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Monica Lennon, a contender for Scottish Labor leadership, has said support for independence could increase if Labor does not accept a new referendum.
Lennon, a candidate backed by the party’s left, said more voters would defect from Labor and support independence if they saw the party side with Boris Johnson by refusing to accept the case for a referendum.
Anas Sarwar, the leader of the leadership, has rejected calls to support a new referendum, but Lennon said that pro-independence parties would be mandated to vote again if they win a majority of Holyrood seats in the Scottish elections in May.
“If people in Scotland express through the ballot box that they want a referendum, it would be foolish and undemocratic to ignore that,” Lennon told The Guardian. One could be held within five years of the next parliament, but not this year, as some SNP leaders have suggested.
“It would be irresponsible for anyone to go ahead and force a referendum to be held this year while we are still in the middle of a pandemic,” he said. But for those people who want to hide behind Boris Johnson [by rejecting one]So I would say it would be a disaster for Scottish Labor and, in fact, that puts the union at risk. I think the biggest threat to the union is Boris Johnson and the Tories. “
Lennon rose to fame last year after the MSPs endorsed their private member’s bill to make Scotland the first country in the world to offer free products for the period. Vogue magazine made her one of the 12 women who changed the world in 2020, along with the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris, and Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand.
Elected to Holyrood in 2016, Lennon, a former council planning officer, said Scottish Labor could only win back voters who supported the SNP over the past decade if it recognized that many believed in independence.
Failure to do so after the 2014 independence referendum led to Labor being “knocked out” in the 2015 Westminster elections, losing 40 seats. “We’ve been losing people’s trust for a long time, and it takes a while to put that back together,” he said.
Lennon said he wanted to prevent the SNP and pro-independence Scottish Greens from winning a majority in May. But if that failed and a referendum was held, Labor should campaign for a federal option on the ballot as an alternative to independence, he said.
That could be similar to proposals in a federalism plan commissioned by Jeremy Corbyn, the former UK party leader, he said. He advocated replacing the Lords with an elected Senate and substantial new powers for the delegated parliaments of the United Kingdom and the English regions.
“We are sounding very grumpy about the constitution,” he said. “We are telling people that it is irresponsible to talk about it. But they’re going to talk about it anyway; They are going to talk about it without us. I’m standing up to lead the party because I’m sick and tired of Scottish Labor being left behind, talking to ourselves. “
Sarwar has said it is “deeply irresponsible” to support another independence referendum, and believes that Labor should focus solely on the pandemic, combat the deep recession and attack Nicola Sturgeon’s domestic political record.
He and other Labor figures admit, however, that the party has been too slow to offer counterproposals to independence. Keir Starmer’s plans to introduce a UK-wide constitutional convention in January were delayed when Richard Leonard suddenly resigned as Scottish Labor leader, sparking the current contest. The winner will be announced on February 27.
Lennon said the Labor Party should already be campaigning to bring back employment and drug legislation to Scotland, so Holyrood can remove restrictive union laws and decriminalize drugs to address record drug death rates in the country.
The absence of a compelling alternative from the Labor Party, he said, meant that many voters had moved toward independence: 21 consecutive opinion polls have shown an affirmative majority, excluding don’t know.
“Because Scottish Labor has not shown there is a better way, people are asked to respond to opinion polls that give them a binary choice between independence, which involves jumping off a cliff, or staying with it. that we have, which most people don’t like, ”he said.
