Scottish Labour leader endorses Owen Smith over Corbyn

Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale has announced her support for Owen Smith in the party leadership campaign, warning that incumbent Jeremy Corbyn is incapable of uniting the party.

“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 cant pin our hopes on a leadership who speak only to the converted, rather than speaking to the country as a whole,” she wrote in her column in the Daily Record.

“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. I believe Owen can.”

Dugdale led Labour to its worst ever defeat in the Scottish elections earlier this year. She has been a prominent figure in Progress, the pro-business, rightwing party faction closely associated with former leader Tony Blair. However, she insisted that she supports Smith’s leftwing programme.

“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?” Dugdale told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday. “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.”

She added that she “disagreed entirely” that her position would become untenable if, as is widely expected, Corbyn won the leadership contest.

Owen Smith said he was incredibly proud to have Dugdale’s endorsement 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.”

On Sunday, Corbyn drew thousands of peopleto 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,” he 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.”

Around 640,000 Labour members eligible to vote in the leadership contest will start receiving their ballots by email from Monday.