VOTERS will "switch late and switch big" to Labour at the general election, enabling the party to hold all 40 of its Scottish seats, Jim Murphy predicted yesterday.

Despite a series of polls putting the SNP well ahead, the Scottish Labour leader insisted people were listening to his party once more, would consider its ideas, and ultimately vote for it.

Murphy, who has now been party leader for 50 days, said Scottish Labour even hoped to add to its tally of MPs by ousting LibDem minister Jo Swinson in East Dunbartonshire, a seat previously held by Labour where the LibDem majority is just 2184.

The SNP mocked the predictions as "oddball".

Speaking at a media briefing, Murphy said he didn't expect "overnight converts" to Labour but sensed people were "on a journey back towards us".

He said: "First, they will begin to listen to us again, second they will consider us, and third they will vote for us. I happen to think that the polls will change but they will change late."

As a precedent, he cited the dramatic poll swing in the 2011 Holyrood election, when Labour started 16 points ahead and ended 13 points behind.

"Our sense is that as we move through these stages of people listening, considering and voting they will switch late and they will switch big, and that's what we are working on," Murphy said.

The latest poll puts the SNP 24 points ahead, on course to win far more seats than Labour in May.

The East Renfrewshire MP, who admits Labour lost a lost of support in the referendum, claimed Labour was now the party of ideas in Scotland, and the SNP had "run out of things on its to-do list".

He said his strategy would be to hold the SNP to account for eight years' worth of decisions in government, so that it could no longer act as if it were both the incumbent and the opposition.

The NHS, education and inequality would be Labour's principle areas of attack, he added.

He claimed voters had noticed a change in Scottish Labour's "personal and collective confidence" since he took over from Johann Lamont, and that the party had interesting ideas again, while the SNP looked like the party of "the status quo".

Asked whether Labour would cut a deal with the SNP after the election to form a government, Murphy repeatedly refused to rule out a partnership of some kind, saying only that Labour did not want, need or expect one, and was not planning for one.

SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson MP said: "Jim Murphy has been saying some pretty oddball things in a desperate attempt to get noticed, but this must be the strangest one yet.

"Mr Murphy arrogantly insists voters will just go back to his party without giving any reason why, as if Labour had a divine right to rule Scotland - thus demonstrating that he is part of Labour's problem in Scotland, not the solution."

Labour won 41 of the 59 seats in Scotland at the 2010 election, although one, Falkirk, is now held by the Independent MP Eric Joyce, who quit Labour after a drunken Commons brawl.