Brian Leishman

That is a reasonable, candid and honest assessment, and I agree with it. It is up to us, now that we are in government, to raise living standards and give people faith and hope. If we do that, the spivs and speculators of Reform and Restore will be rejected. So I say to the Minister: can we properly analyse why right-wing parties are convincing people that they are the ones who will turn people’s lives around? They are conning people again, even after the lies that they told about Brexit. Referendums have a vital place in our democracy, but let us acknowledge that they can create uneasy bedfellows and awkward alliances. The impact of that is clear when I look at the fortunes of my Scottish Labour party. I am afraid that Scotland is still dominated by the constitutional question. Painting everyone as either nationalist or Unionist has distracted Scots from the real political issue that affects us: whether you are from Alloa or Aldershot, Stenhousemuir or Stoke, politics is always about class. Class must be put back on the political agenda. Many people back home do not know what we in Scottish Labour now stand for or who we stand with. We must appreciate that campaigning alongside Tories, who did so much damage to Scotland, was seen as a betrayal of our class. If we ever want a Scottish Labour Government in Holyrood again, we must appeal to what was once a large chunk of our Scottish Labour vote, which has found its political home in the Scottish National party. Do we not see that competing for just a small, diminishing Unionist vote is swimming in shallow, crowded waters and will never lead to us being in government again? I am not saying that we should back independence, but we should lay out the democratic route to having another referendum. If we do that, we will be speaking to a huge number of Scots who left us. Who knows? They might even listen to us again. Scotland needs to break the constitutional deadlock and Scottish Labour needs to shift from a position of dogged inflexibility, otherwise we are heading for the irrelevance of perpetual opposition. That would mean we would never be able to put Labour values into a Government that Scotland so desperately needs.