‘Street fighter’ new Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy now faces the real battle

New Scottish Labour leader is famed as a ‘street fighter’ he’ll need those talents.

“Christmas has been cancelled,” joked one member of Jim Murphy’s team skipping out of Glasgow’s Emirates Arena.

He was only half-joking. The new leader of Scottish Labour has little time for celebrations with just 143 days until the General Election and opinion polls predicting the party will take a battering from the SNP in May.

Murphy’s first five months in charge of Scottish Labour are critical not only to his own fledgling leadership career but also of embattled UK leader Ed Miliband and who takes the keys to Number 10 Downing Street.

“It’s not a kamikaze mission,” insisted Murphy after he was declared the winner in the iconic Commonwealth Games venue yesterday morning.

“There is a huge amount of work to do in a really short amount of time, this is now about post-referendum and how we bring together the much more substantial division in our country, the haves and the have nots.

“The General Election is not about the future of the union, it is about who governs the country.”

A YouGov opinion poll published yesterday put the SNP on a 20-point lead over Labour in Scottish Westminster voting intentions anxious reading for the party’s 59 MPs north of the Border.

Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, not surprisingly, took great delight in pointing out Murphy’s other immediate headache.

She said: “I know Jim doesn’t shirk from a challenge, but given Mr Miliband is Labour’s biggest electoral liability since devolution, he’s going to have his hands full.”

Petty point-scoring aside, Davidson touches on an issue which few in Scottish Labour want to acknowledge.

Lost in the build up to the independence referendum were a string of opinion polls showing Ed Miliband was trailing David Cameron on the trust stakes, and the situation has not improved since.

Despite leading the biggest party on the winning side, Miliband still trails Cameron yes he with just one MP in Scotland on the popularity stakes.

For Murphy, the immediate challenge is how to devise a General Election campaign that tackles this issue head on, a tricky task when your pitch is only Cameron and Miliband can be the next Prime Minister.

Murphy will set out his stall with the announcement of his shadow cabinet tomorrow, which will probably include leadership runners-up Neil Findlay and Sarah Boyack and is expected to clear up his own, potentially tricky, path to Holyrood next month.

The East Renfrewshire MP has made clear that his big priority is winning back Yes voters who have previously backed Labour. The Labour leader sees this “conversation” as critical to making his party a viable force once again.

He said: “The referendum was not a winner-takes-all contest, I’m not trying to convince yes voters they were wrong, I am not going to try to rerun the referendum. We had that vote, we were on different sides on that one day but let’s now work together.

“We have to deliver on those extra powers, a substantial amount of yes voters will be surprised about how we are going to use those powers.

“I and the Scottish Labour Party share so much more in common with Yes voters and the values of those many hundreds of thousands who voted ‘Yes’ in the referendum than we do with many of the political leaders who campaigned for ‘No’ on the 18th of September.

“I’d like to invite all Scots, regardless of politics or referendum to work together in this great land, with a sense of pride, and build the fairest country on earth.”

But it will be policies at the end of the day which will bring people back to Labour and Murphy used his winning speech to address this.

He reiterated his push to end inequality as the driving force for his leadership campaign, a move which will unite all aspects of the party, and highlighted education as his big focus.

He said: “It makes me angry that kids from poor backgrounds are three times less likely to get good grades than those from prosperous backgrounds.

“It’s wrong that just 220 kids from poorer families 220 in the whole of Scotland leave school with the qualifications good enough to get into our best universities.

“It’s unacceptable that the poorest people live nine years less than the richest and are three times more likely to take their own lives. I’m proud of Scotland’s potential but we should all be restless that too few Scots share in it.”

Right-leaning Labour voters will be pleased to hear Murphy’s “backing business, creating jobs” rhetoric but there was also plenty of accommodating the more socialist agenda pushed by main rival Findlay.

Murphy’s victory was more emphatic than most had tipped and he did well among union members, closing down a potential pitfall given so many union leaders had backed Findlay.

Community’s Assistant General Secretary, John Park, said: “The Scottish Labour Party has taken a big step forward. Party members have made it very clear that they believe in Jim Murphy’s vision for our party.

“The trade unions have a vital role to play in helping elect a Scottish Labour government and Community will be doing everything we can to make Jim Murphy the next First Minister of Scotland.”