Balls & Miliband to take charge of Scottish Campaign as SNP pull ahead

Given the Welsh election is all sown up with at least half of Welsh voters ‘returning to the Labour fold’ on May 5th, the leadership of the Labour Party is turning its eye to Scotland where they trail the SNP by 10 – 13 points in the latest opinion polls, but even with this news most commentators still agree that Labour will end up on the opposition benches for another term as momentum is with the SNP.

According to the Spectator’s Coffeehouse blog the two Ed’s are taking control of Scottish Labour’s campaign and trying a different message that a vote for the SNP would be one that would put the economic recovery at risk (insert your own joke) instead of telling voters that Tories eat babies and are responsible for all the evil in the world, the type of drivel that works much better on Welsh voters.

It states ‘The aim is simple: use a scaremongering argument to woo the wavering Lib Dem voters who have always been seen as the key to this campaign. So far, Alex Salmond has done far better than Labour in winning them over. His "I stand up for Scotland" claim has resonated far more with those who want to protest at Westminster-inspired cuts than Labour’s message.'

And continues ‘Until now, Labour has liked to portray its campaign for the Holyrood elections as a totally Scottish affair: run in Scotland, organised in Scotland and led by Scottish politicians. Not any more. Senior staffers in Ed Miliband’s office started briefing Scottish hacks last night that Miliband is now going to take a much more "hands on" approach to the campaign. Miliband has only made one, brief appearance in the campaign so far. But he and Ed Balls are due to be in Scotland this week to push a more strident "anti-independence" message.

Gordon Brown has also only appeared on the campaign trail once so far, and that was to meet a few voters within easy reach of his home. But he is also due to take a more active part in the Scottish Labour campaign this week.

Will it work? Scottish politicians are rightly wary of involving Westminster leaders too much because they tend to run against the semi-autonomous spirit of devolution. The leader of Scottish MSPs, Iain Gray, will know he risks being ridiculed as someone who needed to be saved by his party bosses from London.

Yet Labour managers must have weighed up these risks and decided it was still worth sending for the cavalry — in the form of Balls and Miliband. And this is not without risk for Miliband. With Labour seemingly heading for defeat in Scotland, he will now be associated with a campaign that may well end in disaster.'

Who knows if it works at least there is still some life in the Scottish campaign that has been sorely missing in the Welsh campaign, but never fear it will all be over next week and the politicians in Cardiff Bay can get back to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic once more.Any source