page_title: Kezia Dugdale
section_title: Leader of the Scottish Labour Party
hierarchical_section_title: Kezia Dugdale / Leader of the Scottish Labour Party
caption_attribution_description: English: Kezia Alexandra Ross Dugdale, Member of the Scottish Parliament for Lothian, waits to make affirmation following the 2016 election.
context_page_description: Kezia Alexandra Ross Dugdale is a Scottish politician who served as Leader of the Scottish Labour Party from 2015 until 2017. A former member of the Scottish Labour Party and Co-operative Party, she was a Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Lothian region from 2011 to 2019.
  Born in Aberdeen and raised in Dundee, Dugdale studied Law at the University of Aberdeen and Policy Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where she was a campaigns and welfare adviser. After leaving university, she worked as an election agent, political researcher and parliamentary officer. She was elected at the 2011 Scottish Parliament election on the Lothian regional list and became Deputy Leader of the Scottish Labour Party in 2014.
  Dugdale was elected Leader of the Scottish Labour Party in the 2015 Scottish Labour Party leadership election. She led Scottish Labour into the 2016 Scottish Parliament election, where the party finished third behind the Scottish National Party and Scottish Conservatives and Dugdale failed to be elected to the Edinburgh Eastern constituency, once again being elected on the Lothian regional list.
context_section_description: During the 2015 leadership election campaign, Dugdale said she would want to end the charitable status of private schools in Scotland which gives them tax breaks, a policy in her opinion unfair to state schools. In a July 2015 televised leadership debate, she said it was wrong the vast majority of the 232 Labour MPs abstained on the Conservative government's Welfare Reform and Work Bill in a second reading vote in the House of Commons. Following the resignation of Lord John Sewel on 28 July 2015, she said the House of Lords should no longer be an unelected chamber and should be moved to Glasgow. She won the leadership on 15 August, defeating Ken Macintosh.
  During an August 2015 interview with The Guardian, Dugdale refused to publicly say who out of the four candidates in the UK Labour Party leadership election she supported, but did express serious doubts as to whether Jeremy Corbyn could ever become Prime Minister. After Corbyn had been elected as Leader of the Labour Party on 13 September, she revealed for the first time, on BBC Question Time on 30 October, she had voted for Yvette Cooper.
  Dugdale led Scottish Labour into the 2016 Scottish Parliament election. Dugdale wanted to re-affirm Scottish Labour's core beliefs and convey to the electorate what the party stood for. She focused her campaign on a proposal to increase income tax to tackle underfunding of services by the Scottish National Party government, particularly in education. Meanwhile, the Scottish Conservatives' ambitions were to oppose Scottish independence and push Ruth Davidson as an effective leader opposed to the SNP's governmental agenda. The results put Scottish Labour behind both the SNP and Scottish Conservatives, with the party falling into third place from second. The party made a net loss of 12 constituency seats, gaining only one and holding another two, but retained 21 of its 22 regional seats which assign additional members to address imbalance in constituency results. Dugdale was once again returned as an additional member for the Lothian region, having failed to win the Edinburgh Eastern constituency from the SNP by 5,087 votes.
  On 29 June 2016, Dugdale called for Jeremy Corbyn to resign from his position as Leader of the Labour Party, after 174-to-40 Labour MPs voted no-confidence in his leadership. She said when 80% of his own MPs no longer supported him, Corbyn could not properly function as Labour leader or Leader of the Opposition in parliament, nor could he form a potential alternative government. On 22 August, she declared her support for Owen Smith in the 2016 Labour Party leadership election but also said her position would remain tenable were Corbyn to win re-election. After Corbyn won the leadership election, she first said that this made the Labour Party unelectable, then stated the opposite.
  Dugdale was Leader of the Scottish Labour Party during the 2017 general election. In the previous general election in 2015, the party lost 40 of its 41 seats in what was a landslide victory for the SNP, who won 56 of the 59 seats in Scotland. Nicola Sturgeon based the 2017 SNP campaign on a promise to seek a second Scottish independence referendum with the aim of keeping an independent Scotland inside the European Union, a referendum Ruth Davidson and the Scottish Conservatives were opposed to. Dugdale again campaigned on what she saw as the need for an income tax increase to tackle education underfunding by the SNP. The results gave Scottish Labour seven seats. In their previously sole seat Edinburgh South, Ian Murray was returned with a super-majority of over 15,000, and the party gained a further six seats from the SNP. However, the party came in third place behind the SNP with 35 seats and Scottish Conservatives with 13.
  On 29 August 2017, Dugdale resigned as leader of Scottish Labour with immediate effect, commenting that it was time to "pass on the baton" to someone else. She opined that her successor needed the "space and time" to prepare for the next Scottish Parliament election in 2021.
caption: Dugdale back in the Scottish Parliament following her defeat in the 2016 election
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