Jim Murphy fails to impress Scottish focus group voters

Jim Murphy's performance as Labour leader in Scotland has failed to impress voters in its working-class heartland, according to participants in the third of the Financial Times' pre-election focus groups.

Populus, the polling company, on Monday quizzed a cross-section of voters from the Glasgow East seat of Margaret Curran, Labour's shadow Scotland secretary.

None of them said they were pleased with Mr Murphy, on whom Labour has pinned its hopes of a renaissance in Scotland.

"He is very rightwing for a Labour leader," said Craig Johnstone, a call-centre manager planning to vote for the Scottish National party in next month's general election. Mr Johnstone's comments suggested the SNP's attempts to highlight Mr Murphy's background on the Blairite wing of the party are having an impact.

Others said Mr Murphy's style of delivery might be failing to engender confidence. "He looks like a bag of nerves now," said Natalie Dines, a former Labour voter now thinking of moving to the Conservatives.

One risk for Mr Murphy appears to be his association with the party in Westminster; he served in a number of front-bench positions in the last Labour government. Tommy Fulton, another Labour voter, said: "His appointment has put me off voting Labour . . . he has just come up from London."

When asked if they considered Scottish Labour to be a Scottish party, most said they did not. They agreed instead with Johann Lamont, the former Scottish Labour leader, who said the party in Westminster treated her part of the party as a "branch office".

The sense of alienation from Labour, which won Glasgow East with a 12,000 majority in 2010, was palpable. David Bowers is a former Labour voter who switched to the Scottish Socialist Party in 2011. He said: "The SNP is the most socialist party at the moment. The Labour party have lost it altogether."

The comments give a sense of why Labour has failed to halt the momentum of the SNP. A poll by TNS earlier this week showed the pro-independence party extending its lead over Labour to 32 points, a result that would give them all but two of Scotland's 59 Westminster seats.

Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, was generally popular. Several voters believed she had run the best campaign of all the party leaders, with women voters in particular pleased with her performance.

"She is a strong woman," said Jane Black, an SNP voter who works in a leisure centre. "She has made a lot of them who take their positions for granted wake up." The contrast was made by several participants between Ms Sturgeon and the other leaders, whom they characterised as public schoolboys.

Some however believed Alex Salmond, the party's former leader now standing to be MP for the Gordon constituency, would have made a tougher opponent for the other parties.

The voters were asked to draw what they thought Scotland would look like under a Conservative government compared with a Labour/SNP alliance. Several drew food banks as the dominant characteristic of life under the Tories, while some showed rising wages and increased powers for Scotland under Labour/SNP. Two showed Scotland as separate from the rest of the UK if the SNP were given a role in government.

There were some signs that those intending to vote SNP - four of the nine said they intended to do so, compared with three for Labour - were less enthusiastic about doing so than they had been about the independence referendum last September. This could make SNP voters less likely to turn out on the day than Labour supporters.

And in the longer term, it appears that many voters have not entirely given up on the Labour party. To murmurs of agreement, Mr Johnstone commented: "People are voting SNP to get the Labour party they used to know."

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