At midnight on Thursday, in the foyer of Glasgow’s Emirates Stadium, a little knot of Labour councillors clung together in grief and anger over coffees from paper cups. Just a few yards away in the main auditorium, the last rites were being read for their beloved party as election officers tallied the votes from Glasgow’s seven Westminster constituencies.

The official results were still a couple of hours away, but these party stalwarts knew that the SNP now occupied their city and they knew whom to blame.

“How can a party that is supposed to stand up for working-class families tell these same families that they must endure more cuts in their already stretched household budgets,” one of them said.

These men knew the game was up in their city, but none could have predicted the evisceration of the Labour party in Scotland that would occur before the sun rose on Friday.

There was bitterness, too, that the party – their party – had simply ignored their entreaties over the years to turn back from the path chosen for it by Tony Blair and pursued enthusiastically by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls.

It will take several weeks to quantify, assess and interpret what happened in Scotland last Thursday. A judgment, biblical and implacable, was delivered to Labour and it has left the party on the edge of extinction in a country which it felt it owned fewer than 10 years ago.

There were many staging posts along the road to its perdition; each of them carried a stark warning to turn back from this path they had chosen and each was ignored by London party chiefs. Hadn’t Scotland always delivered for Labour? Who cared what happened in Holyrood, the conference league of UK politics? No matter what happened there, the idiot punters would always return to the fold for the big election to the Big House by the Thames. Now, Holyrood is all they’ve got.

You could say that it all began when Tony Blair brought forth his New Labour project, which, by his own admission, owed as much to the philosophy of Margaret Thatcher as it did to ideas of collectivism and working-class solidarity. But the seeds of Labour’s downfall in Scotland had been sown in Scotland before then.

Even in the 1980s, there was a growing unease that this party was dining out on the card vote of Scotland’s working-class communities but offering little in return, and it was during this period that a wicked and oft-repeated observation began to take root: that a monkey with a red rose pinned to it could stand in some seats in Lanarkshire and still get elected.

When Labour was returned to power in 1997, many of us were optimistic that its virtual three-term majority afforded it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring forth a programme of socially progressive legislation that, if planned carefully, would prove difficult for future right-wing Tory administrations to unpick.

Yet, instead of reversing Thatcher’s anti-trade union laws and re-establishing a social housing sector, it embraced her free-market philosophy and withdrew proper regulation of the financial sector, a decision that would reap a bitter harvest in 2008.

And, rather than choose to abolish the House of Lords and end tax evasion by the super-rich, it chose to use the upper chamber as a cheap means to reward long service and millionaire donors. By the time the illegal second Iraq war had been joined, it was clear that Westminster Labour was becoming a stranger to the aspirations and expectations of its supporters in Scotland.

Its disdain for Scottish devolution from the outset was evident in the attitude of many of its Scottish MPs who, only with great difficulty, concealed their contempt for those who represented Labour at Holyrood. They regarded them as amateurs and oiks and refused to extend to them any degree of autonomy.

This was a branch office and you only needed to feed and water it from time to time; perhaps visit it occasionally to convey to its Scottish supporters that they were still voting for the real thing.

In recent years, though, the scales had been lifted from those same supporters’ eyes, and so traps were laid and an ambush occurred last Thursday.

Labour, with its one MP in Scotland, now has worse prospects than the Tories in Scotland, but a weak pulse can still be detected. What happens between now and next May’s Holyrood elections will determine whether it can live independently of a life-support machine. The Scottish Tories, though largely harmless, can still lead a twilight existence, comfortable in the knowledge that there is no other right-wing party to spoil the fun in their walled garden.

Not so Scottish Labour. Their territory has been annexed by the SNP and the electorate has decided that, for the time being, social justice, fairness and equality sound better from the mouths of the SNP than from Labour.

Jim Murphy, the stricken Scottish leader, must resign immediately. He holds neither a seat at Westminster nor at Holyrood and he has presided over the most humiliating defeat suffered by any political party since 1832.

His attempts to blame his predecessor Johann Lamont, the woman he himself ambushed last year, are tawdry. His deputy, Kezia Dugdale, though raw and inexperienced, has nonetheless held her own at Holyrood and ought to be given the opportunity to lead.

Gifted and smart men such as Gregg McClymont, Tom Greatrex, Anas Sarwar and Douglas Alexander all lost their jobs last Friday morning. If their commitment to the party is as strong as they would have us believe, they each ought to consider standing for Holyrood.

At the very least they must be invited to form an executive thinktank where they will be encouraged to think the unthinkable. This should include re-embracing the Scottish trade unions. And it must also include a de-coupling from Westminster Labour, an organisation that has ceased to be Labour at all.

I have a much more detailed blueprint for Labour’s recovery in a sealed envelope underneath my desk. It is available on polite request to any of those named above.