Scotland – it’s not over until the bagpiper plays

Yesterday’s TNS poll of  Scottish General Election voting intentions has caused more justifiable doom and gloom regarding Scottish Labour’s fate.

It puts the SNP on 54% (+2), Labour on 22% (-2), the Tories on 13% (unchanged), and Lib Dems on 6% (unchanged). Figures like this on May 7^th would see Labour getting just one seat in Scotland.

Whilst this is a possible outcome, I do not believe it is inevitable.

The SNP, talked up by the Tories, would like to think that Labour in Scotland is already dead, and all they have to do is kick the body out of the way.

The reality is that there is significantly more life in the party that gave UK Labour leaders including Keir Hardie, John Smith and Gordon Brown than its enemies would give it credit for.

Scottish Labour isn’t giving up any of its parliamentary seats without a fight, and also knows this is just round two following the referendum, with another fight next year for control of Holyrood.

The stakes are high. The SNP need to permanently destroy, not just defeat, Scottish Labour if they are to get and win a second independence referendum. UK Labour needs Scottish Labour to recover if we are to ever get a majority at Westminster.

There are a number of reasons why I think Scottish Labour may exceed the rock bottom expectations being generated by the polls:

1) The high number of undecided voters. The otherwise bleak TNS poll puts the number of undecideds at 29%. This is very high and given Labour is the status quo party in Scotland they are more likely to break in Labour’s direction.

2) The SNP’s claim to be a more anti-austerity leftwing version of Labour is seriously undermined by the Institute of Fiscal Studies examination of each party’s spending plans, which show the SNP are in favour of deeper cuts than Labour. This, and the transparency with which the Tories are ramping the SNP, gives Labour some powerful campaign material for the final week. These factors won’t have been fully felt in the TNS polling as its was taken over a very extended period (1-19 April) which ended over a week ago.

3) There is scope and appetite for large scale anti-SNP tactical voting not just by people who voted No in the referendum but by Yes voters who want to move on and not have a second referendum. As Labour starts first or second in the vast majority of Scottish seats, we would be the main beneficiary. According to YouGov “almost half of all Conservative and Lib Dem supporters say they would switch to Labour to keep out the SNP.”

4) Scottish Labour has a campaigning edge over the SNP. The SNP may have a vast number of new members but they are a paper army – they lack the organisational structures to effectively mobilise them in a way that will affect the outcome in seats that are close-fought. The SNP has brought vast crowds together for rallies in George Square. We know this doesn’t impact the result because we did it ourselves in Sheffield in 1992. Meanwhile Labour’s smaller membership is being organised professionally and is hence more active in a smarter, more targeted way, having conversations with undecided voters. Lord Ashcroft’s polls in individual Scottish seats showed Labour having contacted more voters than the SNP in all the seats where Labour started first or second, despite this being from a standing start in those that were previously uncompetitive.

5) The same electoral maths that gives the SNP almost every Scottish seat if Labour is on 22 or 25%, a huge band of previously safe Labour territory that all falls when Labour goes below a certain tipping point, can have the opposite implication – a relatively modest Labour recovery to 30% starts yielding quite a few seats.

6) The Gordon Brown factor. It worked in the referendum. He is out on the stump doing amazing speeches again. It might work again.

Of course, none of this alters the fundamentals. That the SNP are winning politically because of an emotional response to the independence referendum, which may prove totally impervious in the short term to rational messages about their actual policies. And that the excellent Labour campaigning that is happening now is built, outside a small number of campaigning CLPs like Jim Murphy’s East Renfrewshire, on non-existent foundations, because complacency meant that for twenty years Scotland had among the lowest levels of membership and campaign activity in the UK.

Whatever the result on 7^th May it is important that Scottish Labour sees this campaign as having been the start of a process of renewal and revitalisation. Rather than a blame game or inquest, the party in Scotland will need to pick itself up rapidly and push on with campaigning for the 2016 Scottish Parliamentary elections. It will need to put huge vigour into scrutinising and exposing the weak performance of the SNP in government in Scotland, and how SNP MPs behave in Westminster. It must not be distracted into infighting along the lines of the Falkirk selection spat.

In this our comrades in Scotland will need and deserve the solidarity, support and comradeship of the rest of the Labour Party. We and the British people need Scottish Labour to have its best days ahead of it just as much as the people of Scotland need Labour in power in Westminster.

When Labour’s bagpipe playing UK General Secretary Iain McNicol next plays a tune we need it to be a stirring war march for Scottish Labour, not a lament.