General Election 2015: Think of the values your ancestors fought for before abandoning Labour for SNP, says Ed Miliband

The Labour leader will evoke the spirit of the party founder Keir Hardie

Opposition Labour Party leader Ed Miliband takes part in the "BBC Question Time: Election Leaders Special" (AFP)

Disaffected Labour voters in Scotland should remember the values that their parents and grandparents fought for before abandoning the party in favour of the SNP, Ed Miliband will say.

In a major speech in Scotland with less than a week until polling day, the Labour leader will evoke the spirit of the party’s founder Keir Hardie, telling supporters that “nationalism never built a school or lifted people out of poverty”.

Polls suggest that Labour are heading for a wipeout in Scotland at the hands of the SNP, who stand to win as many as 50 of the country’s 59 Westminster seats. Many traditional Labour voters have lost faith in the party, which they believe has become too close to the Conservatives.

In a last-ditch attempt to persuade them to change their minds, Mr Miliband will appeal to voters’ emotions by urging them to reconnect with Scotland’s Labour-supporting history, name-checking party figures of the past such as John Smith and Donald Dewar.

“Imagine all the people you know who have built Labour in Scotland,” he will say. “Your grandparents who fought for their rights in the shipyards and mines across this country. Your mums and dads, many of whom delivered leaflets for Labour or knocked on doors.

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“Remember our great leaders, from Keir Hardie to Jennie Lee, John Smith to Donald Dewar. What would they want today? We could be on the verge of electing a Labour government. They would want to be part of it. They would want to be part of building the better future.”

Labour leader Ed Miliband takes part in a special BBC Question Time programme (Getty Images)

Warning voters not to “gamble” with the SNP when they could “guarantee” a Labour government, Mr Miliband will add: “Throughout history, it’s Labour values that have changed Scotland. Nationalism never built a school. It never lifted people out of poverty. It never created a welfare state that healed the sick and protected our most vulnerable.

“It is Labour values, Labour ideas and the determination of people across Scotland that has built this country to what it is today.”

The SNP’s deputy leader Stewart Hosie said Labour “would rather look to the past” because they offered the people of Scotland “so little ambition” for the future.

“The fact is that the towering figures of the Labour movement that Ed Miliband cites would no longer recognise what the Labour party has become – a party that worked hand in glove with the Tories during the referendum and trooped through the voting lobbies with them at Westminster to support a further £30 billion of austerity cuts.”