EVEN Nicola Sturgeon agrees that Scots should vote Labour to make sure David Cameron's Conservatives do not win the 2015 General Election, Margaret Curran will say today.

 

The Shadow Scottish Secretary will make the claim about the First Minister in a speech to a Labour summit in Perth when she is also due to attack the SNP, accusing it of trying to "sound Labour".

Her speech to the party's Scottish MPs and General Election candidates comes after recent opinion polls showed a slump in support for Labour and after the Nationalists saw a dramatic rise in their membership following the independence referendum.

Last month, one snapshot put support for the SNP for the May election at 45.8 per cent compared to just 23.9 per cent for Labour. Such a result could see a significant drop in the number of Labour seats in Scotland, which currently stands at 41. In contrast, the SNP could see its presence at Westminster rise considerably from its current six seats.

In her speech, Ms Curran will rally her party behind Labour's planned social policies and will insist the cross-party vow of more devolution has been delivered by the Smith Commission agreement and the debate has been settled and has moved on to how to use the new powers.

Ms Curran is expected to say: "The question the vast majority of Scots now want an answer to is 'how are you going to make me and my family better off?' And all the parties in the next election have to answer that question."

"Here in Scotland only Scottish Labour has a clear answer," she will declare, outlining Labour's key policies to:

*freeze energy prices and save every Scottish household £120;

*ensure the recovery is fair by introducing a 50p tax on people earning £150,000 or more and lift people out of tax with a new 10p starting rate and

* fix the economy by drawing a line under low-paid and insecure work by ending exploitative zero-hours contracts and raising the minimum wage to £8 an hour over the course of the Parliament.

"That's a fair and funded plan from Labour in the face of not a single progressive policy proposal from the SNP," Ms Curran will add.

In response, the Nationalists branded her speech desperate stuff, that showed Labour was panicking in the face of polls which suggested they would lose a raft of seats in Scotland at the next election.