Alf Young: It has been a bad (and a bad-tempered) week for Labour in Scotland. It started with a Westminster junior Transport Minister and Holyrood's Deputy Enterprise Minister roughing up one of Scotland's most distinguished historians.

It has been a bad (and a bad-tempered) week for Labour in Scotland. It started with a Westminster junior Transport Minister and Holyrood's Deputy Enterprise Minister roughing up one of Scotland's most distinguished historians. Professor Chris Smout, the Historiographer Royal, had dared to suggest it is "perfectly feasible" Scotland could make a go of independence, as some emerging states in eastern Europe have done. As good Ayrshire lads, Tom Harris and Allan Wilson put on their metaphorical pit-boots and gave the Queen's adviser a verbal kicking for daring to state the obvious.

Next we discovered that, in the view of HM Inspectorate of Education, one of the devolved Scottish Executive's flagship initiatives, the £2bn McCrone deal on teachers' pay and conditions, has so far failed to deliver the impact on children's learning claimed for it at the outset. No minister launched a verbal attack on the inspectors, at least not in public. But you could certainly conjure up the noise of disgruntled citizens, choking over their cornflakes, wondering how many more billions Holyrood will manage to spend with no discernible impact on the quality of outcomes.

Bang on cue, Tuesday brought more opinion-poll gloom for Labour. The latest YouGov survey, this time for Channel 4 News, gave the SNP three more seats than Labour, were these figures to be repeated in the real poll on May 3. They won't be, of course. And a three-seat lead guarantees nothing more than some very fraught horse-trading over which multi-party coalition controls the next Scottish Parliament. Or the possibility, if that horse-trading fails, that devolved Scotland will get its first taste of minority government.

But this string of polls putting the Nationalists ahead is clearly eating away at Labour's soul. This one coincided with Jack McConnell's latest ministerial reshuffle, enforced by the departure of Communities Minister Malcolm Chisholm over the future of the Trident missile system. The choice of Rhona Brankin, someone the First Minister had seen fit to sack in 2001, left other contenders and backbenchers with ambition wringing their hands in despair. Labour suddenly looked less like incumbents seeking a third consecutive term in office, and more like a political establishment in danger of falling apart at the seams.

"It's not a calamity, it's worse than that," I was told, when I asked one Labour insider this week how preparations for May's election are going. If it is really that bad, can Labour restore some semblance of internal unity in the next 100 days and project a convincing, positive case for another four years as Holyrood's largest party? Or can we expect, as a weapon of last resort, a rampantly negative assault on the consequences of leaving the present Union?

The sound of government ministers, however junior, verbally abusing the author of two benchmark histories of the Scottish people, calling him "naive" and suggesting he "shut up", suggests negativity will prevail. If that's what we get - the politics of fear, peddled day-in, day-out - on no other justification than that it's worked before, it will speak volumes for the parlous state political debate in Scotland is now in. The politics of fear locking horns with a political nationalism which, all too readily, slips into the politics of grievance is a deeply unappealing prospect for an electorate already refusing in growing numbers to vote.

Let's return to Professor Smout's modest intervention. You don't have to be a Nationalist to believe Scotland could credibly go it alone and make its way in the world as an independent nation state. You can believe such an outcome is perfectly feasible, but doubt whether the process of disengagement from the present Union would be worth the candle. Alex Salmond and his party would have us believe that emulating Ireland, Norway, Iceland or Finland is simply a matter of resolve, of national will. Is it?

All four of these small European nations gained their independence in the first half of the past century: Norway in 1905, Finland in 1917, Ireland in 1922 and Iceland in 1944. Where are their counterparts in today's post-industrial developed world of extensive welfare provision and globalising capital? The truth is they barely exist. Yes, new independent states have continued to be born as the communist bloc and old imperial empires have broken up. But from Quebec to Catalonia, most nationalist movements in the developed west have opted for constitutional compromise rather than outright independence.

The Labour Party, in Scotland and in Britain, settled for such compromise, first unsuccessfully in the 1970s, then with more decisive conviction post-1997. But while Labour delivered the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, too many of the party's leading figures, even in those parts of the UK directly affected by the changes, left the task of turning devolution into constitutional flesh to others.

I'm told Brian Walden recently revealed that, when Jim Callaghan called him and other rising stars of Labour together before the first stab at a devolution settlement hit the buffers, the then Prime Minister told them there was nothing wrong with a little "appeasement", if that's what was needed to see off bigger threats. From what I knew of Callaghan at the time, I can believe it. But, sadly, that mindset has afflicted Labour's approach to making the home rule settlement work ever since.

Labour politicians of ambition saw - and still see - serving political time at Holyrood as beneath them. That was, perhaps, understandable for a generation of Scottish Labour politicians who were already well up Westminster's greasy poll before Holyrood had gained popular backing. But a younger generation take the same view. Two of them have made it to Tony Blair's cabinet. So who can blame them?

Well, as they and their party may be about to discover, playing the appeasement game while pursuing their own political destinies in another place could carry a very heavy political price. I doubt the Scottish electorate wants another election campaign that treats us all like the hapless Professor Smout, berating us for the folly of thinking Scotland could exist just fine as an independent state.

Many of us who haven't yet signed up for independence, who believe in a Union, re-energised by home rule, and see the past 300 years as, in the main, a benign experience and not a cause of relentless grievance, don't want another dose of the politics of fear. We accept there are no magic wands, not even the one on offer from the SNP. We just want more of those who promoted devolution to invest more of their own energies and careers into realising its full potential.