Labour’s national conference will be asked to approve plans for the Scottish wing of the party to have full control over its policy and candidate selection, after years of tension with leaders in London.
Labour’s national executive committee agreed late on Tuesday to give Scottish Labour full policymaking autonomy, including control over the selection of Westminster candidates and its constituency parties, while still being funded by the wider party.
The reforms cement a deal agreed last year between Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader, and Jeremy Corbyn, whose re-election as UK leader is expected to be announced at the party’s conference in Liverpool this weekend.
Scottish Labour will also be given a seat on the UK national executive committee to be filled by a frontbench Holyrood MSP, with a similar place also being made available to Welsh Labour. The Scottish place will be directly controlled by and answerable to Dugdale, strengthening her power base within Labour.
Johann Lamont, who was Scottish leader before resigning after the bruising Scottish independence referendum, angrily stated her party was treated like “a branch office” by UK party officials when she stood down.
The measures push Labour into a quasi-federal structure – Scotland’s constituency Labour parties are already organised around Holyrood constituency boundaries rather than Westminister seats – and will allow Dugdale to further distance her party from the conflicts over Corbyn’s leadership.
The two are said to have a civil working relationship but Dugdale, along with a large majority of Scottish Labour’s MSPs and its sole Westminster MP, has backed Owen Smith to become the new overall party leader.
Insiders predict Smith will have a higher level of support from Scottish Labour members than across the UK and could win the Scottish section of the vote.
However, Corbyn’s campaign said their candidate had won support from 24 Scottish Labour constituencies, versus only 15 for Smith, giving him a clear lead.
Even so, the Scottish Labour conference has adopted a Corbynite policy on opposing Trident’s renewal, which the UK conference rejected last year. It also pushed public ownership of the railways harder than the UK party.
Dugdale, who will press for party support in her conference speech next week, said the reforms were “the biggest changes we’ve seen to how the Scottish Labour party is run in a generation. [It] is right that as devolution strengthens across the UK that Scottish Labour changes to reflect that.”
Corbyn allies in the pressure group Momentum said that giving the Scottish leader that level of control over NEC posts ran counter to its quest for far greater internal party democracy.
Rhea Wolfson, a Glasgow-based Momentum activist who was recently elected to the NEC as a member representative, told BBC Radio Scotland she understood the political context to the decision, but added: “It is important to have a stronger Scottish voice, but this isn’t the way to do it. We’re not going to have a directly elected Scottish representative on the NEC, apart from myself, and I think that’s a shame.”
The internal reforms follow several years of growing pressure within Scottish Labour to secure full policymaking and administrative independence in response to the rise of the Scottish National party, in an attempt to develop a separate identity and policy platform.
Scottish Labour leaders also believe greater autonomy is essential for the party’s survival.
The SNP, which has consistently goaded the Scottish party as being controlled by “London Labour”, has taken several hundred thousand voters from Labour, pushing it into third place in the Scottish parliament and leaving it with just one MP at Westminster.
The tensions around that subordinate status blew up during the crisis over the alleged rigging of Labour’s candidate selection process in Falkirk in 2013 by figures in the Unite union, which led to a police investigation.
The then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, and officials in London took control of the local party to the irritation of Lamont, and deselected a Unite-backed candidate. Unite disputed the findings of the party’s internal inquiry.
The row spurred on Miliband’s decision to introduce the one member, one vote election system for party leaders that has propelled Corbyn into power, and led party membership to mushroom.
