Leader hopes result in Scottish elections on 5 May will allow her to rebuild party as she prepares to unveil Holyrood manifesto

Kezia Dugdale is sitting in a cafe in Portobello, a prosperous seaside suburb of Edinburgh, sipping a flat white coffee. On the beach just over the promenade, strong gusts of Arctic wind are whipping up thick flurries of sand. The sun is shining, but it is bitterly cold.

The cafe has become an impromptu campaign base for the Scottish Labour leader as she battles to regain the Scottish parliament seat of Edinburgh Eastern from the dominant Scottish National party (SNP). And with only a day before Dugdale unveils her party’s Holyrood manifesto, she is hoping for a break in the weather.

Dugdale hopes that in a handful of seats like this Labour can defy the polls consistently giving the SNP under Nicola Sturgeon an apparently unassailable 30-point lead. The polls suggest Labour may lose all its 15 Holyrood constituencies to the SNP, leaving it reliant on regional list seats.

Similar polls in last year’s general election correctly foresaw the SNP nearly wiping Labour out in Scotland, reducing it to a single MP at Westminster, as furious voters punished it for allying with the Conservatives during the independence referendum.

Now she is finding “genuine warmth”, Dugdale said, on the campaign trail. Voters, she believes, like the fact that Labour is openly fighting for higher taxes on the rich, campaigning for a 50p top income tax rate in Scotland. So too do Labour activists.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kezia Dugdale at a town hall event in Portobello with Jeremy Corbyn. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

“When I compare that to the sentiment during the general election, the mood has changed,” she said. “There’s a sense now that the anger has dissipated. People really like the tax policy. They like the honesty of it. They like the simple recognition that we now have the power to do things differently.”

Dugdale and her colleagues point to several seats they hope to hold or even win back from the SNP – despite the pessimism which grips Labour at national level. Given its dire standing in the polls and last year’s annihilation, winning four or five constituencies would be seen as a good result, as long as Labour comes second overall.

Trailing behind the Tories would be a fatal blow for Dugdale. The Sun and Sunday Times report talk of coups if Labour comes third. She dismisses such speculation as “absolute, categoric rubbish”, but there have been wobbles for Dugdale. Some trade unionists and colleagues are unhappy with the clumsy mishandling of a policy change on tax affecting the lowest earners.

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She has been forced to emphatically rule out in Wednesday’s manifesto supporting a second independence referendum, even if the UK votes to leave the EU in June but Scotland votes to remain, after appearing to concede in an interview that a Brexit vote could be grounds for another referendum. That came after the SNP claimed she had written to one MSP applying to be his constituency researcher while she was a student – a leak she dismisses as an unfounded smear.

They hope to hold Rutherglen in South Lanarkshire or East Lothian, where the former Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray is fighting a hyper-local campaign focusing on traffic wardens, train services and courthouse closures.

There may even be gains, Labour strategists hope. In Edinburgh Southern, the SNP-held seat which is contiguous to Labour’s last Westminster seat of Edinburgh South, there is quiet confidence of a small upset. As there is in West Lothian, held by SNP education secretary Angela Constance.

There is some evidence pro-independence voters are leaving the SNP to back Labour. In Coatbridge & Chryston, Elaine Smith has won the backing of the celebrated comic strip and scriptwriter, Mark Millar, who originated Kick-Ass and Kingsman: The Secret Service. Alex Salmond, the then SNP leader, was delighted when Millar backed a yes vote and the SNP before the 2014 referendum; the graphic artist is now dismayed about the SNP’s refusal to increase income taxes for the better off.

A prominent member of the Campaign for Socialism grouping inside Scottish Labour, Smith has also brought in Jeremy Corbyn, the UK Labour leader and shadow chancellor John McDonnell for campaign rallies. Like many of her colleagues, Smith believes the polls are failing to capture hotspots of strong Labour support.

While cautious about her chances, Smith believes: “Jeremy is having a positive effect, particularly in my community. I think the straight-talking, honest politics message is appealing to people: they expect the Labour party to do what it says on the tin.”

Corbyn’s appearances are carefully selected and targeted at core audiences. He was the star speaker at a rally for Dugdale in Portobello town hall the weekend he appeared alongside Smith; people were turned away at the door. Yet those have been Corbyn’s only appearances in this campaign: he is limited to a supporting role in Scotland. There are no walkabouts or press conferences.

Despite his appeal to leftwing voters who prize his purism and activist history, Dugdale says it is her job to lead Scottish Labour, to determine its strategy and its policies.

“You just said to me: ‘You are eight months in the job, you’re 34 years old, can you do this job’, right? If I brought up a bloke from London to help me out, how would that look? I’m in charge of this party, I know what I’m doing. I’ve got the plans. I have the confidence of my party.”

At another campaign event several days earlier, Dugdale insisted she had an excellent and supportive relationship with Corbyn “but I get to determine what support from the UK party looks like. Sometimes that means coming to help, like he did last Saturday in my own seat, [and] sometimes supporting me means letting me get on with it,” she said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kezia Dugdale campaign flags. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

“I have to prove that the Scottish Labour party puts Scotland first: the decisions that we take are with the interests of the people of Scotland in mind.”

Yet some Labour MSPs say privately Corbyn’s leadership is damaging the party in some constituencies: he is seen as too leftwing. And Corbyn’s election as UK leader had no lasting impact on the Scottish party’s standing in the polls. With several parties competing for leftwing votes – Labour, the SNP, the Scottish Greens, the socialist-environmentalist grouping Rise and Tommy Sheridan’s Solidarity – the political landscape in Scotland is far more crowded than in England.

Dugdale hopes the result on 5 May will allow her to rebuild the party at Holyrood. She is assured of a seat in Holyrood if she loses in Edinburgh Eastern; she tops Labour’s list of candidates in the regional list vote for Lothian.

The toughest electoral challenge is making headway against the SNP and Scottish Tories. Both parties are framing their campaigns and literature heavily around their leaders: Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson respectively. Sturgeon appears 30 times in the SNP’s manifesto. Only one other cabinet minister, her deputy John Swinney, makes an appearance in it.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kezia Dugdale, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson of the Scottish Conservatives take part in a televised debate. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Dugdale derides that as a “personality cult” around the two women, both more experienced and seasoned than she. “I choose to put forward a policy platform and a set of political choices underpinned by values and principles,” she insists.

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She believes Sturgeon has shown political cowardice, in particular by refusing to use the new tax powers. “What angers me more than anything about the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon in particular is she has such tremendous political support. She has the people on her side; she has a tremendous number of MPs, all of that potential, all of that power but for what end?”

But that leads to the other huge challenge, converting popular policies into votes. Several polls suggest a new 50p top rate for the richest is favoured by about half of Scotland’s voters. A BBC Scotland survey found 69% believed a 50p top rate should be a high priority. And yet, three months after that plan was announced, Labour’s poll ratings remain stubbornly fixed at 21%, 30 points behind the SNP.

So Dugdale, tacitly acknowledging that Labour will come a distant second behind the SNP on 5 May, says she is digging in for the rest of the decade.

“The problems with the Labour party didn’t happen overnight and they won’t be fixed overnight,” she says. “I don’t think anybody at any stage said, ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’, and when I walked in the room all would be well again. What I have though is a plan, a five-year plan to turn around the party, and I’m stubbornly sticking to it.”