FOR all Labour's well-publicised woes over the past few years, it is still striking to see the party of Donald Dewar and Gordon Brown described as "toxic".

Yet that was the conclusion of pollster Michael Turner after BMG's survey, for The Herald, found Labour's plan to increase income tax by 1p was actually very popular - until it was mentioned in the same breath as the word 'Labour'.

READ MORE: Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale 'faces uphill struggle' after poll suggests party is toxic in Scotland

Just over half those questioned (51 per cent) were in favour of the tax rise in order to protect education and other services from spending cuts, with 21 per cent opposed.

When the same question was put to people, but identifying it as a Labour policy, support fell by more than eight percentage points.

Labour's slide has been sudden.

Jack McConnell lost the 2007 Holyrood election to Alex Salmond by a single seat and just a percentage point or two in the popular vote.

But as recently as the 2010 General Election, Labour achieved 42 per cent of the vote in Scotland, more than double the SNP's share, and winning 41 out of 59 seats in the process.

That was the last time Labour bested the Nationalists at the polls in Scotland.

There are lots of reasons for that but it's worth remembering the relative unpopularity of Labour, compared with its policies, is not a new phenomenon.

In the run-up to the last Holyrood election in 2011, the BBC commissioned pollsters ICM to conduct a 'blind-tasting' of 25 policies plucked from the parties' manifestos.

When people were asked to rank them in order of importance, the overall favourite turned out to be one of Labour's key pledges in that contest: to cut the waiting time to see a specialist, in suspected cancer cases, from four weeks to two weeks.

By and large, Labour policies polled well; far better than the party eventually performed at the ballot box, when it won 37 seats with a 32 per cent share of the poll.

The SNP hammered Labour - taking 69 seats on 45 per cent of the vote - despite having some the least popular policies in its offer.

Languishing in the bottom five priorities were the Nationalists' long-standing plan to replace council tax with a local income tax (a policy that was only abandoned in the past couple of months) and its promise of a referendum independence.

That, of course, came to dominate the next five years, though in 2011 voters ranked it 22 out of 25 in their list of priorities.

The picture was not entirely clear cut.

For example, another policy in the bottom five was the merger of Scotland's eight police forces into Police Scotland. It was backed by the SNP, Labour and the Conservatives.

There was little public support, too, for the new Forth crossing, though the parties - bar the Greens - backed it.

Back at the top end of the league table the SNP and Tory policy of maintaining an extra 1000 police officers was the second most popular policy.

But, looking at the pledges and then seeing how the parties fared, the survey made the point well enough: there is a lot more to winning elections than a popular policy platform.