Bill Jamieson: When will Labour feel the ground shifting underneath its feet?

We should not underestimate the extent of the change that could be achieved without outright separatism.

POOR Gordon Brown. Poor David Miliband. Poor Cathy and Iain and Andy and all of them. Poor, poor Labour. If the party has an inkling of the seismic shift in our political life that is now under way across the UK, it is hiding it well. Its leadership contenders so far appear condemned, like the Bourbons of France, to learn nothing and forget nothing.

Both in suddenness and in scale, the collapse of Labour support portends a change, not just within the Labour party but in the future constitution of the UK.

Wales and Scotland are both experiencing the end of a long period of single party domination. That in itself has massive repercussions for civic and political life. It is now likely that the next Westminster election will see substantially enhanced representation for the two nationalist parties.

At the same time there is little evidence of a significantly enhanced Conservative showing outside of England, raising questions of the legitimacy of a Conservative writ across the UK. This suggests that if the United Kingdom is going to survive as an entity at all, it will be by virtue of a move to a federal constitution. Indeed federalism may be the only means left to ensure the Union's survival.

Both in Scotland and Wales, government and its many related institutions are no longer in the gift of a single dominant party. One feature of this change will be to reinforce and strengthen the nationalist challenge. A second will be an enhanced role for the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly as national institutions and focal points rather than as subsidiary "transmission mechanisms" for the policies of the UK government in London.

John Osmond, director of the Institute of Welsh Affairs, writing in the Western Mail yesterday, set out the likely change in the Principality: "In place of more than 100 years of single party domination, in which the possibility of Welsh popular sovereignty was extinguished, we now have the emergence of a civic culture, built round an inclusive National Assembly, with the potential for demanding sovereignty over at least the nation's domestic affairs."

The Labour rebuttal to all of this is that Scotland and Wales have succumbed to the politics of whinge and that Alex Salmond's first year as First Minister has been preoccupied with the exploitation – if not manufacture – of grievances against the London government.

Certainly no-one can beat us when it comes to grievance. In an outstanding article in the Financial Times earlier this week, Professor John Kay, a member of the First Minister's Council of Economic Advisers, declared that impotent resentment has long been a dominant theme of Scottish politics. Labour has railed that our economic problems are the fault of international capitalism, while the Nats dumped the blame on the English.

This grievance culture has done us no good. It has worked to block a more honest appraisal of how many failings (municipal socialism, welfare dependency) now, thanks to devolution, lie within our gift to rectify. It has also blinded us to a more practical culture of solutions: "It doesn't have to be like this."

It is this quest for new ideas that has, in part, fuelled the switch to the SNP. Kay argues that the surge in the fortunes of the SNP "is associated with a shift from a culture of complaint to a more constructive agenda".

Even were the grievance explanation valid, not all the grievance has been economic. For another major contributor to Labour's demise has been a keen desire to retain what's left of our sense of identity and belonging.

It is here Labour is now reaping its own whirlwind. It has never thought much of the politics of identity, still less the importance of history, tradition and belonging. Indeed, one of the insistent themes throughout the Blair years was the expunging of such concepts as nationalism and identity and the adoption of "universal values" of equality, human rights and progress through diversity. This rejection of the importance of history and nationhood led directly to a huge underestimation of the problems in Iraq and now Afghanistan. Blair's ahistoricism, his assumption that what the liberal West wanted could be foisted on anyone else, blinded him to the complexities of Iraq – and those of his own country.

Indeed, it has fuelled a deep unease in the UK. This led to desperate back pedalling, with Gordon Brown championing courses in British citizenship and oaths of loyalty to the Queen. How very non-British, as if loyalty could be conjured up by a certificate.

This has only exposed the government's insensitivity to matters of history and identity. But these concerns have long been close to Scottish hearts. We are proud of our history and culture, thank you very much, and we have no intention of wishing them away. We know who we are and from whence we come. We will not lose that which defines us. Is there a flicker of recognition of the potency of these concerns with David Miliband? On the contrary. He wants Blairism back.

So we are now in something more than a "crisis of Labour", but looking beyond the next election to the likelihood of changes in the constitutional landscape. Far-fetched though reports earlier this week may have seemed of a deal between the SNP and the Conservatives, it is likely some sort of modus vivendi will be sought that could bring about "max dev" while external affairs are handled at national/federal level. The Conservatives have much to gain from the prospect of almost unfettered dominance of domestic English political affairs with the Lib Dems as the main opposition party while the nationalist parties secure much of what they desire without a total breakaway from the UK.

That is an ultimate step only a referendum would determine, but we should not underestimate the extent of the change that could be achieved without outright separatism. Either way, Labour looks dead and buried.