A former Scottish Labour leader has questioned Anas Sarwar’s rejection of town hall coalitions after May’s council elections.
Kezia Dugdale said the “sanity” of sacrificing the power Labour currently wields locally has “yet to be proven”.
Labour runs various local authorities with other parties, including with the SNP in Fife and Edinburgh and with the Tories in Aberdeen.
Sarwar, who has been leader for over a year, appeared to close the door on similar arrangements in the future.
“My strong view, and this is a discussion we will have with our colleagues in local government and also with the Scottish Executive Committee, is I don’t think we should be doing pacts or deals or coalitions,” he said in January.
In a column in The Times, Dugdale, leader between 2015 and 2017, linked the decision to Labour’s sensitivity over criticism about a pact with the SNP at a Westminster level.
The Tories were widely perceived to have scared voters in England in 2015 about the prospect of the SNP propping up Ed Miliband.
She wrote: "The strategy here is surely to use the local elections as a platform to assert an early general election message: under Anas and Keir [Starmer], Labour doesn’t deal with the SNP. At the next general election, Labour can say with confidence it wouldn’t because it hasn’t.
"In recent years, Labour has developed a strong attack line on the SNP’s centralising instinct. This includes highlighting that Holyrood budgets have been balanced on the back of disproportionate cuts to town hall budgets and therefore local services like schools and social care.
"Anas Sarwar must now have concluded that, while righteous, this line is ineffective."
Dugdale also stated that the SNP/Green Government looked like it was about to centralise local powers under the new National Care Service.
She wrote: “Might Labour blunt its own attacks on this centralisation if it is so set on disempowering its own councillors?
“It has long suited both the SNP and the Conservatives for each to be the other’s main opponent. It’s hard to see how Labour checking out of the administrative game ends this cycle of mutual benefit.
“Starmer and Sarwar have clearly concluded that it’s madness to play the same game as before and expect different results. Yet the sanity of sacrificing what power Labour has left in the quest for greater power tomorrow is yet to be proven.”
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