Breaking: Kezia Dugdale steps down as Scottish Labour leader

[Denzil_DC]

19. A backgrounder from the Glasgow Herald's Tom Gordon

The first part of the article recaps the last UK election results in Scotland (it's worth bearing in mind any talk of a "collapse" in the SNP vote is in comparison to the almost certainly unrepeatable swings and astonishing highs of the 2015 election). Gordon's as unimpressed with the "Corbyn bounce" in Scotland as I am.

The second part looks at Scottish Labour's finances:

There were other figures for Scottish Labour to ponder this week, as the Electoral Commission released the accounts of the main parties for 2016. Most of the attention fell on UK Labour’s bulging coffers thanks to union donations, and on the SNP going £1.2m into the red. But one of the wildest facts was that Scottish Labour, at least on paper, had less income (£400k) and a smaller expenditure (£504k) than the Scottish Liberal Democrats (£772k and £592k) and even the Scottish Greens (£448k and £630k).

How on earth, in the year of a Holyrood election, could the party which started out as the official opposition be so outgunned, even by the fourth and fifth parties?

Despite Kezia Dugdale’s best efforts to make Scottish Labour more autonomous in policy and election matters, it is far from independent. It’s not even strictly a party, but an “accounting unit” of UK Labour. According to this unit’s accounts, its campaign expenditure was £539,000 in 2015 and £198,000 in 2016. But it told the Electoral Commission it spent £1.64m and £338,000 in those years. (Yes, Mr Murphy spent £1.64m, more than the SNP, for one MP.)

The difference comes from UK Labour heavily subsidising the Scottish operation. Without it, the unit would be flat broke. Hence Scottish Labour finds itself is in a bind. The election data suggests Scots are yet to be convinced by Mr Corbyn, and a pro-Corbyn leader might struggle to win them over. But the accounts show the accounting unit can’t afford to be on bad terms with the UK party as it needs its handouts, and a centrist leader might struggle on other fronts. Ms Dugdale certainly found UK Labour less than generous in the June election. An interesting contest indeed.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/15510866.Tom_Gordon__Scottish_Labour_s_numbers_don_t_add_up

The Wings Over Scotland blog takes a closer look at Scottish Labour's finances and what they might reveal about its membership figures, which are a closely kept secret (How secret? Wait and see whether the coming leadership election results are expressed in numbers of votes rather than the uninformative percentages for each candidate that were released after the last leadership election.):

Motes and beams

The Times today carries an article sparking the annual revival of one of the evergreen mysteries of Scottish politics: just how many (or more accurately, how few) people are in the Scottish Labour Party?



The piece sees leadership contest avoider Alex Rowley crowing about a fall in the SNP’s membership income, based on this year’s party accounts as just released by the Electoral Commission.

...

A few paragraphs later on, the piece reveals that the decrease in the SNP’s revenues from membership fees in 2016 was £156,500 – a fall of 5.7% on 2015’s figure of £2.74m, down to £2.59m.

The amount of the SNP’s loss alone, however, far outstripped Scottish Labour’s entire membership income for 2016, which was just £108,024.

That’s a drop of 10.3% on the 2015 total of £120,479. In other words, proportionately Scottish Labour’s membership income has gone down by almost twice as much as the SNP’s in the last year, despite endless talk of surges of new members.

https://wingsoverscotland.com/motes-and-beams/

Wings' analysis reckons Scottish Labour's membership may be closer to the low thousands rather than the 30,000 often bandied about - if true, worse than where it was before Jeremy Corbyn came along, when 10,000 members seemed a reasonable estimate.

Membership doesn't equate directly to votes, of course, but it may be some indicator of enthusiasm.