Scottish Labour: a critical vote for Monica Lennon

Nominations for the Scottish Labour Party (SLP) leadership contest triggered by Anas Sarwar’s desertion to the House of Lords opened on 3 August and will close on 17 August.

Such is the parlous state of the SLP that candidates need nominations from just three MSPs (which can include their own nomination), three Scottish MPs, and three affiliates (at least two of which must be trade unions) in order to get onto the ballot paper.

Three candidates are seeking to stand: North East MSP Michael Marra, South Scotland MSP Joe Fagan MSP, and Monica Lennon.

The latter is technically not eligible to stand, as she will not be sworn in as an MSP – taking the place of Anas Sarwar – until Holyrood reconvenes in September. But even by the shameless standards of the SLP, declaring her ineligible to stand on a technicality would be a major embarrassment.

Less nobly, the right wing calculates that it has nothing to lose by letting her stand, given that she is extremely unlikely to win the contest. (But a similar calculation badly backfired in 2015, when Corbyn was elected Party leader.)

Apart from hitting the nominations requirement, anyone who wants to get onto the ballot paper will also need to pay the SLP £5,000 – up from £3,000 in the 2021 contest, and from £1,500 in the 2017 contest. The SLP’s defence: the price of a stamp has doubled over the past five years.

Unfortunately, Campaign for Socialism member Katy Clark MSP is not standing. True, Clark took a seat in the House of Lords after she lost her Westminster seat in 2015. Even so, she represents a socialist current much more rooted in class politics than Lennon’s.

When Lennon stood against Sarwar in the 2021 SLP leadership contest, we advocated a vote for her on the basis that she was not Anas Sarwar:

“In other circumstances, she would not be a natural candidate to win support from the left. But the current circumstances are defined by the fact that the other candidate in the leadership contest is Anas Sarwar. A vote for Monica Lennon is a vote against Anas Sarwar. It’s as simple as that.”

Similar considerations apply this time round: She is neither Michael Marra not Joe Fagan.

To be fair to Lennon, there are also some positives in arguing that she should be supported. Since she last stood for election as SLP leader, she has notched up a number of achievements to her name, most notably against period poverty, and remains committed to pushing her ecocide bill.

Lennon has chaired the Scottish Labour Trade Union Group for the past five years, and also works closely with the STUC Women’s Committee. She is the one candidate who does not support lifting the ban on new North Sea oil licences.

Unlike Marra and Fagan, she also has been open in her criticisms of the internal regime in the SLP, especially in the Labour Group in Holyrood. Looking to the future, she has written: “We can’t be led by people who presided over our failures or didn’t stand up to a UK leadership that was out of control.”

At the time of writing, it is not clear whether Lennon will make it onto the ballot paper. She has enough trade union support (with nominations already in from Unison, Unite and the TSSA) but stills needs nominations from a third MP and a third MSP. According to a recent article in the Daily Record: “Marra does not want her on the ballot and his supporters have been energetic in ensuring this becomes a reality."

Some MSPs who might have been expected to have nominated Lennon are backing Marra or Fagan. It is also noticeable that the one MSP (Katy Clark) to back Lennon has done so in less than enthusiastic terms: “I have nominated Monica Lennon to help her get on the ballot paper.”

Marra has been an MSP since 2021. In an interview with the “Holyrood” magazine in 2022 he described himself as soft left: “I’ve always viewed myself as being probably on the soft left of the Labour Party.” But if the adjective fits at all, then the emphasis is very much on the “soft”.

Marra, of course, promises to turn round the SLP’s fortunes. But what he omits mention is his own role in how the SLP has ended up where it is.

Marra was senior adviser to former SLP leader Iain Gray in the 2011 election which saw the SNP win an overall majority (in an electoral system designed to prevent any one party securing an overall majority).

Marra was also one of the authors of Labour’s 2026 election manifesto – so bland, colourless and devoid of substance (rather like Marra himself) that it resulted in Labour’s worst ever Holyrood electoral performance, despite a collapse in the SNP vote.

Marra promises to “give our party back to our members: devolve power and resources away from the centre, across Scotland; empower our movement everywhere with regional staff and resources; plans made in every region for every region.”

But why only now, when he is standing to be SLP leader, has Marra suddenly discovered that SLP members (and affiliates) have been systematically disenfranchised year in, year out? Moreover, “giving our party back to our members” is a matter of democratic reform, not a bureaucratic reallocation of resources.

The same applies to Marra’s sudden discovery that the SLP “has failed to deliver for working class people at Holyrood for nearly twenty years.” He has only just noticed this – despite having sat in Holyrood and held various Shadow Cabinet Secretary posts for the past five years?

Fagan, former leader of South Lanarkshire Council and a regional list MSP since only May of this year, presents himself as a Scottish Andy Burnham: “Greater Manchester cannot simply be lifted and dropped into Scotland. But Andy Burnham’s approach of starting with the place itself is worth learning from.”

Fagan’s manifesto shares the vocabulary and proclaimed priorities of Burnham: “Scottish Labour should be the party of more money in people’s pockets, more power in people’s hands, and more wealth kept in the communities that create it.”

Fagan casts his achievements as Council leader (free swimming for under-16s!) as the counterpart to the Burham mystique of his role as Mayor of Manchester. But as Fagan coyly admitted in a LabourList article: “We also set difficult [i.e. cuts] budgets.”

In fact, Fagan presided over a minority administration (Labour 25 seats; SNP 25 seats) propped up by the Lib Dems and Independents. The way he ran the Labour Group was summed up by a Group member in a complaint to the then SLP leader Sarwar:

“The inner circle around Fagan instinctually close ranks at the first sign of anything that might rock the boat. They can be vicious when they do so. The group is kept in the dark about many big decisions until they are already made. We are instructed on how to vote on motions that we cannot even see the wording of. [The Group] is run by secrecy, fear and intimidation.”

Fagan’s authoritarianism is his real attraction for SLP right-wing faction around deputy leader Jackie Baillie (who, in reality, ran the SLP when Sarwar was its figurehead leader, and will certainly do so again if Fagan is elected).

As “a Labour source” put it in a recent article in the “Daily Record”: “If he (Fagan) can manage to keep together that South Lanarkshire Labour group and deliver as a minority administration, then he can handle this group of MSPs.”

Who wins the SLP leadership contest is certainly not an irrelevance. But given the current state of Scottish Labour – a dwindling and aging membership, moribund CLPs, and the decline of trade union and community links – much more than a change of leadership is needed.

Apart from calling for a vote for Lennon, the left needs to reorganise itself into a serious campaigning force to turn CLPs outwards and re-root them in local communities and workplaces.

All candidates are paying lip-service to something or other along those lines. But only the self-organisation of grassroots activists can deliver on that.