Scottish Labour was on the brink of civil war last night as the party slipped into third place.
Former MP and Fife list candidate Thomas Docherty branded the party’s manifesto as “self-immolation for dummies”.
In a scathing attack on his own party, Mr Docherty said Labour has gone “further backwards” with an “unambiguously socialist platform”.
His comments were rebuffed by party insiders, one of whom branded former Dunfermline MP Mr Docherty “Mandelson without the intelligence”.
Glasgow’s Anas Sarwar – himself also a former MP – said it was “absolutely not” the time for Scottish Labour to replace party leader Kezia Dugdale, who lost in her constituency of Edinburgh Eastern.
Mr Docherty said she had fought a “brave and dignified” campaign, but said there should be a debate about what the party hoped to achieve under UK party leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
He said: “The swing that we have seen … has been away from Labour and towards the Conservative party.
“And the hard reality the Labour Party faces is that when you stand on a platform that promises to raise taxes for everyone earning over £20,000 – an unambiguously socialist platform that calls for the scrapping of Trident amongst other things and with the UK leader we have, there is a correlation clearly with the fact that our support is going down, perhaps even falling below one in five tonight and the Conservative vote at the same time going up.
“And someone once described – very famously – the 1983 manifesto as the longest suicide note in history and if you bring it up to date, frankly, the manifesto we stood on is self-immolation for dummies.”
