John Park, Labour’s campaign manager for the Scottish elections and shadow minister for the economy and skills, writes exclusively for Left Foot Forward on Labour's vision for Scotland.
John Park, Labour’s campaign manager for the Scottish elections and shadow minister for the economy and skills, writes exclusively for Left Foot Forward on Labour’s vision for Scotland; John is standing for Labour in the regional vote for Mid Scotland and Fife
The last time that Labour fought an election for the Scottish parliament, we were in government in Westminster and at Holyrood. This time around, we are in opposition in both parliaments – a first. We have learnt the lessons of our defeat in 2007. We’ve listened to people in Scotland and we have understood the frustration that people have about politicians who seem to promise everything, then let everyone down.
That’s why a key feature of our campaign is an unrelenting focus on the things that matter to ordinary Scots. Our commitments are things that will improve people’s lives and prospects every day. Together, they add up to a vision of Scotland that is modern, ambitious and makes sure that everyone gets on.
I wanted to write here to give people an idea of what we are campaigning for. If you want the full manifesto, it’s on our web page (pdf), but I want to give you an idea of our direction of travel, of what we are really about.
Take youth unemployment as an example of what drives us on. I, like many Scots, remember when the Tories left thousands of our young people on the scrapheap with no job to turn to and no way out of a life of little opportunity. So when the Tories came into government and made scrapping the future jobs fund one of their first acts, of course people in Scotland were worried. But in truth, Scotland’s problems didn’t just begin with the election of the Tories last year.
The SNP have been distracted by independence, and on their watch youth unemployment has risen by 350 per cent over two years. People struggle to comprehend the scale of that rise, but there is a real fear that we could sleepwalk into another generation of workers with low skills while many employers struggle to fill places because of skill shortages.
We now have a Tory government at Westminster which is reverting to type and an SNP government in Scotland that is too distracted using the levers of government to promote separation rather than standing up for jobs.
In the face of this, one of our most important pledges to the people of Scotland is to completely abolish youth unemployment by 2015. We’ll bring back the future jobs fund in Scotland and guarantee an apprenticeship to every qualified school-leaver who wants one. That’s a big ask, but we are committed to only pledging what we know we can deliver.
Not only will we abolish youth unemployment, but by building Scotland’s skills base and driving investment into our industries, Labour has set out plans to create 250,000 jobs in the next ten years. We’ll need to do that because the pace of economic change will only increase
We have also pledged to keep building the talents of people through our world class universities. Now, everyone knows that we can’t build a modern and successful Scotland if we put people off from going to university. It’s no surprise that Iain Gray was the first of the main party leaders to sign up to the NUS Scotland election pledges.
We have promised to reform the broken college bursary system, but will now set in place plans to reform university support too.
I know that I have concentrated here mainly on opportunities for Scotland’s young people, but I think that’s a key difference of approach between us and the SNP. Obviously, there are others like knife crime, local taxation and other important areas in our public services.
But the differences on youth unemployment are important to understand, because it’s not that the SNP are in favour of youth unemployment, or that they have plans to tackle it with which we disagree. The fundamental difference between us and the SNP is that they don’t have a plan to create jobs for young people. They don’t have a blueprint to create a modern Scotland where our young people have the opportunity to get on.
We have put a modern and dynamic set of policies to the Scottish people, we have focussed on what really matters and we will keep standing up for Scottish jobs; the voters will decide on May 5th.
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30 Responses to “Vote 2011: Scottish Labour “will keep standing up for Scottish jobs””
Rev. S. Campbell
And can it be that I forgot to mention PFI, the millstone that will drag our children down for decades to come? Labour built hospitals and schools so they could look good at the grand opening ceremonies, but desperately conspired to keep the financial reality off the books and secret from the electorate, because they knew the truth – that every hospital built would actually cost the taxpayer the price of SIX hospitals.
http://www.monbiot.com/2010/11/22/the-uks-odious-debts/
Labour mortgaged all our futures for short-term political gain, nowhere more so than in Scotland where the PFI hospital at Hairmyres will generate unimaginably obscene returns for private investors at next to no risk – hundreds of millions of pounds coming DIRECTLY out of taxpayers’ pockets.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/concern-at-huge-profit-for-firms-behind-pfi-projects-1.879536
And let’s not forget almost a billion pounds wasted by Labour in Edinburgh alone, firstly on insisting (for political reasons) on a new Parliament building which ran £400m over budget, and then on forcing through the £550m trams project, which nobody wanted but was a handy spoiling tactic to prevent the SNP spending the money on dualling the A9, which would have saved dozens of lives a year, been of huge benefit to the tourist economy and massively popular with everyone who used the road, the country’s main north-south trunk route.
Why can it be that great socialist union stalwarts like the late Jimmy Reid and the very-much-still-with-us Tommy Brennan (formerly of the iconic Ravenscraig steelworks, symbol of Thatcher’s destruction of Scottish industry) have abandoned Labour and now support the SNP? It’s because Labour have betrayed all the values of the left, and now sit (according to the independent politicalcompass.org) far to the right of centre. Of the four main parties contesting the Holyrood election, only the SNP are to be found anywhere on the left.
http://www.politicalcompass.org/ukparties2010
In Scotland, Labour often level the smear “Tartan Tories” at the SNP. But the truth is that only one of the major Scottish parties has policies which deliver a positive net match with those of the Conservatives, and it’s not the Nationalists:
http://wosblog.podgamer.com/2011/04/18/who-are-the-tartan-tories/
If we include the Greens, Scotland has two-and-a-half parties of the left, and Labour is none of them. John Park is lying to this site’s readers every bit as much as Labour’s finance and justice spokesman have been embarrassingly caught out lying over the cost of knife crime (citing totally made-up figures of £3bn and £500m which they later admitted to having simply read in a newspaper, when independent monitoring group Straight Statistics calculated the figures – using real, named, official sources – at somewhere closer to £5m.)
If you want the working classes protected as best as is possible from the ConDem cuts, voting for Labour is like cattle voting for the building of a new abattoir. The last time the Tories were in power at Westminster Scotland returned over 50 Labour MPs, and look what a magnificent job they did of protecting the country from Thatcher’s axe.
If Mr Park has any guts, perhaps he will answer the one question that no Scottish Labour apparatchik has ever been able to in the decade I’ve been asking it:
Would you rather Scotland be governed from Westminster by the votes of English Tories, or by whichever party was elected by the voters of an *independent* Scotland?
Rev. S. Campbell
Oops, forgot to include the Straight Statistics links:
http://www.straightstatistics.org/article/it%E2%80%99s-election-time-think-number-big-number
http://www.straightstatistics.org/blog/2011/04/19/newsnight-scotland-tackles-knife-crime-costs
Ed Jacobs
RT @leftfootfwd: Vote 2011: Scottish Labour “will keep standing up for Scottish jobs” http://bit.ly/dSMNMY
John Ruddy
If PFI is so bad, why is the SCottish Futures Trust now telling Angus Council that its new High School in Brechin is to be built using a form of PFI, and not the capital grant that was originally proposed?
Rev. S. Campbell
Given your previous track record of supporting claims with sources and evidence, I’m going to have to wait for you to supply some background on that before commenting. In the meantime, do I take it that you’re happy with the tens of billions of pounds that PFI projects will suck out of the public purse to line the pockets of private companies for the next 20 years?