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Richard Leonard voted Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard voted Scottish Labour leader
(about 1 hour later)
The Scottish Labour party has elected Richard Leonard, a Jeremy Corbyn supporter, as its new leader after a fractious campaign. Jeremy Corbyn has strengthened his grip of the Labour party after Scottish members elected a leftwing trade unionist, Richard Leonard, as their seventh leader in the past decade.
His election marks a significant defeat for Labour’s centrists, who had endorsed his rival Anas Sarwar, and helps to cements Corbyn’s control of the Labour party, which has slowly regained support in Scotland this year under his leadership. Unveiled to cheering supporters in Glasgow, Leonard won a decisive victory over his rival Anas Sarwar, a former Scottish deputy leader, after a fractious contest between the party’s left and its centrists, in which the Unite union played a significant role.
Until now Scottish Labour had backed centrist candidates, and its members voted in the UK party’s leadership election last year for Corbyn’s rival Owen Smith. Corbyn had remained silent during the contest despite open support for Leonard from his allies, but he said Leonard’s victory was a turning point in Scottish politics and would transform the party’s fortunes.
Sarwar received endorsements from Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor for Greater Manchester, and Harriet Harman, and had the backing of a large majority of Scottish Labour’s MSPs and most of its councillors. “Richard’s campaign has offered a challenge to the rigged system that has benefited a wealthy elite and showed how he will lead Scottish Labour to transform society,” Corbyn said. Labour’s popular support has nearly doubled this year, from 13% last winter to 27% in June’s general election, winning six new Westminster seats.
Leonard, a little-known MSP who was first elected in 2016, built up a strong reputation in the trade union movement as a GMB political officer, and has close ties to the pro-Corbyn grouping in Scottish Labour. Yet Leonard’s victory, with nearly 57% of the vote, was overshadowed by a bitter row inside the party over the decision by Kezia Dugdale, the former Scottish leader, to appear on the ITV reality show I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, next week.
The announcement in Glasgow on Saturday was overshadowed by a row about the decision of Kezia Dugdale, whose resignation as Scottish Labour leader sparked the contest, to appear on the ITV reality show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here. With Dugdale’s allies openly attacking her decision, party sources confirmed she faces disciplinary sanctions because she failed to seek approval from party business managers to be out of the UK. She will donate her MSPs salary to charity but one ally said he was “pretty horrified” by her decision.
Labour MSPs and senior figures in the party accused Dugdale of bringing herself and the party into disrepute. She has promised to donate her MSP’s salary to charity for the duration of her time on the show, which starts next week. Leonard said he supported a bill barring MSPs from second jobs, but his initial reaction was not to suspend her. He said the Labour group at the Scottish parliament needed to consider what action to take. “I was a bit disappointed,” when he heard the news, he said.
Daniel Johnson, the Labour MSP for Edinburgh Southern and an ally and friend of Dugdale, said: “It’s not so much that I’m saying nothing; I’m speechless.”
Jenny Marra, another Labour MSP, tweeted:
Election to parliament is a privilege to serve and represent people. It’s not a shortcut to celebrity. https://t.co/SrcA6h1gxzElection to parliament is a privilege to serve and represent people. It’s not a shortcut to celebrity. https://t.co/SrcA6h1gxz
Leonard earned a decisive victory by winning both the membership and the trade union affiliates sections. It added to an unrelated crisis for the new Scottish leader after his deputy leader, Alex Rowley, was suspended last week by the party after it emerged police had told him in October of abuse complaints against him by a former partner.
The result neutralises potential complaints from centrists that the contest was rigged by union leaders using the affiliate membership system to boost their candidate. Thousands of extra members were recruited by the unions, chiefly the pro-Corbyn Unite union. Widely disliked by Sarwar’s supporters, Rowley had backed Leonard’s leadership bid while serving as interim leader: his daughter Danielle Rowley, a recently elected Labour MP, had chaired Leonard’s leadership campaign.
Leonard received 56.7% of the total vote on a turnout of 62.3% of Scottish Labour’s 35,309 members and affiliates. Corbyn’s allies in Scottish Labour are nonetheless celebrating a significant victory for the party’s left wing. Scottish members have traditionally rejected the left, backing centrist candidates in previous leadership contests and voting last year for Corbyn’s UK leadership rival, Owen Smith.
In a speech at Glasgow Science Centre where the result was announced, Leonard said he represented “a movement for real change, a movement for democracy and yes, as a movement for socialism”. In this vote, Leonard won both the trade union affiliates section by a resounding 77% to 23% for Sarwar, but also narrowly won the membership vote by 52% to 48%. A membership drive orchestrated by Unite, which backs Corbyn, pushed up Scottish Labour’s membership to 35,000 although turnout in the ballot was 62%.
He described Sarwar as “my friend, my comrade”, but he implicitly criticised Sarwar’s policies on a new means-tested Scottish child benefit and his more cautious economic policies. Although Leonard has resisted being pulled into the Campaign for Socialism, a 23-year-old pro-Corbyn grouping inside Scottish Labour that vigorously backed his candidacy, his victory increases Corbyn’s control of Labour’s ruling national executive committee.
Barely mentioning Corbyn, Leonard said his victory was “a mandate to back a high-wage, high-value, rebalanced economy, to investing in universalism, not means-testing”. In a reform pushed through by Dugdale, the Scottish and Welsh party leaders are automatically given seats on the NEC.
Sarwar congratulated Leonard on his win, saying: “He has my full and unwavering support, and I look forward to campaigning with him to return a Scottish Labour government. Leonard acknowledged his immediate task was reuniting the party after a bruising contest which exposed factional divisions within the Scottish party. Despite winning the support of a majority of trade unions, he also commanded only a handful of votes amongst Labour MSPs at Holyrood.
“Our party will now unite around our new leader because we all share the same burning desire to elect a Scottish Labour government that works for the many, not the few.” He described Sarwar, whose leadership campaign was hit hard by attacks on his £4.7m shareholding in his family’s cash and carry business, and for sending his children to a fee-paying school, as a “friend and a comrade”.
Sarwar was too talented and experienced not to get a frontbench post at Holyrood, he said. “The party will, in my view, come together because we have no choice. We are in third place [in Holyrood]. We do not have the luxury of continuing splits and divisions. In any leadership contest, there is a debate of ideas, there is a debate about direction, and that is what we have seen.
“One of the things that has emerged in the course of this long nine-week campaign is a new consensus around where the Labour party needs to sit politically … which is about extending public ownership, which is about ending austerity, which is about investing in public services and which is about seeing a shift in power from the few to the many.”
Sarwar said he would happily serve in Leonard’s team at Holyrood. He said: “This was clearly not a referendum on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership but now we have the result I give my full and unswerving support to Richard Leonard.”