I TOLD you this post-Labour politics would be disorientating. In Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, Liz Lochhead’s Corbie diagnoses our national pastime as – “nostalgia.” Once, maybe. For Scottish Labour and her opponents, this is Scotland’s last nostalgic election. The game has changed. The political maps of the 1980s and 1990s have finally given out. Labour Scotland is gone.

An unprecedented third term for the SNP has smudged out all the familiar landmarks of Scottish Labour dominance. Anniesland no more. Pollok no more. Kirkcaldy no more. Be in no doubt: Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon have rewritten the Scottish political map. As recently as 2011, Labour were serious contenders for government; for a time, polling solidly ahead of the SNP, still a threat, still stoutly defending their bastions, still running the Nationalists close. But today?

The old warhorse has been sent to the glue factory. Crushed between the SNP and the Scottish Tories, crushed by independence, then crushed by the Union, the People’s Party totters on, barely a shadow of its former self, addled, unfocused, broken. So haul down the red flag, comrades. Surrender the bunker. It’s over. Even now – this collapse still somehow takes you by surprise. After 2015, you could be under few illusions about the broken covenant between the Labour party and the Scottish people. But even now, even in this election campaign, the old myths still clung on for dear life, obscuring your view. We should have seen the Tory surge coming.

The writing was, proverbially, on the walls for Kezia Dugdale’s stricken party. Or rather, in the polls. A string of studies put the Scottish Tories ahead of them, of their former Better Together allies. but many folk – myself not least – just couldn’t see Ruth Davidson barrelling past Labour’s rattling campaign to seize second place. Surely the party of Donald Dewar and John Smith, of Blair and Brown, couldn’t slip so far? Nostalgia again. Davidson smashed through her former Better Together allies, goring the SNP in Edinburgh Central and the Borders as she went.

The past is now a foreign country, but the future stretching out in front of the SNP minority government is yet to be written, unknown untravelled – and at the moment – unclear. Since the late 1980s, the social democratic left of the SNP has struggled to displace Labour in its traditional heartlands. The going has been slow. The key virtues of the SNP have been patience, and perseverance.

These virtues will be essential in the new minority parliament, which will inevitably throw up new snares, new challenges, and new opportunities. Scotland is not a one-party state. It never has been. The new parliament just reflects this reality. The proportional voting system did what it was designed to do – return a representative parliament to the bottom of the Royal Mile. The SNP worked electoral wonders to secure its thumping constituency wins and solid list support, but the party fell short of 50 per cent of the vote – as it fell short in 2011. No games, no tricks, and no foul play – just democracy. The new parliament will be a test of all of the First Minister’s considerable political skills. She must rise to the occasion. If they are canny, the powerful SNP minority will apply the lessons learned between 2007 and 2011. In Bruce Crawford and John Swinney, she has powerful allies, blessed with the temperament and tempered by experience to meet these challenges. If the First Minister picks her music carefully, she can play the new, more balanced Holyrood like a fiddle, forming alliances where she may, choosing her agenda wisely, and picking her fights with care.

The SNP is an old horse for the long road. A young Alex Salmond recognised, all those decades ago, that if Labour could be broken, so too could the Union they help to hold together. Scottish independence could only be secured from the centre-left. Scotland wakes up this morning to a post-Labour future the young SNP politicians envisaged. But it also awakens to something more unfamiliar, and more unsettling: an unprecedented Tory-led opposition in the Scottish Parliament. Having slated the grit and consistency of her former allies, Ruth Davidson has planted the Union flag firmly in Tory territory. The Union is ours, she says.

In the Ruth Davidson for a Strong Opposition Party, there is only one soprano. But the chorus of MSPs are – for the most part – bumbling Tory gentlemen from central casting.

The Scottish Tory campaign was a triumph of style over substance, intellectually slight, lightweight on policy, singing the same old Tory songs. During the campaign, the electorate heard little about Davidson’s plans to dump back free tuition, roll back prescriptions, cut taxes for the tiny minority of the wealthiest Scots.

Ruth Davidson and her party have yet to be exposed to searching critical scrutiny. As they celebrate their triumph, the old caution applies: be careful what you wish for. When the new parliament opens, Scotland’s emboldened reactionaries should brace themselves. They’re in for one hell of a fight.

Labour take an 'absolute doing' as their vote collapses across the country

