KEZIA Dugdale should be ousted as Scottish Labour leader for her “politically and personally woeful leadership”, according to a scathing editorial in an influential left-wing publication.
The highly critical article, which was published in the Scottish Left Review (SLR), called on Jeremy Corbyn's supporters in Scotland to replace the struggling Dugdale, stating "Labour can’t win in Scotland with Dugdale" and “the left needs to move to remove her and do so soon".
Corbyn's backers were also urged to move swiftly to "take control of the party" and "isolate the right-wing careerists" in Labour across the UK.
SLR, which is backed by senior figures on the left, made the dramatic call in its 100th anniversary edition out later this week.
It is not affiliated to Scottish Labour.
But the magazine has links with trade unions and has backers from across the left in Scotland in Labour, the SNP, Scottish Greens and Scottish Socialist Party.
SLR said Dugdale’s leadership was partly to blame for Scottish Labour not winning more seats that the magazine claimed could have kept the Tories out of power. Scottish Labour increased its number of MPs from one to seven in last month's General Election. However, SLR said the "legacy of ‘Better Together" contributed to a failure to get more due to a lingering resentment of Labour's alliance with the Tories in the anti-independence campaign.
The intervention came weeks after Labour MSPs Neil Findlay and Alex Rowley said the party could have won 15 MPs in Scotland if it had toned down its Unionist-focused campaign and promoted Corbyn more.
SLR also called on Corbyn supporters to "seize the initiative with the increase in popular support and membership and take control of the party constitution, structure and organisation in order to hand power back to ordinary members and isolate the right wing careerists who have ruined it".
Former Scottish Labour chair Bob Thomson is a leading member of its editorial committee of SLR.
However, it also has supporters such as SNP MP Tommy Sheppard and is edited by Gregor Gall, an author and academic. In its editorial, SLR highlighted traditional Labour areas it claimed the party could win seats in if Dugdale was replaced. It said: “If Labour had done much better than its extra six seats and 2.8 per cent vote increase – like winning Aberdeen South, Renfrewshire East, Stirling and the Ochils (which they held before but which the Tories took) as well Airdrie and Shotts and Motherwell and Wishaw, the Tories would have had difficulty forming any kind of government.
“The legacy of Better Together and a politically and personally woeful leadership in the form of Kezia Dugdale are the critical explanatory variables. So it is all very well saying, as left Labour MSPs Alex Rowley and Neil Findlay and others have said, that Labour would have done better in Scotland with more radical approach, namely, empathising Labour’s manifesto, and one less based on opposing indyref2. Logic then dictates that Labour can’t win in Scotland with Dugdale so the left needs to move to remove her and do so soon. Not doing so is to ignore the elephant in the room.”
However, a Scottish Labour source, hitting back, said: "The author of this editorial is ill-informed and clearly didn't read Kez's manifesto in 2016, which was the most radical in a generation, and has absolutely no understanding of the views of the party membership."
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