How Labour lost the Scottish electorate.

It now seems certain that Labour will enter the next parliament with only a handful of Scottish MP's. They may even be fewer Labour MP's in Scotland than pandas. Labour's collapse was predictable and inevitable. It may have culminated in the referendum, but it has been a long time coming,.

Labour could have made a socialist and internationalist case against independence, or even a federalist one within the European Union, but they chose not to. Instead, they went into a coalition with the Conservative Party to push a vision of lack of capability within Scotland to manage it's own affairs. Couple to this an overblown fearmongering, especially with older voters and people had simply had enough.

Labour have also failed to recognise that their core social democratic values are no longer unique. The SNP has reinvented itself since 1979 and is now more clearly social democratic than Labour.

The local breakdown of referendum voting showed that tribal voting has effectively ended. Glasgow voted Yes, even though Labour had traditionally harnessed the working class Catholic vote. Catholic and working class voters now seem more comfortable with the SNP and are voting for them.

Not content with annoying half the electorate many in Labour have continued to demonise those who vote SNP as either racists or "nasty nationalists". This shows a complete failure to engage with the SNP's civic nationalism - if you move to Scotland tomorrow you will be considered Scottish.

Labour's last campaign tactic seems to be an eve of poll leaflet entitled "24 hours left to prevent another referendum". The SNP have made it clear they do not want another referendum unless there is an attempt to leave the EU. Even if they did want a referendum under those circumstances presumably Labour and the Conservatives will vote against legislation enabling it so if it went through it would be Labour's own fault.

With one week left to go, both Labour and the Conservatives may be relying heavily on a pro union bounce from the imminent royal birth.

Why the SNP will not hold the balance of power after this election.

According to analysis based on the latest Times/YouGov opinion poll the parties will have the following number of seats after the election:

49   SNP
290 Labour
265 Conservative
20   Liberal Democrat
2     UKIP
24   Others

With 650 seats, an outright majority requires 325.

Based on these figures the Conservatives will not be able to form a government. Even if they could form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats again and bring in all the "others" plus UKIP it would not be enough:

Conservative (265) + LibDem (20) + UKIP (2) + Others (24) = 295

Labour, on the other hand, would have a far easier job:

Labour (290) + Others (24) + LibDem (20) = 334

So even if all the 24 "others" did not support them they would still have a majority without having to talk to the SNP at all.

Given the historical enmity between Labour and the SNP and the fall out from the referendum it seems fanciful to me that they would make any sort of agreement after the general election. The SNP might choose to vote for policies put up by Labour, but Labour will not need to do anything to keep the SNP on-side as they will not need them to have a majority and get Ed Miliband into No 10.

What makes this even less likely is that the level of support for the SNP suggested in this poll is unprecedented. The likely outcome will be far fewer SNP MP's and more Labour ones, meaning even less of a need for anyone to do a deal. A figure of 35-40 SNP MP's seems far more likely given that younger people are less likely to vote than older.

We can be sure that the Liberal Democrats will want to stay in power, even with a vastly reduced number of MP's. Labour has been careful not to single them out in their national campaign. One of the reasons for this will be their potential as coalition partners on May 8th.