EX-Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale has said she “does not feel” there is a surge in Labour support brewing in Scotland.
Dugdale told the Holyrood Sources podcast that from speaking to people around Fife – a region previously packed with safe Labour seats – she does not sense huge swathes of support moving away from the SNP to her former party.
Although she insisted things were more positive for Labour than they were at the last two General Elections, she questioned whether SNP voters had enough reason to change their vote.
Asked if she believed a Labour surge was on, Dugdale said: “No, I don’t feel it.
“I live in Fife in these days and I spend a lot of time moving around and talking to people, a past bastion of Labour support with the exception of North East Fife. Seats like Glenrothes and Kirkcaldy and Dunfermline you could have banked on in the early years of Blair’s government to return Labour MPs with huge majorities that now return SNP majorities in four or five figures in some instances.
“I don’t think Labour have been polling into the 30s since something like 2010, so there is a shift to that extent for sure, but when you break it down by constituencies, I still think the constitution dominates.
“In seats where you have a majority for No in 2014, they are seats that will fall more rapidly to Labour than they will elsewhere in the country, so you can see very quickly how Labour regains the seats I won in 2017.
“But the thing about 2017 General Election was although we won seven seats, we also ended up with nearly 20 seats where the majority the SNP MP had was around about 1500 mark, so suddenly there was a whole other 20 seats in Scotland that were back in play, but they were seats with really strong Yes support, so you are looking at direct transfers from SNP voters to Labour voters.
“I just don’t feel that yet.
“Labour are on the rise, and of course you’d much rather be Keir Starmer now than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and 2019, but my big fear about Labour’s perspective … the big issue is turnout for me. Is there enough of a reason for people to switch their votes?”
The Panelbase poll predicted Labour would get more seats than the SNP in Scotland at the next General Election.
It suggested the SNP would win just 21 of Scotland's seats, losing more than half of their current 45, while Labour would win 26, up from one now.
Dugdale – who is now director of the John Smith Centre for Public Service at the University of Glasgow – resigned her Labour membership in 2019 after quitting as Scottish Labour leader in 2017.
Elsewhere in the podcast, she said she had a issue with the “five missions for a better Britain” the Labour Party had put forward in that none of them focus on housing.
She said: “I actually think that would be a really fundamental campaigning ground for Labour to be on to talk about everyone’s right to a home, helping people to buy a home, tackling the rising interest rates crisis we are facing, building social housing and benefitting from all the jobs and skills that flow from that.”
During the interview she also said she “felt” for First Minister Humza Yousaf, with his time in office having been partly overshadowed by the arrests of senior figures in the party, but said he needed to look more “excited” by the role and talk about what he wants to do in the position.
She insisted indiscipline in the party was the real threat to Yousaf’s leadership and not “whether or not Sturgeon had an SNP membership card in her purse”.
