Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard tells critics he won't quit

Leader says he will stay and fight 2021 Scottish Parliament elections

Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard (Scottish Government via Getty Images)

Richard Leonard has rejected calls from his internal opponents to step down as leader of Scottish Labour, and said he will stay on until after the next set of Scottish Parliament elections.

Mr Leonard said the party's current electoral woes were "part of a long-term trend" and pointed out that he had "inherited" the party in third place and that "it still is in third place".

Asked whether he would step down, the party leader said: "No, I’m not and I think that those people that have been calling this week for me to step down have underestimated both my resolve but also the mandate that I got."

Figures from the right of the Labour party this week called on Mr Leonard, a left-winger, to quit, blaming him for the SNP riding high in the polls and his party's waning fortunes.

Rachel Reeves, an English MP who returned to frontbench politics recently under Keir Starmer, this week called on Mr Leonard to “look at the opinion polls” and “consider his position”.

But the Scottish Labour leader said that "there are some people who really never accepted the result when I was elected" by the party in 2017.

"Prior to my election as the leader, just under three years’ ago, we’d had five leaders of the Scottish Labour party in six years and so the mandate that I was given by the members when they convincingly elected me to be leader, was to campaign on a radical agenda but it was also to be the leader of the Scottish Labour party going into the May 2021 Scottish Parliament elections," he told the broadcaster.

Scottish Labour has just one House of Commons seat, a figure it first arrived at in 2015 when the party lost 40 seats under the leadership of Blairite Jim Murphy. Despite a minor recovery in 2017 to seven seats, it lost them again at the 2019 Westminster election.

At the Scottish parliament level the party has lost seats and votes in every election since the body was set up, starting on 56 MSPs in 1999 and falling to 24 in 2016.

The latest opinion poll by ComRes has Labour on 17 per cent for the next Scottish elections, which are due to be held in May 2021. This would represent a slight fall from its 2016 result under former leader Kezia Dugdale, when the party first fell to third place.