Nicola Sturgeon says claim SNP cost Labour the election is "bollocks"

Nicola Sturgeon has described claims that the threat of the SNP helped the Conservatives win a majority in May’s general election as “bollocks”, in an exclusive interview with Holyrood magazine.

With the Tory campaign focusing heavily on images of former SNP leader Alex Salmond in campaign material, Labour politicians have suggested the threat of the SNP controlling a minority Labour government pushed voters towards the Conservatives.

Responding, Sturgeon told Holyrood: “I’m not sure this a word I should use in an interview but it’s bollocks. Even if you try to unpack that argument, what’s the logical conclusion – that we shouldn’t have stood? That Labour should have been given a free run? I’m assuming that’s not what they're arguing.”

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An investigation by Labour strategist Jon Cruddas into the party’s general election result found the surge in support for the SNP left 60 per cent of English and Welsh voters were “very concerned” about the prospect of an anti-austerity alliance in Government.

In an interview covering the party’s strategy since the referendum, along with its approach going into the 2016 Scottish Parliament elections, the First Minister argued that Ed Miliband made a mistake in ruling out working with the SNP.

She said: “If Labour had been perfectly credible then the idea of Labour and the SNP in coalition wouldn’t have been a scare tactic that Labour tried to say it was. I think Ed Miliband got it completely wrong in how to handle that. Instead of standing up when the Tories started this and saying, ‘do you know what, I’m trying to win a majority here but if people choose a hung parliament, that’s what the people have chosen and we have to work with that and if people in Scotland choose the SNP, we have to respect that, because the voters are in charge’.

“Instead, of doing that, he entered the Tory frame by ruling out working with the SNP and almost legitimizing that a Labour/SNP coalition was something that people should be scared of and saying that it would be simply a reflection of how people voted, live with it. It was bad intelligence.

“There is a spectrum of opinion that Labour holds about the SNP which starts with an inability to fundamentally understand anything about the SNP and Tony Blair was at it again with his talk recently about us being cavemen but I say, carry on completely misunderstanding, be my guest, because as long as you do, Labour is dead in the water in Scotland.”

Read Holyrood editor Mandy Rhodes’ full interview with Sturgeon in the Holyrood Annual Review tomorrow.