CommonSpace profiles possible Scottish Labour leader candidate Kezia Dugdale MSP
SCOTTISH LABOUR deputy leader Kezia Dugdale will make her decision over whether to stand for the leadership of the party over the next couple of days. If she does, she will be the bookies’ favourite to take over from Jim Murphy, ahead of Eastwood MSP Ken MacIntosh. What does the MSP for Lothians, born in Aberdeen and brought up in Dundee, have to offer? CommonSpace takes a look.
Like Murphy, Dugdale has never worked outside of politics, moving from the Edinburgh University Students Association to the National Union of Students, before working as assistant for former MP George Foulkes and finally being elected to the Scottish Parliament as Labour’s second candidate on the Lothians regional list seat in 2011.
Dugdale, therefore, is schooled in politics, but having no wider experience is normally seen as a limitation in being able to come across as authentic and in-touch with the common person.
Being one of the new crop elected in 2011 is an advantage for Dugdale – Scottish Labour needs someone it can pitch as breaking with the past.
Murphy’s attempts to do this where held down by his past baggage: saying you are against tuition fees in Scotland isn’t as effective when you voted for tuition fees at Westminster.
Dugdale does not appear to be too tainted personally by Murphy’s legacy, helped by the fact that they didn’t stand on a joint ticket for leader and deputy leader in the leadership election at the end of 2014.
“The sun will be shining and someone somewhere will be opening a can of Irn Bru.” Kezia Dugdale
However, she doesn’t seem too concerned about distancing herself from the Murphy era. Writing in the Daily Record this week after the former East Renfrewshire MP announced he was stepping down, she said that he “reinvigorated a sleepy Labour Party”.
She added: “I’ve heard people say [Murphy] thinks in pictures, if it’s true, it’s a painting of a fairer Scotland, where every child has an equal chance, where the creation of wealth is a good and noble thing as long as it’s shared.
“The sun will be shining and someone somewhere will be opening a can of Irn Bru.” (Click here to read more).
The article at least shows she is loyal, but Murphy is likely to go into the same category as Wendy Alexander, Iain Gray and Johann Lamont – ie. leaders of the party in Scotland that the new leader wants to push deep into the background, not highlight.
In politician terms, Dugdale is very young at 33, but this again could be in her favour if she can appear as being from a new generation of Labour activists that want to do away with the old.
However, with youth comes inexperience – Dugdale has never held a position in government, and has only been an MSP for four years.
Candidate for UK Labour leader, Andy Burnham, recently said that Chuka Umunna was right to stand down as a candidate because he had only served one term in parliament and therefore did not have the requisite experience for such a high profile position. Surely a similar analysis could be made of Dugdale?
Dugdale does not appear to be too tainted personally by Murphy’s legacy, helped by the fact that they didn’t stand on a joint ticket in the leadership election.
Ideologically, it’s difficult to find a great deal of difference between Dugdale and Murphy: the two are cut from the same cloth, both followers of the Progress think-tank associated with the ‘Blairite’ right of the Labour party.
However, what this means in practice is a bit of an unknown in the current context: as Herald columnist Iain MacWhirter pointed out shortly after Murphy won his leadership, he had dumped everything he previously believed in to rebrand himself to fit the realities of post-referendum Scotland. (Click here to read more).
How much of Murphy’s legacy Dugdale will shed will likely depend on politics more than principle, although their backgrounds do give some indication of possible dividing lines.
Dugdale would not be well positioned to embrace Murphy’s criticisms of Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey, for example, being a union of which she is a member.
On the Israel-Palestine conflict, Murphy is an arch-Zionist whereas Dugdale is significantly more balanced, previously questioning Scottish Enterprise’s funding support for Israeli water company Eden Springs, which operates in the Golan Heights, considered under international law to be occupied Syrian territory.
Dugdale is seen as having a more consensual style of politics than previous Labour leaders, with more openness to arguments on the independence side of the debate.
She wrote an open letter to Women for Independence (WfI) expressing surprise about one of its members’, Kate Higgins, public rejection of Scottish Labour’s support for its campaign (which was eventually successful) to abolish plans for a new women’s super-prison in Greenock.
She started off the letter by writing: “Thank you for creating a space in Scotland where women can come together and discuss their hopes and aspirations for their nation.” (Click here to read more).
All fine and well, but it’s not clear what Dugdale would do that could transform the party’s fortunes – there’s nothing in her weekly Daily Record articles that provide much indication of someone thinking radically about Scottish Labour.
The hope for the party will be that a fresh face and a competent speaker will be a sufficient starting point from which Scottish Labour can redefine itself, but without a clear vision for what redefining itself looks like it is unlikely to look like anything other than another cosmetic change.
There’s nothing in [Dugdale’s] weekly Daily Record articles that provide much indication of someone thinking radically about Scottish Labour.
However, the plan could be to work out how to rebuild the party with someone capable of doing that job over the long term.
When the new leader is in place, the party will have had five new leaders in eight years, and therefore may be looking for long term stability, even if it means election defeats to the Nationalists.
Dugdale’s project, therefore, could be similar to that of Ruth Davidson in the Scottish Tories – slowly rebuilding the party again from the bottom up after recurring devastating defeats. Davidson is widely considered to have helped begin the progress of detoxifying the Tories as a fresh-faced political figure.
However, the Tories are also instructive of the dangers of this strategy: entirely under the radar, Ruth Davidson’s party just received its lowest vote ever in the General Election. If that’s considered progress, the party’s ambitions have shrunk dramatically.
The terrain of seeing failure as success is unfamiliar to a party like Scottish Labour which has been used to winning.
Dugdale is seen as having a more consensual style of politics than previous Labour leaders, with more openness to arguments on the independence side of the debate.
Murphy’s whole pitch to be leader was that he could “get the party winning again”. He polarised people and created bad blood, but under Murphy the party still mattered.
And that is where the danger comes in for Labour in Scotland: the one thing worse than being hated in politics is to be irrelevant.
A strategy which sees rebuilding Scottish Labour under Dugdale’s leadership as a steady 10 to 15-year job of slowly regaining trust may just make the party, as STUC General Secretary Grahame Smith has warned, “irrelevant to Scottish politics”.
Picture courtesy of Shelter Scotland