LABOUR leader Ed Miliband told the audience at an election Question Time last night that he would not do a deal with the SNP in the event of a hung parliament ... even if it meant another Conservative government.

Miliband said on a special edition of the BBC programme: “If the price of having a Labour government was a deal or a coalition with the Scottish National Party then it is not going to happen.”

Miliband has consistently ruled out a coalition with the SNP ... despite Nicola Sturgeon repeatedly pointing out that the prospect of a coalition was not on the table.

When pushed, he has also ruled out a “deal” but last night he went further and suggested he would find the prospect of David Cameron returning to Downing Street more palatable than accepting

Nicola Sturgeon’s offer of an alliance to “lock out” the Tories.

Miliband’s appearance on Question Time came at the end of a day which saw Scottish Labour descend into turmoil, with some of the party’s key activists openly criticising its election campaign.

Party members are calling on the leadership to reject the “negative” strategy of warning that a vote for the SNP is a vote for a second referendum.

As Miliband prepares to travel to Glasgow today to make a keynote speech, activists have taken to a secret Scottish

Labour Facebook group to call the the party’s final campaign leaflet “ludicrous”, “appalling”, and “a mistake”. The campaigners have complained that the Labour leadership’s obsession with a second referendum is losing the party voters.

Although party insiders have insisted that their own polling is nowhere near as negative as those published in recent days, they still expect heavy losses at next week’s election.

The leaflet being criticised by the party members is known as the Get Out To Vote leaflet. On the night before election day party volunteers will post it through the doors of people who have previously been canvassed as being Labour voters or potential Labour voters.

On the Scottish Labour for Scotland Facebook group, a secret group that can only be accessed by those who are invited to join, activist April Cumming, who works as a researcher for an MSP in the Scottish Parliament, warns “when we invoke the referendum people recall ‘better together’... we should have spent more time defining ourselves against the Tories rather than falling into the trap of fighting the SNP on their terms”.

In later comments, a despondent Cumming, who is also a former vice-chair of the Scottish Fabians, asks where the party can go from here.

John Morton, the secretary of the Glenrothes Constituency Labour Party, said that “the vote Tory get SNP thing was a mistake from the start”.

Jamie Kerr, a member of the campaign group Labour For Scotland, and a former Scottish Parliament candidate for the party, said: “It’s a sad day when we are reliant on tactical voting by the Tory element of the middle classes to even have a chance of keeping our seats. Activists here need to wake up and smell the coffee.”

The polls, Kerr claims, show that the party’s messaging is “clearly not working”.

The “Vote SNP, get a second referendum” message is at the heart of the final part of Labour’s campaign. Yesterday morning Scottish leader Jim Murphy launched the party’s new poster featuring two road signs under the slogan,

“Scotland’s Choice”. One sign pointed towards “Labour’s fairer economy”, the other to “another referendum”.

As was pointed out quite quickly on Twitter, the sign for the second referendum was pointing forward, while the sign for Labour’s fairer economy pointed backwards.

AN SNP campaign source said: “Jim Murphy inherited a bad situation for his party and made it significantly worse. The SNP campaign is reaching out to people who voted No last September, and voters all over Scotland, to back Nicola Sturgeon and elect a big team of SNP MPs to empower Scotland at Westminster. Jim Murphy, by contrast, seems to be going out of his way to alienate Labour people who voted Yes – which is one reason why so many are moving to the SNP.”

A Scottish Labour spokesperson said: “Scots deserve some honesty from the SNP about their plan for a second referendum.”

Yesterday’s Herald reported that the Labour Party in North Lanarkshire was split after Labour councillors refused to help candidates financially.

A motion at the local authority’s Labour group to provide the four local candidates, Gregg McClymont, Tom Clarke, Pamela Nash and Frank Roy, with £1,500 from the councillors’ war chest was turned down, as was a second request for £500.

A source told The Herald that the councillors resented giving the money to the MPs, and claimed that there was, “real agitation amongst party members over how things are panning out in this campaign”.

In what may be his last major speech in Scotland before the election, Miliband is expected to tell Scots tomorrow not to “gamble with the SNP” and to “guarantee change with Labour”.

Miliband is expected to talk about the history of Scottish Labour and invoke the names of Keir Hardie, John Smith and Donald Dewar.

“Remember, throughout history it’s Labour values that have changed Scotland,” Miliband will say. He will add: “Nationalism never built a school. It never lifted people out of poverty. It never created a welfare state that healed the sick and protected our most vulnerable.

“It is Labour values, Labour ideas and the determination of people across Scotland that has built this country to what it is today.”

A Conservative spokesman said: “This is Ed Miliband’s Mayday message to Scotland – a desperate plea as Labour faces wipeout by the Sturgeon tsunami.

“Having made the humiliating journey to Russell Brand’s house only to be rebuffed for the Greens, Ed Miliband is heading to Scotland cap in hand for votes invoking the past not focusing on the future.

“It goes to show that, next Friday, Ed Miliband cannot be Prime Minister without being propped up by the SNP. If you want to stop that happening, vote Conservative on 7th May.”