Eddie Barnes: concerns of leaking support in once-solid constituencies is a measure of the task facing Iain Gray

Published on Saturday 23 April 2011 16:07

'It's an in-born thing," the old man says of the area's support for Labour. "It's very hard to get away from it. I don't think the SNP will do it.

It's a shame; the best thing would be if we could have the Labour Party run by Salmond ..." his voice trails off. Out in the rain in Dumbarton yesterday, the tussle for hearts and minds goes on. It is here, in this public sector dominated constituency, which has voted Labour since the birth of devolution, and which has always sent Labour MPs to Westminster, where the 2011 Scottish election is now getting very interesting indeed.

On the trends in today's Scotland on Sunday poll, Dumbarton goes to the Nationalists. Seated in the cafe in Morrisons supermarket, SNP councillor and candidate Iain Robertson is visibly excited. "I think we will take this. We'll take this," he declares. He and his daughter handed out 750 copies of the party's in-house newspaper the day before. People, he claims, were keen to get their hands on it. "There was one man, typical Labour man, - you could see he was Labour - he says: 'I'm not touching that'. Then his wife says, 'I'll have one.' And I thought, that would never have happened ten years ago."

Robertson runs a local printing business. "Jackie (Baillie, the Labour candidate] has never been up against a well-kent face before", he argues, when asked to say why this time it'll be different.

Not surprisingly, Baillie disagrees. She is just across the roundabout, handing out pledge cards outside the local Asda where she receives a warm welcome from people who know her well. Most are backing Labour. There are a few people who say they're supporting the SNP, but even they didn't think the SNP will actually win here. Local issues - such as the future of Faslane, the Vale of Leven hospital, and public sector employment - knock the polls into a cocked hat, she notes. "Every seat has to be treated individually," she says. "The evidence on the ground is that the Labour vote is holding up. We are picking up people who would vote Conservative or Liberal." And the Salmond factor? Naturally, she is dismissive.

Holyrood 2011 coverage in full

• Iain Gray under fire after poor show in new poll

• Eddie Barnes: concerns of leaking support in once-solid constituencies is a measure of the task facing Iain Gray

• Kenny Farquharson: What Labour needs is some six appeal

• Aidan Smith: Annabel Goldie risks becoming a national institution, despite her politics

• Target voters: OAPs

• John Curtice: The OAP vote

• Peter Ross: Socialists who go it alone

A fleeting impression from Dumbarton would suggest that the SNP still has it all to do. But even to be talking seriously about the party's prospects here is a measure of how far this campaign has shifted. For Iain Gray, the worrying evidence is that a significant chunk of his support has, over the last week, broken away and headed straight over to his main rivals. Gray has long acknowledged that he wouldn't hang on to all the Scots voters who backed Labour at Westminster last year. But the polling suggests that far, far too many are leaking away; Labour's vote at Holyrood drops by a quarter compared to voting intentions at Westminster.

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Worse for Labour, thousands of people who backed the LibDems and the Tories last year are also rallying to the SNP cause.

These SNP switchers, says Peter Kellner, president of YouGov, are crucial. "These people hold the key to who wins Holyrood," he says. "If they stick with the SNP, then Salmond should remain First Minister, and probably comfortably." If Labour is going to win now, the task is clear, he says. Of the 200,000 Labour voters who voted Labour last year, but now appear ready to flip over to the SNP, "Labour needs to persuade at least half of them to "come home". This weekend, with all attention on the faltering Labour campaign, the question is: can Labour do it?

Tomorrow Iain Gray will mark what his campaign chiefs are calling the proper start of the election, and what all their rivals prefer to term a panicked re-launch. Gray will deliver a speech to party activists at Glasgow's Lighthouse gallery sharpening up his attacks on the SNP and Salmond. The aim is to try and find "clear red water" between the two parties, with the party acknowledging that people see little difference between the pair. A series of new Labour posters will ask voters to "spot the difference" between Labour and the SNP on, for example, Labour's pledge to cut cancer waiting times. Expect to hear Labour remind voters more about Alex Salmond's famous pre-crash "arc of prosperity".

