by Samuel Dale
The Labour party is in a state of emergency. Rather than fighting this election with real momentum and confidence, we are in retreat across large swathes of the nation.
In the last five years of opposition Labour has drastically shrunk its core and failed to reach out to new voters. Ed Miliband has been outflanked on the left, right and centre leaving a party creaking at the seams.
If you design a 35% leadership strategy that aims to benefit from boundary anomalies then this is what happens. He talks the talk on One Nation but he has not done much else.
Whatever happens this week, the long-term consequences could be immense.
Scotland has been lost to the SNP in disastrous fashion. The independence referendum that split the nation is clearly the catalyst but Miliband must share some blame.
He is ultimately the leader who oversaw a huge defeat in the 2011 Scottish parliament elections and failed to respond. When she left in October, Johann Lamont famously compared Scottish Labour to a “branch office” of London last year.
Miliband is more unpopular in Scotland than even David Cameron. In February a Survation poll put said just 19% of Scots wanted Miliband as prime minister compared to 23% for Cameron.
That puts a spanner in the works of those calling for Labour to move to the left to win back Scotland.
