I've spent the last few days attempting to pinpoint precisely when the Labour Party "lost its soul".

 

In the last year or so, and particularly since the referendum, this has become something of a trope, a widely-accepted explanation for the steady decline of Labour and the rise of the SNP.

It has been taken up with particular relish by former Labour supporters who now support independence; as the writer Val McDermid put it last week, supporting the SNP at the forthcoming election might "drag the national Labour party back towards the kind of progressive politics that used to be second nature to it".

Similarly, speaking in the wake of her triumph in last Thursday's leaders' debate, the First Minister said a big group of SNP MPs would "make sure" Labour didn't "sell out on its values like the last government did".

She meant, of course, the three administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, although a quick scan of Labour's Scottish support at the four general elections between 1997 and 2010 doesn't suggest the electorate shared this analysis.

In 1997, for example, the Blair-led Labour Party managed roughly what the SNP are polling at present - 45.6 per cent of the vote - and even after the Iraq War (not so much a loss of soul, but certainly a colossal error) it managed almost 40 per cent, hardly a whole-scale rejection. In 2010, meanwhile, the Brown-led Labour Party climbed back up to 42 per cent of the popular vote.

So if the last Labour governments lost their "soul", it didn't become an electoral problem until several years later. The party's performance in Scottish Parliament elections, however, does tell a story of gradual decline: Donald Dewar managed a respectable 38.8 per cent of the vote in 1999, but by 2007 this had declined to just 32.9 per cent.

This is surprising, for the narrative of that period, during which Labour led two coalition Scottish Executives, was very much one of "Old" Labour versus "New". Indeed, I remember well the Scottish Labour Party making much of resisting Blairite reforms like foundation hospitals while introducing measures like free personal care for the elderly.

So despite going out of its way to preserve its "soul", Scottish Labour still gradually lost support in devolved elections between 1999 and 2007. A year or so ago I asked the First Minister (she was then Deputy First Minister) when she reckoned it all started to go wrong for Labour and she replied that it was when Neil Kinnock replaced Michael Foot as leader (at which point others might argue things started going right for the party).

Thus the apex of "honest" Labour was represented by what Gerald Kaufman called the "longest suicide note in history", a manifesto committing the next Labour government to many things of which Nicola Sturgeon would approve, chiefly unilateral nuclear disarmament and abolition of the House of Lords.

But the trouble with romanticising the Labour Party of old is that it simply serves to highlight how much not only Labour has shifted since the early 1980s, but also the SNP. Michael Foot was also keen on withdrawing from the European Union, taxing the rich and a huge programme of re-nationalisation, none of which features in either Labour or SNP manifestos several decades later.

Even in 1986, when the First Minister joined the SNP, she'd reached the conclusion that Labour had lost its "soul", chiefly by moving away from unilateralism, although this was only formalised in a 1989 policy paper entitled "Meet the Challenge, Make the Change". But if that amounted to "selling out", then how come Labour went on to win every general election (in Scotland) thereafter?

Of course there have been other forces at work, and in its long-standing quest to displace Labour as Scotland's main left-of-centre party the SNP has simply utilised whatever argument has been close to hand. At the 1997 general election, for example, Nicola Sturgeon argued (as in 2015) that Labour and the Tories were basically the same party, as if New Labour's commitment to devolution, a minimum wage and massive public spending on health and education were somehow right-wing acts.

What she meant, of course, is that Labour had accepted the Thatcherite economic orthodoxy of low taxation and business-friendly policies, but then under Alex Salmond's leadership so had the SNP. If you're going to argue that "soul" is central to a political party's electoral success, then one really has to define terms.

A correspondent in yesterday's Sunday Herald suggested the "soul" had been Labour's old Clause IV, which spoke of "common ownership" of the "means of production, distribution and exchange", but beyond the hard left, no party (and certainly not the SNP) has any intention of reviving that particular ideology. And given all this talk of returning to "founding principles", Labour might point out that the SNP's "founding principles" weren't exactly left wing.

As one old Labour hand pointed out to me, many of those who've deserted Labour (in Scotland and the rest of Britain) have done so because the loss of "soul" they resent has more to do with social issues - i.e. New Labour's support for gay rights - rather than a rightward drift. And as survey after survey demonstrates, a lot of traditional Labour voters aren't awfully keen on immigration.

In her article for The Times, Val McDermid identified the loss of soul as occurring during last year's referendum campaign when Labour "aligned" itself with the hated Tories. Not only was this simplistic (I thought they'd "aligned" themselves with the Union) but also a bit baffling: did Labour supporters honestly expect it to support independence? McDermid also blames Labour for "constructing the Better Together campaign as it did", but would a standalone Labour "No" campaign honestly have left the party in a better place at this election?

Over the next few weeks, meanwhile, Nicola Sturgeon will make banishing (or rather mitigating) austerity and scrapping Trident crucial tests of whether or not the Labour Party can regain its "soul" with the enthusiastic support of the SNP, assuming they're sincere in that aim. Few, however, appear to have thought this through to its logical conclusion.

Let's suppose that after 7 May the SNP's grand plan falls into place and they reach a deal to sustain a minority Labour government in office, "keeping them honest" by tempering austerity, scrapping Trident and ushering in a new era of co-operative, "progressive" politics at a UK level. Not only might that revive Labour's fortunes (as least according to the Nationalist analysis of where it's gone wrong), but it might end up demonstrating that the Union and Westminster aren't so broken after all.

And against that backdrop, the SNP will have neutralised three of the bogeymen that have so far fuelled its rise - Tories, Trident and austerity - thus making the 2016 Holyrood election that bit harder to win. Call me cynical, but somehow I doubt that's the plan.