Labour refuses to give up the fight in Scotland

Labour is fighting back against the Nationalist surge in Scotland by seeking to reawaken memories of an historic moment in the House of Commons when Ed Miliband was a ten-year-old boy.

Scottish Labour have produced a video that pins the blame on the SNP for the downfall 36 years ago of Jim Callaghan’s Labour government which ushered in the Thatcher era.

Margaret Thatcher’s motion of no confidence in the minority Callaghan government was carried by just one vote and it was the support of the 11 Scottish National MPs that proved crucial.

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Callaghan famously dubbed the SNP MPs “turkeys voting for an early Christmas”. And so it turned out. As Thatcher swept into power in the general election on 3 May 1979, all but two of the Nationalists who had supported her lost their seats.

The great irony is that Thatcher became the SNP’s best recruiting sergeant as she imposed unpopular policies such as the poll tax on Scotland and opposed devolution.

Hostility to the Tories north of the border has grown over the three decades since and Labour and Miliband have paid the price for making common cause with David Cameron and the Tories in the independence referendum.

The most recent survey by ICM for The Guardian shows the SNP with a 16-point lead over Labour (43 to 27 per cent). That’s exactly the same level of support for Labour shown in ICM’s December poll for the Guardian – suggesting the new Labour leader north of the border, Jim Murphy, has been unsuccessful in halting the SNP surge.

The ICM figures would translate into 43 seats for the SNP (up from six) while Labour would lose 29 of their 41 Scottish seats, leaving them with just 12.

That would doom Miliband to relying on SNP support in the House of Commons to make him Prime Minister (if Labour come out of the election as the biggest party in a hung parliament).

But the Labour leader still insists he can win a Commons majority - which means he has to find a way to stop the SNP delivering such a crushing blow on 7 May.

The man he’s pinning his hopes on is Patrick Heneghan, his director of field operations.

Heneghan was the subject of a profile in the Sunday Times written by someone who knows what he’s talking about, Damian McBride, who worked alongside him in Gordon Brown’s 2010 campaign.

Heneghan may not have delivered Brown the victory he craved, but he did deny Cameron the majority that had been his for the taking, says McBride.

“A month away from that election, Heneghan made the crucial call about which seats Labour could hold onto, and which it should cast adrift, and decided how its campaign resources should be deployed accordingly.”

Now, McBride suggests that Heneghan will make the same sort of call in Scotland. He will write off at least a third of Labour’s 41 Scottish seats, targeting all resources on the two-thirds where it has a better chance of holding on.

Heneghan is apparently fascinated by military history especially the Second World War fight for Stalingrad. McBride says: “The stakes may be infinitely lower, but the principles at this election are the same: once you get down to a street-by-street war of attrition, the better-organised, better-reinforced, better-motivated force will always win.”

And, he adds, most party professionals privately admit that, under Heneghan, Labour has “the best managed and best equipped army”.