Labour has been fighting a battle on a number of different fronts recently, both ideological and otherwise, but its biggest battle is undoubtedly in Scotland.
As membership and support for the SNP rocketed during and following the Scottish independence referendum campaign, it looks like Scottish Labour will be hit hard in seats where the party has been in an increasingly precarious position. Labour’s complacency in Scotland began to do some damage to its popularity there long before this year’s referendum, and now the party has finally caught up with the challenge for Scottish Labour, there are only five months to go to the general election.
A new poll published in today’s Guardian by ICM suggests there is a “bloodbath” ahead for Labour in Scotland, come the general election. It suggests the SNP’s vote share will be more than double its 20 per cent share of 2010, hitting 43 per cent of the vote, while Labour’s 42 per cent take in 2010 will tumble to just 26 per cent. This would give the SNP a 17-point lead: disastrous for Labour, as its number of Scottish MPs would plummet from 41 to 10.
To add to Scottish Labour’s bad news, a recent Survation poll for the Daily Record had 48 per cent of voters saying they would back the SNP, and put Labour at a disastrous 24 per cent. As well as this, the election polling sage and the media’s academic of the moment, Professor John Curtice, has analysed the Guardian‘s latest poll, and written that polling results based on uniform swing could actually be underestimating how hard Labour could be hit by the SNP: “. . . if anything, estimates of how many seats the SNP might win that are derived by assuming that the Scotland-wide movement uncovered by a poll would be replicated in each and every constituency in Scotland could actually underestimate the scale of SNP gains.” He warns that Labour’s defeat could be greatest in its “safe” heartland seats.
However, as George points out, though the numbers look bad, they are not enough for us to begin writing Scottish Labour’s obituary. The Labour MP and former frontbencher Jim Murphy only became leader of Scottish Labour two weeks ago, and it is clear that he is already taking the party in a new direction, outwardly rejecting the idea of taking advice from Ed Miliband and Westminster. The man who won popularity with his passion during his pre-referendum tour of Scotland, speaking from his Irn-Bru boxes around the country in a bid to save the Union, is in the best position to save Scottish Labour as well.
Although winning support back from the SNP cannot be done by one individual alone, Murphy’s leadership coupled with the unlikelihood of Scotland treating the general election as a re-run of the in/out referendum – plus a reminder that the recent predictions in the Guardian derive from an online, rather than telephone, poll (“never the golden ticket”, as one pollster describes this technique to me) – makes it too early to write off Labour’s chances in Scotland.
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