MONICA Lennon, who is running to be Scottish Labour leader, has said her party must accept indyref2 if pro-independence parties win a majority at the Holyrood elections.

Lennon said Yes support could increase if Labour sides with Boris Johnson in refusing to accept the case for another referendum.

READ MORE: What Scottish Labour's leadership candidates have said about independence

Anas Sarwar, who is currently the frontrunner for leader and has previously served as both deputy leader and interim leader, has rejected indyref2 calls. 

But Lennon said it would be "foolish and undemocratic" to deny a vote if pro-independence parties like the SNP win more seats at the Scottish Parliament election in May.

“If people in Scotland through the ballot box express that they want a referendum, it would be foolish and undemocratic to ignore that,” Lennon told the Guardian. 

“It would be irresponsible for anyone to race ahead and force a referendum to happen this year while we’re still in the middle of a pandemic,” she said. “But for those people who want to hide behind Boris Johnson [by rejecting one], then I would say that would be a disaster for Scottish Labour and actually that itself puts the union at risk. I believe the biggest threat to the union is Boris Johnson and the Tories.”

Scottish Labour’s executive has agreed a condensed timescale for the leadership contest, with a winner expected to be announced on February 27.

With the party languishing in the polls ahead of May’s Holyrood election, Labour’s constitutional stance has once again been called into question.

Lennon added: “We’re sounding very grumpy about the constitution,” she said. “We’re telling people it’s irresponsible to be talking about it. But they’re going to talk about it anyway; they’re going to talk about it without us. I’m standing to lead the party because I’m sick and tired of Scottish Labour being left behind, talking to ourselves.”

Lennon, a candidate backed by the party’s left, said more voters would desert Labour and back independence if they saw the party lining up with Boris Johnson by refusing to accept the case for a referendum.

Anas Sarwar, the leadership frontrunner, has rejected calls to back a new referendum, but Lennon said pro-independence parties would have a mandate to hold a fresh vote if they won a majority of Holyrood seats in May’s Scottish elections.

“If people in Scotland through the ballot box express that they want a referendum, it would be foolish and undemocratic to ignore that,” Lennon told the Guardian. One could be held within the five-year lifetime of the next parliament, but not this year, as some SNP leaders have suggested.

“It would be irresponsible for anyone to race ahead and force a referendum to happen this year while we’re still in the middle of a pandemic,” she said. “But for those people who want to hide behind Boris Johnson [by rejecting one], then I would say that would be a disaster for Scottish Labour and actually that itself puts the union at risk. I believe the biggest threat to the union is Boris Johnson and the Tories.”

Lennon leapt to prominence last year after MSPs backed her private member’s bill to make Scotland the first country in the world to provide free period products. Vogue magazine then made her one of 12 women who changed the world in 2020, alongside the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, and Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand.

Elected to Holyrood in 2016, Lennon, a former council planning officer, said Scottish Labour could only win back voters who swung behind the SNP over the past decade if it acknowledged many believed in independence.

The failure to do so after the 2014 independence referendum led to Labour being “wiped out” in the 2015 Westminster election, losing 40 seats. “We’ve been losing people’s trust and confidence for a long time, and it takes a while to put that back together,” she said.

Lennon said she wanted to prevent the SNP and the pro-independence Scottish Greens winning a majority in May. But if that failed and a referendum was organised, Labour should instead campaign for a federal option on the ballot as an alternative to independence, she said.

That could be similar to proposals in a federalism blueprint commissioned by Jeremy Corbyn, the former UK party leader, she said. It advocated replacing the Lords with an elected senate and substantial new powers for the UK’s devolved parliaments and English regions.

“We’re sounding very grumpy about the constitution,” she said. “We’re telling people it’s irresponsible to be talking about it. But they’re going to talk about it anyway; they’re going to talk about it without us. I’m standing to lead the party because I’m sick and tired of Scottish Labour being left behind, talking to ourselves.”

Sarwar is a hardline Unionist and wants to block a second referendum for at least five years.

Speaking as Scottish Labour’s shadow constitution secretary in November, he said the party will go into the 2021 election “clearly” rejecting a referendum during the pandemic.

“You’ve got to recognise that, ultimately, it’s for the people of Scotland to decide their own future,” he said. “That’s a fundamental principle, a democratic principle, one that I support, and one that I hope every political party and every politician would support.”

Sarwar added: “But at the same time as that, we’ve got to recognise that we are not going back to the old arguments of 2014. We are going through a pandemic that has changed the world, and has changed Scotland, and our focus for the next four or five years has to be coming through this pandemic, rebuilding our economy, getting people back into work, fixing our education system that has sadly broken under this Government, and rebuilding our national health service.

“That has got to be the priority for the next four or five years.”

Asked if Labour will oppose a new vote for the entirety of the next parliamentary term, he said “yes”.

Sarwar believes Labour should focus solely on the pandemic, combating the deep recession and attacking Nicola Sturgeon’s domestic policy record.

Lennon said Labour should already be campaigning to devolve employment and drugs legislation to Scotland, so Holyrood could scrap restrictive trade union laws and decriminalise drugs to tackle the country’s record rates of drug deaths.

She said the absence of an alternative has led to the 21 polls in a row showing majority support for independence.

“Because Scottish Labour haven’t been showing that there’s a better way, then people are being asked to respond to opinion polls that give them a binary choice between independence, which involves jumping off a cliff, or staying with what we have, which a majority of people don’t like,” she said.

Last month Lennon said Labour need to show Scots they can “do politics differently”.

In an apparent dig at former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, after another intervention regarding independence, Lennon said if she becomes Scottish Labour leader at the end of next month, she would work to showcase the talents of more people within the party.

READ MORE: Monica Lennon hits out at Labour for ‘wheeling out’ likes of Gordon Brown

She also argued that Labour’s image needs to change – and said that as she had not held a leadership post within the party, she was the best person to achieve this.

The Labour MSP successfully pushed legislation through Holyrood, making Scotland the first country in the world to provide free period products to those who need them, with Lennon persuading the Scottish Government to back her bill, despite ministers’ initial opposition.

She said: “When people are polled on policies they do like Scottish Labour policies – they just don’t like the brand, and that tells me the party’s image has to change.

“I am coming into this as someone with a fresh perspective, who hasn’t been part of the leadership team before and I have shown in Parliament I can be really effective and speak about the issues that matter most to people.”