their own way, at least under Alexander. That in the end, Labour in Scotland does what they are told and are unable to speak for themselves, let alone speak for Scotland.

This should have been a turning point for Labour in Scotland: the moment when it finally asserted itself against London and reinvented itself as the Scottish Labour Party, a political entity in its own right, with its own leadership, policy agenda and organisation. Alexander was right in her analysis of the political situation, but she clearly lacked the political authority to achieve the necessary outcome. She has been slapped down. Labour have been made to look absurd and the only people who benefit are the SNP.