THERE was a somewhat forced bonhomie at the final First Minister's Questions of the political year.

Inevitably, the macaroni pie featured prominently in exchanges between Nicola Sturgeon and the stand-in Labour leader, Iain Gray. But the smiles concealed a real anxiety among the political classes. What is the future of opposition in Holyrood?

And can the SNP be an effective opposition in Westminster? The recent media focus on the 56 SNP MPs will fade, not least because in most areas there isn't a lot they can actually achieve, apart from making a lot of noise. Alex Salmond is no slouch when it comes to doing that of course, and he has already spoken more than 124 times since the election.

But the Smith legislation and the minimal tax legislation contained in it is now a done deal, and was anyway largely incomprehensible to most voters. Full Fiscal Autonomy, or FFS as David Cameron calls it (Full Fiscal Shambles), has been formally rejected by the UK Government and can now be consigned to the lengthy list of powers blocked by Westminster.

The SNP's task now will be to manage expectations that have been generated by the General Election that, in some way, there can be progress towards independence without risking an early referendum. Frustrated expectations are always a problem for an insurgent party like the SNP. However, there's no indication yet that Nicola Sturgeon has been trying the patience of voters in Scotland.

It may seem depressingly early to start speculating about the 2016 Scottish Parliamentary elections as everyone is trying to get a summer break from politics. But the reality has to be faced. The SNP's popularity appears to be growing even beyond the unreal heights it reached in last month's Tsunami.

According to one opinion poll the SNP is now the choice of 60% of Scottish voters, which means that Labour might fail to win any of the constituency seats next May. (Though of course, thanks to the additional member system of election, they will return some MSPs from the lists.) This is not unalloyed good news for Nicola Sturgeon.

The claims that Scotland is now a one-party state after the General Election were predictable and wrong. The SNP's success was magnified by the Westminster electoral system. Nevertheless, the state of disarray of the opposition parties in Scotland cannot help but alarm those who believe that vigorous opposition is vital to democracy.

Now, I would normally be the first to insist that the opinion polls should be dismissed at this stage. But after the General Election, no-one can afford any more to rule them out just because they seem barking mad. I spent most of the last year insisting that the SNP couldn't win over 50 seats, and they won 56 out of 59.

Indeed, the full impact of last month's results hasn't fully sunk in. There's been a stunned silence from the UK media and even in Scotland there is an air of bewilderment that such a thing could have happened. Labour are still in denial.

It's like that period after the First World War when people just couldn't come to terms with the scale of the losses. Hard to believe that 40 out of 41 Labour MPs have disappeared from the political map. That significant political figures like Margaret Curran, Douglas Alexander, Jim Murphy, Tom Harris, Ian Davidson have ceased to have any significance at all.

The General Election was the most remarkable electoral event in Scottish history, and we haven't begun to grasp its significance. What we do know is that all the Unionist parties suffered a catastrophic rebuff.

The Liberal Democrats were wiped off the Scottish mainland and the Scottish Tories returned their worst share of the vote in over a century. This made last week's pronouncement from Ruth Davidson that the Conservatives are on course to become the opposition in Holyrood next year somewhat premature.

Her argument appears to be that because lots of "natural" Tory voters switched tactically to Labour, then the Conservatives must somehow be the main opposition party. But I'm afraid this is an exercise in self-delusion that has afflicted the Scottish Conservatives for fully three decades now.

They assume that there "must" be lots of shy Tories out there - well, look at the house prices and all those Scots who are worried about immigration - and that they have all just been hiding behind flags of convenience because it isn't quite done to vote Tory in Scotland.

They used to think that a lot of their "natural" votes had been snaffled by the clever SNP, who were really Tartan Tories in disguise. But if this delusion survived the 2011 Holyrood landslide, then last month should have consigned it to its final resting place. The truth is that the Scottish Tories, even under the agreeable and energetic Ruth Davidson, are as unpopular as ever.

And they are about to get more unpopular still. Last week's confirmation that David Cameron intends to press ahead with his £12bn welfare cuts programme is bad news for Ms Davidson. He said that he wanted to end the "merry go round" whereby people on low pay get their wages subsidised by the state.

Mr Cameron is to be congratulated for accepting that poverty pay should have no place in modern Britain. Unfortunately, while he has apparently resolved to cut in-work tax credits, he has not increased the minimum wage accordingly. This means that those hard-working families he keeps talking about are likely to have up to £1,400 slashed from their annual incomes.

Some 48% of Scottish families received tax credits last year - an arresting statistic that surprised even me. Their removal could plunge half of Scotland's families into severe difficulties.

We learned last week that child poverty has started to increase in the UK for the first time in over a decade. The Prime Minister's response to that was to suggest that they might alter the way poverty is defined.

This is right up Labour's street, and their sole remaining Scottish MP, Ian Murray, made significant running on this last week against "ideologically driven cuts". However, the problem here is that Labour in Scotland is linked to the UK Labour Party whose opposition to Tory welfare reforms is less than robust.

We all remember Labour's shadow work and pensions minister Rachel Reeves saying that Labour would be "tougher than the Tories" on work-shy benefit claimants. Labour oppose the cuts in tax credits, but the use of essentially Tory rhetoric on welfare has made it difficult for them to defend the system they created.

The crisis of the Scottish Labour Party shows no sign of being resolved. It was left to the radical outside candidate in the UK Labour leadership race, Jeremy Corbyn, to call last week for the Scottish party to reconnect with its radical roots in the Independent Labour Party.

Scottish Labour seem to be suffering from collective amnesia. They've forgotten their own radical tradition of John Wheatley, James Maxton, Tom Johnston. Just because Yvette Cooper has ruled out any separate Scottish Labour Party - and even any future coalition arrangement with the SNP - the party in Scotland has lost its voice.

So, yes, there are problems ahead for Nicola Sturgeon, and the frustrated 56. But they are problems of success. And I suspect they can live with them for now.