A news event long predicted can mistakenly lose its impact. For many months pollsters have been forecasting that Labour will suffer serious reverses in Scotland and that the SNP will earn the right to govern there. Those pollsters have also been saying that Labour will struggle to cling to power in Wales, while in local elections in England Labour could lose between 500 and 600 council seats. Even if the numbers improve in the three weeks ahead of the 3 May vote (and deliberate talking down of expectations is one of the oldest spin-tricks in the book), the ramifications are immense.

It is hard to imagine, on the basis of the evidence, what Tony Blair hopes to achieve by turning up so often in Scotland. The main reasons for registering a protest vote are inextricably linked with him: the Iraq war and the cash-for-honours saga. It is harder still to imagine what Gordon Brown hopes to gain by standing at rallies next to a man he believes has harmed the party by refusing to quit until now.

One suspects that Blair, even in the throes of his term in office, has deluded himself again about his powers of persuasion. Brown has no choice but to associate himself with an outcome that, in the short term, can only damage an already fraught succession to the British throne. He hopes desperately that the results will be quickly overtaken by Blair's resignation announcement (expected on 9 or 10 May) and the excitement that would ensue. Brown and his allies expect an automatic opinion-poll bounce. Their task will be to sustain it well beyond the party conference season in the autumn.

Behind the figures, some disturbing trends have been revealed in the run-up to this set of elections that will be difficult to reverse. Labour will have been ejected from government in the very part of the UK that sustains it in power at Westminster - Scotland. Brown himself will be the first MP representing a Scottish constituency to take over Downing Street since Sir Alec Douglas-Home in 1963. As our political editor suggests (page 11), Brown has still to identify a version of Britishness that is distinctively modern and not necessarily English.

North of the border, the SNP will face a string of problems - it will either have to cope as a minority administration or dilute its aspirations for independence as a Liberal Democrat condition for going into coalition. The precedent will have been set, however; Labour will have lost power in its heartland. Furthermore, rule changes mean that, for the first time, local elections in Scotland are being fought under proportional representation. This will give the SNP a foothold in councils, providing it with experience in administration it has hitherto lacked.

In Wales, Labour's demise is less precipitous. It will almost certainly remain the largest party and soldier on in coalition with the Lib Dems. Intriguingly, the main beneficiary in the principality has not been the nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, but the Conservatives, whose recovery there far outstrips their performance in Scotland.

In England, where 312 of 388 local authorities face either a partial or whole re-election, Labour faces a battle in a number of major cities. Its tenure is fragile even in fiefdoms such as Sheffield (David Blunkett) and Kingston upon Hull (John Prescott and Alan Johnson). The one, and important, consolation is that the Tories have failed so far to break through in most of the north of England. Unless they do, their prospects at a general election will be less rosy than the headline figures suggest.

But, as the saying goes, it is governments that lose elections, and Labour is descending into defeatism. Brown's allies see attempts to open up discussion about Labour's future (see Alan Milburn's review of Anthony Giddens's book on page 57) as a ruse by über-Blairites to deny him the prize. Those Blairites will deliberately misread the reverses in Scotland as evidence that Brown cannot win even in his own backyard. Voters are not impressed.

What is required in the weeks after 3 May is nothing less than an overhaul of Labour policy and behaviour. Failure to do so could turn a Scottish débâcle into a national one.

Symphonic servitude

When posterity considers the great orchestral works of the early 21st century, it seems unlikely that it will linger long on the Nuclear Symphony, performed as part of Iran's "nuclear technology day" celebrations. The muse soon abandons art when it is required to submit to the state's purposes in so servile a manner, and attempts to use the symphonic form to describe feats of industry have a particularly unhappy history.

Take the case of Tikhon Khrennikov: he may have been a long-serving secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, but he dealt his long-term reputation an irrecoverable blow when he wrote his Tone Poem of the Tractor Workers' Co-operative, catchy though it may have been. Nor can it be said that the strains of Smelting Steel, a composition about the joys of working in a steel factory scored for two zithers and string ensemble, are often heard outside the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The Nuclear Symphony appears to represent a late flowering of socialist realism, the Stalinist style which, when applied to visual art, was mocked in the west as "girl meets tractor" (what is it about tractors?). Can Tehran concert-goers look forward to hearing other classics of this genre? They would be forgiven if their enthusiasm flagged during numbers such as "The Collective Farmers' Polka" or "The Diligent Postman", from the 1939 film The Tractorists (yes, them again).

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