Opposition MSP voted against party over Brexit
A FORMER leader of Scottish Labour has admitted she once voted SNP because she was “so mad about Brexit”.
Despite being a Labour MSP at the time, Kezia Dugdale said she voted for the nationalists in the May 2019 elections to the European Parliament.
Ms Dugdale, who led Scottish Labour between 2015 and 2017, said she wanted to register a protest vote in the final EU elections before Brexit. She insisted it had been “safe” to vote SNP in an EU election as it “in no way could be construed as a vote for independence”.
However, Nicola Sturgeon seized on the result, which saw the SNP increase its tally of MEPS from two to three and Labour lose both its seats, to intensify her campaign for another Scottish independence referendum.
The Scottish Tories said pro-uk voters would “be dismayed that a former Scottish Labour leader could vote SNP and betray the Union so easily”.
Ms Dugdale was a Labour MSP until June 2019, the month after the EU election, when she left politics to take a job with the John Smith Centre at Glasgow University. She is no longer a Scottish Labour member and is married to Jenny Gilruth, the SNP Education Secretary.
She spoke to BBC Radio 4 for an coming documentary on the general election battle in Scotland, with polls indicating Labour is on course to win swathes of SNP seats. Ms Dugdale said: “I voted SNP once in my life and that was in the European Union elections immediately after Brexit, where I was so mad about Brexit ... I felt I could vote for the SNP in that European Union election, because that in no way could be construed as a vote for independence.
“I felt that was a safe thing to do. I voted Labour in every election since then, from the council to the Scottish Parliament, to the general election.”
In August last year, Ms Dugdale said her stance on independence had “moved” as she could no longer argue as strongly for the Union as she did in the 2014 referendum campaign. However, she said she was not necessarily ready to vote Yes in a referendum.