IN 1979, when the rest of the United Kingdom began its lengthy love affair with Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherite politics, Scotland maintained its loyalty to a fading party that looked more and more unelectable. In 1994, when Tony Blair effectively disbanded the Labour Party and created New Labour, with Gordon Brown at his side, Scotland's loyalty - or patience, depending on how you saw it - looked like it would be eventually rewarded.

New Labour's triumph in 1997 and the dawn of devolved power was that long-awaited reward for Scotland, a place where you didn't count Labour votes, you weighed them. Factored into every Labour electoral calculation was an assumption of compliance north of the Border. Scotland was a country that for a generation looked like it was content to vote for a party that would deliver little.

Now, as the political pendulum swings away from Labour and back towards Conservatism, anyone expecting Scotland to resume business as usual will be disappointed. The massacre of Gordon Brown's party in the local elections in England and Wales, and the high-profile victory of the Old Etonian Tory, Boris Johnson, in the London mayoral vote, points to a now almost certain return of the Tories to power in Westminster come the next general election.

This weekend in traditional Labour heartlands in northern England, and in die-hard Labour constituencies in Wales, the Conservatives, after Labour's worst showing in nearly half a century, have planted their conquering blue flags. As a consequence, Brown is now a lame duck prime minister, with David Cameron the effective PM-elect.

Although no polling took place in Scotland, it is entirely reasonable to ask where the anti-Brown vote would have gone here. London, it's often said, is the political locus that predicts what's to come later in the rest of the UK. However, last year in the Scottish parliamentary vote, the election of Alex Salmond as first minister and head of a Nationalist administration in Holyrood offered a serious hint at what was to come when England and Wales next voted on a failing Labour government.

For Scotland, come the general election there will be no swing to the Conservatives. While Tories in England and Wales have survived like a desert plant hibernating and waiting for water, in Scotland the species has been beyond any natural revival for some decades now. A parallel collapse in Labour's Scottish core vote will mean only one thing: further gains for the SNP and an extension of their powerbase outward from Holyrood.

For Labour in Scotland, the disastrous results of last week's local elections in England and Wales and the catastrophe of losing London should not be a case of thank-God-it-wasn't-us voting. If any constituent part of the Labour Party should be breaking out in a sweat at what happened on May 1, it should be Labour in Scotland. Whether Gordon Brown makes it to a general election or is deposed in an effort to minimise the parliamentary casualties, Scotland will not simply troop to the polls and vote for a party that cannot deliver. That political era is gone.

And in its place is an electorate expecting genuine representation and delivery. Salmond broke up the comfort zone for New Labour last year, and the SNP will do the same come the general election unless there is a radical rethink on what Labour is, what it stands for, what it can achieve and where it is going.

If Brown remains in Number 10, fiddles with peripheral, inconsequential policies, and his party simply prays for a miracle, Scotland will not ride to Labour's rescue unquestioningly.

CAMERON as prime minister would introduce "English votes for English laws" and quickly turn Westminster into an English-led parliament where Scottish MPs would be marginalised as second-class members, limited in ambition and office. Many Scottish Labour MPs would begin questioning their effectiveness in representing constituencies north of the Border. An alliance of Nationalist and Scottish Labour MPs looks unthinkable at the moment, but after a few years of a Cameron-led Tory landslide administration that began redrawing the constitutional framework of the union, who knows?

Time may have already been called on Gordon Brown. His party no longer controls the administration that runs the streets outside Number 10, and in his Fife constituency power lies elsewhere. With councils throughout England and Wales lost by Labour, Brown remains a prime minister in office, but what exactly is he running, what does he control? Not London, not large parts of England and Wales, and certainly not Scotland.

He is a prime minister whose authority is limited, whose electability is very limited, and crucially, whose time in power is certainly limited. Labour MPs around him have a clear and uncomfortable choice: they can wait for the axe to fall heavily on the entire New Labour project come the general election, or they can begin now to lay the foundations for life beyond Blair and Brown.

Do nothing and Labour, like the Tories before them, will find denial comes wrapped up with a lengthy period in opposition.

Their future, and indeed the future of the United Kingdom, is tied up in the same decision.