Marra or Monica? Scottish Labour has bigger questions to answer, writes Gina Davidson

Political parties love the theatre of it all - even if it injects some chaos - because it allows them, if only briefly, to believe that replacing the cast can rescue a faltering production.

Scottish Labour has become particularly adept at this whole ritual. Since losing office in 2007 it has changed leaders with almost bewildering regularity. Each has arrived promising to reconnect with Scotland and the voters. Each has inherited a party convinced that success was surely just one better speech, one sharper campaign away. Each failing.

And here it stands again, choosing a successor after Anas Sarwar's controversial departure to Westminster, elevated to the Lords and taking ministerial office in new Prime Minister Andy Burnham's government. That alone has seen fury erupt in Labour ranks - a reward for failure is how it has been described - and now the party is facing yet another potentially bruising battle for someone to take the helm.

The contest between Monica Lennon and Michael Marra matters, but probably not for the reason many imagine. Scottish Labour's biggest challenge isn't finding another leader, it’s about answering a question it has spent almost two decades avoiding: what is Scottish Labour actually for? That is what they have to find an answer to, not only to convince members to vote for them, but to convince an increasingly uninterested electorate.

Once, the answer was obvious. Labour built Scotland's devolution settlement. It dominated local government, Westminster and Holyrood. It was the natural party of government because it reflected the broad coalition that Scotland imagined itself to be: industrial, collectivist, unionist and socially democratic.

The hard reality is that Scotland no longer exists. Communities that once voted Labour almost on instinct have disappeared. And the constitutional question has changed everything.

Younger progressives who might once have gravitated naturally towards Labour increasingly find the Scottish Greens more radical, the SNP more clear in its reason for being, or they simply see Labour as another cautious establishment party. Older former Labour voters, for whom remaining in the UK is always uppermost in their minds, have turned to the Conservatives at times - and now they also have Reform UK.

Yet much of Scottish Labour continues to behave as though those voters are merely out on temporary loan. They're not. They've left. And winning them back requires more than changing the person behind the podium.

Monica Lennon and Michael Marra embody two distinct instincts inside Scottish Labour. But this leadership battle is not really about them, or the competing political factions within Scottish Labour. Neither candidate lacks ability. Neither lacks intelligence. The problem is that they inherit a party caught between competing identities.

Scottish Labour wants to be proudly Scottish without appearing nationalist. It wants to be closely aligned with the UK Government without being defined by Westminster. It wants to move beyond constitutional politics while operating in a country where constitutional identity still shapes almost every political debate.

That balancing act has become almost impossible, and Sarwar's departure throws that contradiction into sharper relief than ever.

For years Scottish Labour could argue that electing Labour governments in London was the route to progressive change in Scotland. It's an argument which convinced voters in 2024, sick fed up after 14 years of Conservative government in Westminster. But now Labour governs the UK - and it saw Scottish Labour’s worst defeat since devolution just in May.

Keir Starmer was blamed, but that goes only so far. It doesn't answer the underlying question: what in 2026 is Scottish Labour's purpose? And that's the question which should define this contest. Why should Scotland choose Labour in Holyrood? Why should someone who broadly supports progressive politics but has voted SNP for fifteen years believe that Labour once again understands modern Scotland better than its principal rival?

The SNP has retained electoral dominance through turbulent years not because it has always governed brilliantly, not because its politicians are markedly better than Labour’s, but because its supporters understand its defining purpose. Whether they agree or disagree with independence, voters know what the party ultimately seeks to achieve.

But ask ten Labour figures what Scottish Labour's defining mission is today and you will likely receive ten different answers. That lack of clarity has become the party's greatest political weakness, so whoever replaces Sarwar therefore faces a challenge far larger than defeating the SNP at the next election.

They must persuade Scotland that Scottish Labour deserves to exist as a distinct political force. Not as just a "branch office" of a party run in Westminster, and not as a nostalgic reminder of past dominance, but as a movement with its own analysis of Scotland's problems and its own vision for solving them.

This contest then is about identity. For almost twenty years Scottish Labour has searched for the right leader. Perhaps it has been searching for the answer to the wrong question.

The party's future will only be decided if whoever is the new leader can answer, with clarity and conviction, the question Scottish voters have been asking for years. Not who leads Scottish Labour? But why does Scotland need Scottish Labour at all?

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Gina Davidson is LBC's Scotland Political Editor.

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