“Left-wing Scotland” is a myth that is fed by the myth of a left-wing SNP | Getty You think Scotland’s left-wing? Think again! The SNP is anti-establishment and entirely pragmatic, not a bunch of “reds.”

LONDON — Labour lost votes by the thousands to UKIP in the north, to the Tories in the south and to the Scottish National Party in Scotland. This hemorrhaging of support in three different directions makes it particularly difficult to diagnose what exactly afflicts the party. The big question is: which of these disparate groups of voters should Labour expend the most effort to win back?

Those on the right of the party want to focus on winning over middle England in the manner of their three-time election winning hero Tony Blair. Blair’s success was built on attracting the people Ed Miliband evidently failed to: the English lower middle classes who worry about the National Health Service but also aspire to a nice car and a house in the suburbs. Or ‘Middle England’, as they’re sometimes called.

This approach is heresy for left-wing Labour activists, who want Labour to ‘go back to its working class roots’ (you will hear this a lot). Their preferred explanation for Thursday’s heavy defeat was that ‘Red Ed’ simply wasn’t red enough. They focus on Scotland, where Labour was wiped out (just one Scottish Labour MP remains) because the party in England was too tepid and right-wing. Labour was Tony Blair rather than Tony Benn, and in trying assiduously to court the middle classes in England it drove working class Scots into the hands of the SNP. The surest route back to power will, therefore, come via a shift to the left.

While the left wish to focus on voters in Scotland and the right on England, what everybody is agreed on is that Scotland is left-wing. Scots are apparently greener, more pro-immigration and fundamentally reject a ‘neo-liberal Westminster elite’ who want to impose ‘failed austerity’ (Nicola Sturgeon’s words) on unfortunate Scotland. Scotland wants socialism with a sprinkling of civic nationalism.

Yet there is little evidence that the Scots are ready to play their allotted role in the class struggle. At least not according to the available evidence, which shows that Scotland isn’t all that left-wing.

Despite Nicola Sturgeon’s anti-austerity bombast, on tax and spending there is little difference in attitudes in England and Scotland when it comes to cuts.According to the very recent British Social Attitudes Survey, a third (36.4 percent) of voters in England and Wales want tax and spending to rise, compared with 43.8 per cent of Scots — a 7 percent difference, but not a yawning chasm.

Even UKIP policies to cut overseas aid, reduce immigration and barrel down on benefits claimants are backed by a majority of Scots, according to a massive survey commissioned last year by Dundee University. Half of respondents to the same survey wanted to see inheritance tax abolished and believed local families should get first dibs on social housing.

Were Scotland to be the nest of progressive politics it is made out to be, you would expect Labour to have done better there when it has tacked to the left. The party’s lowest share of the vote, however, came in 1983 (35.1 per cent), when its manifesto was written by none other than the late Tony Benn, left-wing bete-noire of the Daily Mail. Conversely, the party’s most impressive results in recent years came in 1997 (45.6 per cent) and 2001 (43.3 per cent), under the leadership of revisionist sell-out Tony Blair.

“Left-wing Scotland” is a myth that is fed by the myth of a left-wing SNP. The SNP’s progressive platform is for many Labour activists the inspiration for throwing off the shackles of Blairism south of the border. The scrapping of up-front tuition fees for (largely middle class) university students and the abolition of NHS prescription charges have all helped to reinforce the message that, given the chance, the SNP would build a Scandinavian-style social democracy stretching from Hadrian’s Wall to John o’ Groats.

The facts suggest otherwise: For all the rhetoric, the substance of SNP policy betrays a level of pragmatism that would warm the heart of any Blairite. Scotland under the SNP has slashed away at corporation tax and mooted a Tory-style welfare cap. The SNP have also done little to reduce inequality, and the leadership’s economic sympathies lie firmly with Ireland and the ultra-low tax regime lionised by British Chancellor George Osborne as a “shining example of the art of the possible in economic policy-making”.

Thus the growing appeal of the SNP probably has less to do with the supposed ‘Tory-lite’ policies of Scottish Labour and more to do with widespread detestation of the British political establishment, which invariably includes the Labour Party. The SNP are the UKIP of the Scottish centre-left: they’re shiny, still relatively untainted by power, and represent the perfect vehicle for flipping the bird at the posh boys down in Westminster.

What’s clear is that the SNP have not created New Socialist Man, and the Labour Party should be extremely wary about tacking left purely on the basis of the supposed tartan socialism of its northern comrades.

James Bloodworth is the editor of Left Foot Forward.