Has any Labour leader ever run a worse campaign than Jim Murphy?

[T_i_B]

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2015/04/29/has-any-labour-leader-ever-run-a-worse-campaign-than-jim-mur

The campaign run by Murphy has been complacent, uninspiring and counter-productive. Murphy's central message - that a vote for the SNP is a vote for the Conservatives - is purely negative and gives voters zero reasons to actively back the Labour party. This strategy may have once seemed like Labour's best chance of hanging on in Scotland, but the unavoidable fact is that it has not worked. Yet even today Murphy is still sticking to his script, telling reporters that the poll results are "good for the SNP and great for David Cameron."

By contrast to this purely negative message, Nicola Sturgeon's argument that a vote for the SNP is a vote for Scotland's voice to be heard in Westminster, is both positive and difficult to argue against. Whatever the result next week Scotland is set to play a far bigger role in UK politics than it ever has done before. The sheer scale of bile poured on both Sturgeon and her party over recent weeks, is all the evidence you need of the influence they are set to have.

To be fair to Murphy, Scottish Labour's problems predated his time as leader and Labour's collapse has far more to do with what happened in the referendum campaign than anything that has taken place since he took over.

But a different leader could at the very least have limited the damage done by the SNP to Labour's general election chances. Murphy has made those chances significantly worse.

[non sociopath skin]

1. I feared this from the very beginning.

Putting an arch-Blairite in charge of Scottish Labour seemed a daft thing to do.

And, as we can see, it was.

The Skin

[Ken Burch]

2. Aye.

They needed to find someone with that true "Red Clydeside" fire.

[fedsron2us]

4. Something like this perhaps

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/still-irresistible-a-workingclass-heros-finest-speech-2051285.html

[Denzil_DC]

3. The internal rumblings continue.

And there's more than enough blame to go round.

There'd been suspicions that Glasgow South West (ex- and quite possibly doomed if the polls are any guide) MP Ian Davidson - himself a dubious claimant to any left-wing kudos or ability to reach out across the post-referendum divide, among other bullying outbursts having repeatedly declared that after the No vote, in terms of dealing with the Yes camp, "all that will be required is mopping up and bayonetting of the wounded" - might be one of the focuses of the current Scottish Labour dissent, and he's now come out in public:

Ed Miliband 'must take over Scottish campaign from failing Jim Murphy

Ed Miliband needs to rescue Labour’s crisis-ridden general election campaign in Scotland because Jim Murphy is not a “stimulating leadership figure”, one of the party’s most senior parliamentarians has warned.

...

Arguing that Mr Murphy’s tactics are not “breaking through”, he attacked the decision to focus the final week of the Scottish Labour campaign on warnings that the SNP will use a landslide next week to push for a second independence referendum.

Mr Davidson said this would not work in his constituency of Glasgow South West, where he said the majority voted Yes in last year's referendum and would like another chance.

That's Labour still failing to move on from the referendum mindset - it seems to be an obsession, probably easier to try to get their heads round than the deeply entrenched structural and policy deficit in Labour Scotland, and all their efforts to scaremonger about it are just making their situation worse.

There's no doubt that many voters won't forgive Labour for the conduct of that referendum campaign, rather than just the outcome, and quite a number do want another referendum, though few any time soon as two failures in quick succession would see the issue finally dead in the water. But the more pressing issue on people's minds in most constituencies is the austerity concensus and Labour's continuing rightward drift, exacerbated by the Labour Party in Scotland's subservience to the centralized control by Miliband's camp.

Jim Murphy/Kezia Dugdale was the more right-wing ticket compared to the more nominally left-wing Neil Findlay/Katy Clark one in Scottish Labour's leadership elections after Johann Lamont resigned in disgust that she had to follow rUK Labour's line rather than establishing a discrete identity for Labour in a Scotland. Some prominent Labour apparatchiks lobbied hard to see Murphy elected, Glasgow East (ex- and quite possibly doomed if the polls are any guide) MP Margaret Curran desperately ringing round on the eve of the election pleading that "Neil's too left-wing." They made their bed.

Gordon Brown hasn't been helping things either with repeated speeches that plough much the same old ground, his credibility in tatters beyond the media that seem to hang on his every word after Cameron shafted the No campaign with his EVEL declaration the morning after the referendum result, reneging on Brown's highly hyped eve-of-poll (and purdah-breaking) "Vow" of more devolution of powers to Holyrood.

The word from loose-lipped Scottish Labour insiders is that he's not so much been deployed by Labour for this election campaign as "escaped."

Anyway, as the article points out later, Miliband is very unlikely to be an effective white knight up here:

However, an Ipsos MORI for STV this week gave Mr Miliband an approval rating of minus 39 in Scotland, compared to minus 34 for Mr Cameron, minus 19 for Mr Murphy and plus 48 for Ms Sturgeon.

Quite how deep Labour's doom in Scotland may be, we'll have to wait and see, as despite the headlines, nobody's taking anything for granted till the votes are cast and counted.

[Denzil_DC]

5. A pre-emptive (hopefully not premature)

pointer to one of the likely reasons behind the failure of Scottish Labour's campaign, reported in Today's Scottish Times:

‘Negative’ campaign helps Nationalists

Scottish Labour’s central campaign tactic of talking up the threat of independence has not only failed but has actually driven voters into the arms of the SNP, according to an independent study out yesterday.

The academic analysis, by researchers at the University of Edinburgh, found that voters are more likely to vote for the Nationalists if the main unionist parties warn about the threat of independence.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

6. There's been a small swing back to Labour from the SNP

but not enough to haul back the SNP's huge lead and not enough to save Murphy. Scottish Labour still have time to get it right and reorientate itself back towards social democratic politics, but it may take 5-10 years to recover from the damage of neoliberal Blairism.

[T_i_B]

7. Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy to resign

And not before time!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-32760196