Scottish Labour facing ruin at hands of SNP

Labour's Ed Miliband gave one of his best speeches on Saturday before a two-thirds filled hall in Edinburgh, passionately putting forward his vision for the United Kingdom.

Before him sat Scottish Labour delegates, who are facing near-destruction in May’s general election at the hands of the Scottish National Party, if a succession of polls even broadly reflect public opinion.

Miliband's problem in Scotland is not the quality of his rhetoric, but whether voters are listening. His core message to them is that a vote for the SNP is a vote for David Cameron and the Conservatives.

For now, that message is not being heeded. Scots prefer Alex Salmond’s vision of life after May 7th where a strengthened SNP Westminster team can “upset the apple cart”.

Every message on offer at the Edinburgh conference heralded that Scottish Labour has "changed" in the few months since its new leader, Jim Murphy, took command in place of Johann Lamont.

In her final words last October, Lamont complained that Scottish Labour had been treated as “a branch office” by the party’s London HQ.

Many of the party’s 41 Scottish MPs – holding seats where votes were once weighed, not counted – were “dinosaurs”, she said, wedded to a Westminster life, still thinking “that nothing has changed in Scotland”.

‘Patriotic interest’

On Saturday, Scottish Labour delegates changed the party’s constitution, pledging by a 69 per cent to 31 per cent majority “to work for the patriotic interest of the Scottish people”.

The fact that such language is necessary illustrates the scale of Labour’s problems following the SNP’s surge in support since September’s independence referendum.

Much of its post-referendum difficulties are the legacy of decades of lassitude, but not all wounds were self-inflicted, since Cameron irretrievably soured the atmosphere within hours of the referendum result.

He could have adopted a “we are a nation once again”-style, statesman-like posture. Instead, he chose narrow party advantage, opting to talk about England’s need for extra powers.

Scots who had voted for independence predictably crowed that it proved that Albion could not be trusted. Worryingly for the sake of the union, many Scots who voted No agreed.

The opening hours of September 19th set the scene for all that followed. Through it all, the SNP played the grievance card, claiming that campaign promises to Scots were weak and had, in any event, not been honoured.

The question now is how well will the SNP do. Despite the hatred that exists between the parties – for it is nothing less than that – there are few Labour/SNP marginals.

Indeed, a 10 percentage points swing – the usual description of a landslide – would add just two extra MPs to the SNP’s Commons contingent. A 15-points swing would bring 17 more.

However, the latest polling suggests that SNP support is up by 25 points even in Labour-held seats where voters rejected independence, such as Ayr, Dumfries, East Renfrewshire and Edinburgh SW.

Even Kirkcaldy, the bastion of former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, where Labour enjoyed its second-largest lead over the SNP five years ago, would fall in such circumstances.

“It’s even worse than the polls,” said one Labour figure. “The SNP run good campaigns, with strong messaging and late surges. But they have these figures even before they have really begun to campaign.”

Faced with dire portents, Miliband and Murphy refuse to rule out doing a post-election Westminster deal with the SNP, even though the majority of Scottish Labour MPs demand they do so.

Catch-22

In truth, Miliband and Murphy face indigestible choices. Without the SNP, Miliband could find it impossible to run a minority government.

However, such a pact could fracture Scottish Labour beyond repair.

And it gets worse for Miliband. Labour’s vote in key English marginals could be imperilled if voters there believe that support for Labour means letting Scotland to rule the roost, by default.

Such rumblings down south – helped along by Cameron’s call on Saturday on Miliband to rule out a deal with the SNP “if he cares about this country” – will echo back, further fuelling the SNP’s campaign.

For years, the SNP has been lucky in its enemies. The luck continues.

On Saturday, Max Hastings fumed in the Daily Mail about Scottish perfidy.

"It is as if a whole people are rowing lifeboats like madmen to climb aboard the Titanic. Like the French and Greeks, the Scots seem immune to rational argument about their circumstances and prospects," he wrote.

In reality, the SNP – which would not contemplate a formal coalition with Labour – does not even want to do a confidence-and-supply pact with it, where it would support it on confidence and budget votes.

Instead, the ideal outcome for the SNP would be to destroy, or all but destroy, Labour in Scotland; but then see it duck and weave before cobbling an indecorous deal with a Liberal Democrats’ rump.

In such a landscape, Scottish Labour’s passage of a new Clause IV (which sets out the aims and values of the party) pledging to act in “the patriotic interest” of Scotland will cut little ice with voters when they come to elect a new Holyrood parliament a year from now.