Surge in SNP support threatens Miliband’s election hopes

A stunning surge in SNP support north of the border is threatening to wreck Ed Miliband’s best laid plans for winning power in Downing Street next May.

Miliband avoided a potential bloodbath with his own MPs last night with a call for unity after rumblings of discontent over Labour’s near-miss in the safe-as-houses Heywood and Middleton by-election.

"I am not going to let us, seven months from before an election, start lapsing into the bad habits of the past," he told the Parliamentary Labour Party. But Jon Craig, political correspondent of Sky News, blogged: “No doubt he was relieved to have escaped a bloodbath. He looked tense and his body language was not that of a confident party leader on the brink of power.”

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One reason for the Labour leader’s lack of confidence – despite the party regaining its lead over the Tories in recent voting intention polls – is that he is now seriously worried that as many as half of the 41 Scottish Labour MPs could lose their seats to the SNP in the upcoming general election.

Losing 20 or so seats would slash Miliband’s odds of forming a majority Labour government.

It’s on the cards because the SNP have made a remarkable comeback from their defeat in the Scottish independence referendum.

They are now ten points ahead of Labour in Scottish opinion polls while party membership has risen more than threefold from 25,652 to 80,000. There was such a rush to join up in the fortnight after the referendum vote, the Scottish Herald reports, that SNP staff struggled to keep up with the applications. Meanwhile, Labour Party membership in Scotland has slumped below 20,000.

One reason for the surge in SNP support is the growing sense that Scottish voters are about to be betrayed by Westminster over the promises of devolution made by the three main party leaders – Cameron, Clegg and Miliband – in the dying days of the referendum campaign.

The three men’s so-called Vow did the trick in the short term, helping deliver the No to independence vote London wanted. The trouble now is that Labour and the Conservatives cannot agree on the way forward.

Cameron wants greater devolution to England to go “in tandem” with extra devolution to Scotland, with Scottish MPs at Westminster being banned from voting on issues such as taxation that only effect voters in England. Labour won’t agree to that because they know that without their Scottish contingent they will never be able to command a majority at Westminster.

Yesterday, the Government published its white paper to put The Vow into legislation. Today, the Commons will have an emergency debate to get the ball rolling. It will be followed by a report from a commission on devolution headed by Lord Smith of Kelvin later this month and draft legislation in January. But it will not pass into law until after the general election.

William Hague, the Leader of the House, who is trying to bring all the sides together as his last act before quitting politics at the general election, denied on the Today programme this morning that Scottish devolution was dependent on agreement over English devolution. “There is no reneging here,” he said.

But Labour still smell a rat. Gordon Brown, the former Labour PM drafted in to deliver the Vow to Scottish voters, recently accused David Cameron of setting a trap for Scottish voters by trying to dupe them into accepting significant cuts in voting powers for Scottish MPs at Westminster.

The irrepressible SNP leader Alex Salmond has been keen to encourage the “betrayal” narrative. He was at it again this morning, warning on the Today programme that Scottish voters will “exact their revenge” if they are “conned and tricked” over the Vow.

“I imagine some of that surge in SNP support is because there is a pretty negative view of the cavilling of the Westminster leaders who managed to persuade enough people to reject independence by their last-minute promises,” said Scotland’s First Minister.

Salmond, who said in the wake of the referendum result that the issue of independence had been put to bed for a generation or possibly a lifetime, this morning refused to rule out the possibility that the row could rekindle the whole Scottish devolution debate.

Norman Smith, the BBC political correspondent, even suggested The Vow could eventually be “scuppered” after the general election if the Tories continue to insist on “English votes for English laws”.