Alex Massie Alex Massie

Kezia Dugdale’s resignation leaves Labour in turmoil all over again

Even in Scotland, ‘Name the post-devolution leaders of the Scottish Labour party’ is a pretty decent pub quiz question. There have been so many and so few of them left much of a legacy. The people’s standard has been borne by Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish, Jack McConnell, Wendy Alexander, Iain Gray, Johann Lamont, Jim Murphy and Kezia Dugdale. Eight leaders in eighteen years. (In the same period, the SNP and the Tories have each only had three leaders.)

And now there will be a ninth. Kezia Dugdale’s resignation as leader of the Scottish Labour party surprised even some of her closest allies and senior aides. Many of them are, not to put too fine a point on it, furious, seeing her resignation as something close to an abdication of responsibility. 

Leading the Scottish Labour party is not an easy job at the best of times and those best of times were long ago. The party has lost seats and share of the vote in every single election to the Scottish parliament since the first in 1999. The rot began when Kezia Dugdale was still in university. 

Still, Labour have been beaten by the Scottish Conservatives in three consecutive elections (to Holyrood, local councils and, in June, Westminster). Viewed from the vantage point, Dugdale’s resignation seems entirely explicable in political terms. But that is not the whole story. 

The suggestion she has been forced out by the Corbynite left is overblown. There is a vacancy at the head of the Labour party in Scotland because Kezia Dugdale has decided there should be a vacancy, not because she was on the brink of being defenestrated. Even if a rebellion was on the cards, she could have stayed to fight it. 

That she chose not to speaks more to her character than anything else.

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