Scotland “cannot afford” to enter a third decade with the SNP in charge at Holyrood, Labour’s Ian Murray has insisted.
Speaking at the Scottish Labour conference in Glasgow on Friday, the Scottish Secretary said the country needs a fresh start with Anas Sarwar installed as first minister.
The SNP has been in power in Scotland since 2007 and currently leads in the polls ahead of next year’s Holyrood election, but Mr Murray said: “Scotland desperately needs a new direction.”
Noting Sir Tony Blair was still prime minister and the iPhone had not yet been launched in the UK when the SNP first came into Government, the Labour MP said Scotland needs “new energy and vision, to lead the government and the country into the 2030s”.
He branded John Swinney a “failing First Minister at the heart of a failing Government”, and said the SNP leader “simply belongs to a different era”.
Calling for Mr Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, to be the next first minister, Mr Murray said Scotland “needs a leader with the courage to tear up a broken model and reform our public services”.
He added: “Seriously conference, Scotland simply cannot afford to enter a third decade of the SNP.”
Mr Murray accepted voters across the UK have “every right” to be impatient for change under the Labour Government at Westminster.
He also insisted his party must not allow its “positive messages of hope to be drowned out” by its political opponents.
He accepted it “hasn’t been entirely easy” for Labour since the party took power at Westminster in July – with Sir Keir Starmer’s Government having come under fire over decisions such as the ending of the universal winter fuel payment and the failure to compensate women who lost out because of changes to the state pension age.
Mr Murray noted: “Every Labour government in history has inherited a bleak economic legacy and has had to sort it out.”
But he went on to claim no previous government had “faced the same degree of economic and industrial carnage left behind by the Tories”.
With some voters disillusioned with the party in power, Mr Murray accepted “the public are impatient for change”, adding: “They have every right to be.
“I share that impatience and I am eager to get on and deliver our plan for change.
“But that plan would have failed if we didn’t first fix the foundations of our economy first.”
Labour returned 37 MPs from Scotland in July’s general election, up from just one in 2019, and Mr Murray insisted he and his colleagues in the Commons are “working day in, day out to bring change to Scotland”.
He added they need to be “confident in shouting about that change”, saying: “We must not allow our positive messages of hope to be drowned out, as our opponents intend.”
He hailed measures such as the creation of GB Energy as being amongst the “hallmarks of a Labour Government”.
Published: by Radio NewsHub
