SCOTTISH Labour faces a bleak future, according to the party’s own research.
Leaked reports from focus groups held in Glasgow and Edinburgh show that most voters see Scottish Labour as “indistinguishable” from the Tories.
What is worse for party leader Kezia Dugdale is that some voters even saw Labour as “an incompetent version” of the Tories.
The focus groups of swing voters who previously voted Labour were brought together in the aftermath of the election that saw the party almost wiped out, losing 40 of their seats in Scotland.
On a positive note for Labour, voters north of the Border no longer feel angry about the party “taking Scotland for granted”. But this is only because they think the party is “simply an irrelevance”.
Former Scottish leader Johann Lamont’s comment about the party being seen as nothing more than a branch office has stuck with voters.
Dugdale and the party’s leadership, the focus group said, should “consider rebranding Scottish Labour as independent.”
“Labour must re-build in Scotland as a credible alternative to the SNP that isn’t at the beck and call of Westminster”.
In the focus reports from 10 groups across the UK, leaked to journalists, there was also a conflict between those voters who believed Labour should have readily accepted a Labour-SNP coalition at Westminster and those who thought it would give the SNP too much power.
Nicola Sturgeon “was so strong, she would have wiped the floor with him, run rings round [Ed Miliband],” one man in Croydon told the group.
For most traditional Labour voters here, the biggest concern is that “Scotland will continue to be ignored and Cameron’s promises on devo max will never materialise”.
Nationally, the party has “deep and powerful negatives” it needs to address.
Swing voters feel that the party is “for down and outs, not people like me.”
Although the party is seen as “nice,” it is still “in thrall to the undeserving” and “in denial about its ‘appalling’ track record on the economy”.
Former leader Ed Miliband comes in for a good deal of criticism, with voters seeing him as “weak and bumbling”.
One participant in the group described him as “having the appeal of a potato”.
Some voters said they could never have seen him as Prime Minister as he would have been a “laughing stock at home and abroad”.
They also felt the party under his leadership was divided and said he lacked the support of all his MPs.
Worryingly for the party’s leadership, the researchers conducting the focus groups study say voters perceptions remain as bleak now as they did then.
Many of the swing voters in the groups say they were relieved David Cameron was in power and backed his stance on a range of issues, including “cracking down on immigration” and penalising “benefit scroungers.”
The report also claims that “perceptions of the Tories as exclusively for ‘the rich’ (rather than the middle) are only really held in Scotland.”
Although these focus group members believe it is good for the Tories to penalise benefit scroungers, many are worried that the cuts are “too close to home” and will affect them.
Deborah Mattinson, who was Gordon Brown’s pollster before co-founding the BritainThinks consultancy conducted the reports at the request of former interim Labour leader Harriet Harman.
The report has been fed into a report by the party’s “learning the lessons taskforce” chaired by Dame Margaret Beckett.
Harman is desperate for the report and the group’s findings to be published, but senior figures in the party are holding back.
The National View: Scottish Labour is long beyond resuscitation
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