LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Labour Party has made slow progress in winning over disaffected members in Scotland despite installing a new leader of its Scottish chapter and is set to lose to Scots nationalists in May's UK-wide election, according to a poll on Thursday.
The poll is a setback for Labour, which has in the past relied heavily on doing well in Scotland to clinch overall victory in Britain.
Forty-five percent of 1,011 Scots polled by Survation for the Daily Record newspaper said they plan to vote for the Scottish National Party (SNP), down just one percentage point from the last such poll in January.
If those results were repeated in the actual vote, the SNP would win 47 of Scotland's 59 seats and Labour just 10, down from 41 now, the poll said.
The SNP, which currently holds six of the 650 seats in the British parliament at Westminster, has emerged as a potent political force, despite losing a referendum on Scottish independence last year.
Jim Murphy was elected leader of the Scottish Labour Party two months ago in a contest sparked when Johann Lamont, the previous leader, stood down suddenly, accusing colleagues in London of treating Scotland like a "branch office."
But the Survation poll, carried out between Feb. 12 and 17, suggests he has failed to regain the trust of those former supporters who complain that the party has moved closer to what they see as the London elite.
Murphy warned that Scots could inadvertently hand victory to Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative Party, which is deeply unpopular in Scotland, if May's voting reflected the poll results.
"The more seats the SNP get from Labour, the more likely it is that the (Conservatives) will be the biggest party across the UK and Cameron will get into government through the back door," the Daily Record quoted him as saying.
Another scenario might see the SNP holding the balance of power in parliament and entering a Labour-led coalition, for which it would demand a further devolution of powers to Edinburgh.
The SNP would also demand that Labour halt plans to renew Trident, the UK's nuclear deterrent, as a condition of joining a coalition, leader Nicola Sturgeon said in December.