Labour leaders have come and gone since the Scottish Parliament was reconvened: you might have noticed.

The attrition rate, in this version of trench warfare, is high. Set aside the awful death of Donald Dewar and the list of losers unfolds. Leading the Holyrood Labour group isn't exactly the chalice you'd pick at happy hour.

Henry and Jack and Wendy and Iain: none had it easy. Struggling to reconcile the traditions of Scottish Labour with whatever focus-group image London was after proved impossible. Avoiding small misunderstandings, domestic or financial, was beyond these clever people. Attempting to say what their party was for in the 21st century eluded them all.

A large historical irony was involved. Whether Labour "gave" devolution to Scotland is open to question. The legacies of Willie Ross, the Kilbrandon report, the party's old Scottish Council, and a conference at Dalintober Street in Glasgow in the hot, waning summer of 1974 have yet to be settled. On one reading, the unions won, or fixed the home rule argument. A divided party just tagged along.

Arguably, it is still tagging along. Labour claims devolution as its own, but has never seen a devolved power worth cherishing. Tony Blair's government granted – another revealing word – a referendum that couldn't be fixed, but the party, like the leader, was never relaxed about the result. Does Scottish Labour truly believe in home rule in 2012? That's harder to say than you might imagine.

Part of the objection to nationalism is almost visceral. A Labour party liable to espouse self-determination for post-colonial peoples everywhere hesitates, still, over the patch of the planet where its politics is done. There remains a belief that nationalism is a step before fascism, that all nationalism turns nasty in the end. A dire "Scottish night" at a party conference is one thing; unleashing the atavistic beast another.

The result is a party never quite sure about what it believes. Tell a working person in Thurso that they are no different from a working person in Llangollen and you say something true. Tell the woman from Thurso that she isn't Welsh and she's likely to wonder why you state the obvious. But tell her that the difference matters, that her acre of existence is distinct and comes with choices attached: then the political game changes.

Even after a generation, Scottish Labour has not grasped this idea. A movement born out of distinctive circumstances doesn't see why distinctiveness could matter. Even before John Maclean, the Social Democratic Federation – a very long time ago – avoided the juvenile error. In 2012, Scottish Labour still sees "the home rule thing" as a plot, or a fad, or a passing fancy. It is treated as something to be managed. The misreading of history is profound.

After all those leaders, each full of promises, the delusion should have worn off. Wendy Alexander, for one, told the Nationalists to "bring it on". Henry McLeish was more thoughtful than anyone allowed. Jack McConnell attempted the old Willie Ross stratagem of telling London that Scotland – his office, at least – would make its own choices. Iain Gray realised, too late, what was going on in the streets.

And what was that? A crude way to put it would be to say that finally Scotland took Scottish Labour seriously. An unexamined phenomenon of Scottish Nationalism has been the hesitant yet unstoppable movement of troubled cradle socialists towards self-determination. Pa has meanwhile fallen off the dyke.

A swathe of the population, born into Labour, paid less attention to Alex Salmond than to ancestral voices. It's still going on. Long before the National Party of Scotland began to fulminate and flirt with fascists, there was a party of home rule. In one sense, urban Scotland has been returning to its roots in the 21st century. This does not necessarily suit the leader of a nationalist party.

Nor does it necessarily suit a compromised British party, dedicated to the defence of regnal and parliamentary union. So try a psychological experiment. Try imagining Ed Milliband setting out to become, for example, leader of the Labour group in Glasgow, or in Dundee, or in Edinburgh. It doesn't work, does it? Why not? It doesn't work because Mr Miliband is not of the place where politics matter. Anyone who seeks to lead the Labour Party in Scotland has to keep that place in mind.

Alex Salmond eats them alive, regardless. He pays a fine tribute to them, after they are gone, and then commits the sleekit act of enlisting Labour's fallen as Nationalists before the fact. He gets away with it because no-one dares – you can work this joke in any manner that suits – to cheek the father of the nation.

Opposition politicians can't cope with Mr Salmond. They can't cope with his habit of ignoring the questions he doesn't like. They can't respond to his use of personal pronouns, as though a small matter of geography and "C'est moi" accord with the facts of Scotland. Opposition leaders can't cope, most often, because they do not know what they are defending, or why.

There are two things worth saying about Johann Lamont. First, that lazy middle-class journalists have patronised her mercilessly, endlessly, and shamefully. She has been treated as "a wee wumman", with infinite disdain. Simply because of accent and gender – but let's not forget class – she has been treated as less than serious. Reporting has been unfair.

In the shuffle, a fact has been overlooked. Unlike each of her predecessors, the great Donald not least, Ms Lamont gets under Mr Salmond's skin. She does it by being resolutely unimpressed by the patriotic, father of the nation flannel. She treats the First Minister of Scotland as a chancer: this is not always a bad idea. Right or wrong, Ms Lamont manages to speak on behalf of the large constituency of the old, urban and unimpressed working class.

It happens to be the same constituency that will decide Scotland's future. My view is that the Labour leader seeks to defend propositions not worth defending. Such isn't the point: I get one vote, and my view is not solicited. This country will become independent if and when the people who have voted Labour, decade upon decade, make their choice.

Ms Lamont speaks eloquently for them, it seems to me. Some of the SNP poison being poured in her direction recognises the danger she poses. This Labour leader anticipates Mr Salmond's victory in an independence referendum. She says, nevertheless, that certain issues are permanent, and will remain, once choices are made. To adapt Dewar, I like that.

Some of this will need to be explained to Mr Ed, of course. Portions of the Labour Party will need to be brought to an understanding that "the Union" they defend encompasses almost all the things they have always opposed. Ms Lamont is quite steely, it seems to me, and dispenses with the shouting on which her predecessors relied. That's a start.

What would be the ideology of a Labour Party in a post-independence Scotland? Which party would be more progressive, Labour or the SNP? Were I of the former or any persuasion, I would be telling old left voters than Ms Lamont is already thinking these things through.

The wee woman is a bit bigger than the First Minister realises.