Kezia Dugdale, the favourite to take over as leader of Scottish Labour, has criticised the length of time the party is devoting to leadership campaigns north and south of the border, warning it leaves Scottish Labour unprepared for next May’s Holyrood elections and gives the impression of “everyone fighting with each other” in the UK party.

She also warns that a Jeremy Corbyn victory in the UK contest could reduce Labour to “carping on the sidelines” for years. And, after a week in which the UK candidates have been criticised for failing to capitalise on the Sewel scandal to make their case for reforming the House of Lords, she proposes that a reformed second chamber should be based in Glasgow.

The 33-year-old only joined Holyrood as a list MSP for Lothian in 2011 and was elected as deputy to leader Jim Murphy last December. She was initially expected to be endorsed as a solo “unity candidate” following Murphy’s abrupt resignation after the party’s catastrophic defeat in May’s general election. But, despite Dugdale immediately securing a solid majority of MSP and constituency Labour party nominations, Ken Macintosh – MSP for Eastwood, who previously lost to Johann Lamont in the 2011 leadership contest – stepped forward to challenge her.



While insisting that “ultimately it’s good thing to have the debate”, Dugdale warns: “The price for that is having lost the summer, when you might have spent it getting ready to come back with a new style and approach from September.” The results of the ballot will be announced on 15 August, giving the new leader just two and a half weeks before Holyrood reconvenes: “That’s no time at all to make staffing appointments, to get all the MSPs and staff together and go ‘right, we’ve got the fight of our lives over the next seven months, we need to be a team, this is what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it’.”

She likewise expresses frustration at the length of the UK leadership campaign: “It no longer looks like a healthy, democratic and good thing for the Labour party because it’s starting to look like everyone fighting with each other.”

Speaking to the Guardian the day before her supporter and Scotland’s only remaining Labour MP Ian Murray declared his backing for Yvette Cooper, Dugdale herself refused to be drawn on her preference, though she offered serious reservations about Corbyn’s candidacy.

“There are loads of people [in the Labour party] who are quite prepared to say ‘Och, it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t look like a prime minister, there’s someone who’s authentic and says what they believe’.”



“But I want there to be a Labour government; otherwise I’m wasting my time. I don’t want to spend my whole life just carping from the sidelines.”



“So you have to convince me that he can be [prime minister]. Here’s a guy that’s broken the whip 500 times. So how can the leader of the party enforce discipline with that record?”

She provides a particularly generational, and geographical, take on fears that non-Labour activists are infiltrating the leadership contest: “I’ve heard this phrase [entryism] thrown about and I feel like I’m maybe a bit young to understand it. I’m assuming it relates back to the Militant [faction] when I was still at primary school.

“I don’t like it instinctively as a word because it sounds like it’s undoubtedly a bad thing. Nobody was complaining when a 100,000 joined the SNP.”

But Dugdale is not partisan in her critiques. Writing for Comment is Free, she charges Tony Blair with failing to see through Lords reform after his first term: “Labour’s reforming spirit was replaced by a small ‘c’ conservatism.”

And she makes the case for basing an elected second chamber in Glasgow: “Where better than the biggest city of a nation that has just reaffirmed its commitment to keeping our country together? A yes city”.

And she is quick to differentiate herself from her predecessor, taking a sideswipe at one of Murphy’s pet policies: asked to identify Scottish Labour’s top three mistakes during the general election campaign, Dugdale singled out the plans to re-introduce alcohol at football matches at the top of the list, the centralised campaign and the failure to change tone as the scale of defeat became apparent.

With polls suggesting the Scottish National party is heading for a similar landslide next May at Holyrood, Dugdale has already acknowledged that Scottish Labour may not yet have reached its electoral rock bottom, but insists that she is looking at party recovery in terms of years: “My plan is not to bounce from one election to another.”

“What people want is for the party to change and to mean it ... to actually change in the way that Scotland’s changing and to meet that with aspiration and ambition.” This includes simple shifts in thinking, she says: “To believe that this building [we are meeting in her office in the Scottish parliament at Holyrood, Edinburgh] is the centre of Scottish politics, not the one in London or the Labour building in Glasgow.”



How does she make that particular shift when both she and Macintosh have rejected calls for an independent Labour party in Scotland? And doesn’t this risk repeating past mistakes by allowing the likes of Tristram Hunt and Chuka Umunna – who have both discussed party independence from a UK angle – to take the initiative?

“What is the driving force for an independent Labour party in Scotland?” she counters. “Is it so that there is no doubt that when we speak, we speak for Scotland? I think I can do that anyway and remain part of the Labour family across the UK.”

She gives the immediate example of her public opposition to Harriet Harman’s instruction to Labour MPs to abstain on the government’s welfare reform bill. “In the past Johann Lamont or Iain Gray would have wanted to say that but been told ‘you can’t’. I’m not going to engage in that.”

She admits that Mackintosh’s portrayal of himself as a “family man” in his election literature “makes people in my campaign troubled”. But she adds: “The last time Ken stood for leadership in Scotland I ran his campaign. We’re good friends, so I know it’s not a personal aside at me. He chooses to talk about his family and have photographs with his kids; I choose not to talk about my private life.”

Dugdale says her work impinges “massively” on her relationships. “I have no life outside of politics, unless I orchestrate it.” Making time for her partner, family and friends is difficult: “Booking tickets is the best thing to do because then you have to go”.

Given the scale of the challenge facing Scottish Labour over the coming months and years, why is she standing for leader when still so young and relatively inexperienced?

“I feel like my whole political career has been on fast forward,” she replies. “My closest friends were saying to me the night before the election that they would piss themselves laughing if I got elected, and the next day it happened.

“Since that point, to be put in Johann’s first cabinet, to be deputy and then find myself in the position where I could be leader, it’s all come really fast and I just feel that this is the time. My political career could be over before my 40th birthday and that’s just how it’s going to be. I feel I’ve got something to offer my party now.”