Ed Miliband has urged voters not to “blow the whistle on the match before the game is over” after a Guardian poll showed Labour faces being wiped out by the Scottish National party in Scotland.
The Labour leader insisted his party could still win the May general election, despite a Guardian/ICM poll showing the SNP is on the brink of winning at least 43 seats after maintaining a 17-point lead over Labour.
Pressed on the findings, Miliband said: “You don’t blow the whistle on a match before the game is over. I’m not going to do that because there are six and a half weeks to go and six and a half weeks for people to make up their minds.”
After appearing to rule out a “confidence and supply” deal with the SNP, Miliband stepped up his attacks on the SNP, accusing the party of working for a Conservative victory to suit its longer term agenda of bolstering support for independence.
Every Labour seat lost in Scotland would increase David Cameron’s chances of winning a second term, he told an audience of Labour activists in Clydebank.
Miliband angrily brushed off Alex Salmond’s assertion on BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show that the SNP could have a controlling influence on Labour’s budgets in a hung parliament. Salmond had told Marr: “If you hold the balance, then you hold the power.”
“There seems to now be an unholy alliance between the Conservative party and the SNP to carry on a Tory government and frankly Alex Salmond is at it again. It’s a combination of bluster and bluff; I gather he has got a book to sell,” Miliband said.
“I tell you who’s going to be writing a Labour budget. It’s me and Ed Balls [Labour’s shadow chancellor]. And it’s not going to be Alex Salmond. Not in a million years.”
The Labour leader implied that he would not seek a “confidence and supply” deal with the SNP short of a formal coalition, in which the SNP would agree to back a Labour budget in return for other policy concessions.
The SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, and her predecessor, Alex Salmond, have said they would prefer to vote on a policy by policy basis – a position Miliband appeared to prefer. He said it was up to the SNP to decide how to vote: he would not do deals on the budget or other policies.
“What other parties choose to do on a budget vote is up to them,” he said, before adding: “It’s up to other parties to decide how they would vote on a Labour Queen’s speech.
“We can’t be presumptuous about this, to decide the outcome of the election before the election has happened. I believe I can win a majority Labour government. I believe a majority Labour government is what Scotland and Britain needs, and that’s what I’m fighting for.”
Miliband repeated his assertion last week there would be no formal coalition deal with the SNP. “There isn’t going to be a coalition between Labour and the SNP after the election. There’s only one coalition I want: a coalition with working people across Britain to change how our economy works, and the way to achieve that is with a minority Labour government,” he said.
However, the ICM poll shows Miliband faces a huge task convincing Scottish voters about his potential to be prime minister. While Sturgeon has a net positive rating, the Labour leader is more unpopular than the prime minister in Scotland. Cameron’s net personal rating is -33, while Miliband’s is at -39.