Gray's sharper attacks on the SNP are "about bloody time", says much of his party, including his close ally Lord Foulkes. "We've been letting them away with murder," adds an MP. A campaign which has focused largely on warnings of the distant threat of a Tory-led government is now about to combine that warning with a greater attack on the home front too. Labour's campaign finds solace in focus groups where, they claim, voters note that the SNP "don't have the clout to stand up to the Tories". Is this the moment that the old Big Beast of Scottish politics stamps over the SNP lead?

If so, the Nationalists do not look overly worried. SNP sources noted yesterday that Gray's big speech was not exactly well timed, coming as it does on a Bank Holiday Monday. Their increasingly confident assertion is that, with the Royal Wedding set to take attention away from the campaign this week, it will be increasingly difficult for Labour to find any momentum in the "air war" between the pair.

Which brings us to the ground war. In a briefing for Sunday newspapers on Friday, Gray's aides claimed the regional picture across the country was far different from that painted by the increasingly awful national polls (whose accuracy they also dispute). In a total of 21 key seats which the party has identified either as possible gains (such as Stirling) or possible losses (such as Airdrie and Shotts), they claim they are on course to contact upwards of 60 per cent of everyone with a vote.This bombardment, they claim, will buck the national trends.

Campaign bosses draw comfort from two 1,000 strong "contact groups" made up of decided Labour voters and undecided voters. Neither has really changed over the last six weeks, they claim, with voters not yet properly engaged. This allows the party chiefs to make the extravagant claim that, despite the national poll evidence, they remained ahead in all these local battles.

Over at the SNP, confidence is now growing to the extent that it is being matched by its bedfellow, paranoia. "We're peaking too early," says one SNP campaigner in the west of Scotland. "All these polls will just galvanise Labour's vote." But, within the party's campaign HQ, the view is that they are on course for victory. And now they are ahead, the only thing to do is to put the foot down on the gas all the harder.

Party chiefs say that by tomorrow night, activists will have delivered 1.4 million copies of a newspaper entitled The Saltire to doorsteps across Scotland over the Bank Holiday. The party's main billboard campaign also begins this week, with huge pictures of Salmond about to stare down from more than 200 sites across the country. In what is becoming a game of "My database is bigger than yours", SNP campaign chiefs claim they still have way more information at their fingertips than Labour about the trends and shifts at street level. Others are not quite so sure that the SNP's ground war is up to speed. "I still worry we don't have enough going on on the street," says one party figure. "But then we're being helped by the sheer ineptitude of our main opponent."

Gray, however, has appeared chirpier in the last few days. Ironically, the lampooning he has suffered over his supposed anonymity is becoming self-defeating. On Friday, The SNP-supporting Scottish Sun carried a spread of colour photographs of Gray campaigning with Gordon Brown, mocking the pair. But Gray was greeted that afternoon by one female reader who recognised him from the photos and told him how nice he'd looked.

His aides acknowledge that his performance in the first STV live debate at the end of March was not up to scratch. Gray also conceded that his flit from Central Station into a sandwich bar in the second week of the campaign might have been better handled. But, aides say his confidence is growing.

The trouble is that it looks too late. Salmond's lead over Gray as the First Minister of choice is growing and Labour still has yet to lay a glove on him. One opportunity came quite by chance last week: Gray's team claim he met the driver of Salmond's campaign bus from the 2007 campaign on Glasgow's Sauchiehall Street, who proceeded to offer some none-too flattering comments about the SNP leader. He declined, however, to make his views public.

Unless some other stroke of luck comes his way, it is hard to escape the conclusion it could all be too late for Gray.Our polling today suggests that Gray is running out of time to convince people he's right for the job: compared to last week, the percentage of those who think he would make the best First Minister has fallen from 14 per cent to 12 per cent, just two percentage points ahead of the ratings of Scots Tory leader Annabel Goldie.

In Dumbarton the mood was certainly not against Labour. But nor was it hostile to the SNP. For Labour, it is hard to escape the conclusion that any comfort they might draw from this is decidedly cold. Many Labour voters may indeed stick with a party that's in their bones. But, on the current evidence, it is being out-flanked by the evidence of thousands of Labour, LibDem and Tory voters prepared to lend the SNP their backing a week on Thursday. Gray has ten days to haul some of them back - or his party faces defeat.