Kezia Dugdale says leadership challenger is only one who can unite party and win over non-traditional voters

The leader of the Scottish Labour party has announced her support for Owen Smith in the party’s leadership contest as ballots are sent out to 640,000 members.

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Kezia Dugdale, who led Labour to its worst defeat in the Scottish elections earlier this year, said only Smith could unite the divided party and win over voters outside the party’s traditional base.



Writing in her column in the Daily Record, Dugdale said: “Owen understands that to have a chance of implementing Labour values, we need to win over some of those who didn’t vote for us at the last election. We can’t pin our hopes on a leadership who speak only to the converted, rather than speaking to the country as a whole.”

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Dugdale said she had a responsibility to speak out as the party’s most senior female elected leader.

“I don’t think Jeremy [Corbyn] can unite our party and lead us into government. He cannot appeal to a broad enough section of voters to win an election,” she wrote. “I believe Owen can.”

Dugdale has been a prominent figure in Progress, the centre-left party faction closely associated with former leader Tony Blair, and has been a regular contributor to its eponymous journal. Yet she insists that she stands behind Smith’s leftwing programme.

Dugdale told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday: “Across the country today Labour party members and supporters are receiving their ballot papers and on that ballot paper is a very fundamental question: who can lead the UK Labour party and who is best placed to form the next Labour government?

“And the answer to that question is, for me, very clearly Owen Smith, because he represents a mixture of radical policies and politics combined with a credible plan of getting back into government.”

Dugdale also appeared on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme, saying she “disagreed entirely” that her position would become untenable if, as is widely expected, Corbyn won the leadership contest.

She insisted she was “absolutely fine” with her deputy, Alex Rowley, despite his backing for Corbyn and recent comments that he would not oppose a second referendum on Scottish independence.

Smith said he was incredibly proud to have Dugdale’s support for his leadership bid.

“Kezia and I want to see a strong Labour party that can defeat the Tories in Westminster and take the fight to the SNP in Holyrood,” he said. “But that will only be achieved if we can unite our party and demonstrate we have a radical, credible plan to rebuild communities right across the United Kingdom.”

Dugdale’s intervention came a day after Corbyn drew thousands to a rally in Kilburn, north London, where he said he wanted to implement a democratic shift in politics that would “empower people so they don’t have to bow down before the rich and the powerful”.

His re-election campaign director, Sam Tarry, told Today on Monday that a “complete overhaul of the entire [political] system” was needed, including giving citizens greater rights to challenge decisions taken on their behalf.

“That’s why we are suggesting things like citizens’ assemblies, genuinely participative and representative assemblies of people that could actually start to look at the big democratic deficit issues of the day,” Tarry said.

“This is really about drilling down to the local-est level possible. It is about saying we want more democracy in our economy, we need more democracy in our community and actually across the country we need more democracy.

“Ultimately what we want to do is give more people more power to design their own democracy and what I mean by that is, for example, in this country we don’t even have a written constitution, we don’t even have our rights properly enshrined. What I would like to see is a citizen-led process to design the regulations that govern them, rather than just be told: this is how you will be governed.”

Labour members eligible to vote in the leadership contest will start receiving their ballots by email from Monday.

A string of senior figures have urged members not to re-elect Corbyn, who was swept to power by an unexpected landslide last year. The party’s national executive committee changed the rules of the contest to disenfranchise 130,000 new Labour members, which it is believed were mainly Corbyn supporters. However, the MP for Islington North is widely expected to win.