Dugdale: I won’t “rip up” Scottish Labour manifesto despite defeat

Kezia Dugdale has said that she will not “rip up” the Scottish Labour manifesto, despite the party’s historic defeat last week. Labour finished third in the Scottish election, behind the Conservatives, and lost a third of their MSPs.

Dugdale said that she did not believe the defeat reflected a wholesale rejection of Labour’s policies.

Speaking on Question Time, the Scottish Labour leader said: “I don’t accept that our manifesto was rejected. I’m going to be the first leader who doesn’t rip up the manifesto immediately after an election – because I believe it.”

Polling carried out before the election found that Scottish Labour’s individual policies were fairly popular – but were far less so when people associated them with the party. This suggests that Scottish Labour’s bigger, long term problem is that it has an image problem that cannot be solved by policy alone. During the campaign, this led to a joke within Scottish Labour that “we could offer every voter in Scotland a holiday in Barbados and they’d still vote SNP”.

The future of Scottish Labour continues to look dire: a poll this week showed that over a third of Scottish voters do not think the party will remain an important force in 10 years – more than believe it will be.

But launching the Scottish Labour pro-EU In campaign this morning, Dugdale said: “After last week’s painful defeat I promised we wouldn’t stop standing up for what we believe in, we won’t stop fighting for our values.”

Speaking before the election, Dugdale explained that she had a five-year plan to revive Scottish Labour’s fortunes, and this appears to include using the 2016 manifesto as a foundation to build on. The party was seen to have moved to the left during this year’s election, supporting a tax rise to fund education and adopting a more sceptical approach to Trident.

On Question Time last night, Dugdale sought to explain the reasons for Labour’s poor performance on May 5, saying they had been “squeezed” by the SNP and Scottish Tories.

“What happened last week was we were defeated. The people of Scotland spoke and they sent us a big strong message. They wanted to make clear that they oppose the second referendum, those issues came to the fore again”, she said.

“I fought that campaign on trying to move on from those referendum arguments of the past. I believe that Scotland wanted to move forward whether we were a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’.

“What happened last week was Labour were squeezed between the SNP’s desire for independence and the Tories desire to talk about this threat of a second referendum.”

However, not all Scottish Labour figures have struggled with votes: yesterday former leadership candidate Ken Macintosh was elected as the first Labour Presiding Officer for Holyrood.