Drew Smith MSP

Johann Lamont’s decision to appoint a Shadow Minister for Social Justice is a clear sign of her determination to hold the SNP government to account for their failure to prioritise the fight against poverty and lack of understanding on equalities. It is a signal of Labour’s renewed commitment to a fairer Scotland.

The previous Labour-led Scottish Executive demonstrated through actions as well as words our mission to create a more socially just Scotland.  Much has changed since 1999, and more still since 2007.  Not everything the SNP has done has been wrong, neither is every problem we face the fault of the government of the day.  However, the facts on social justice are blunt.  Under the SNP child poverty is rising again.  Under the SNP, fuel poverty is increasing and they have even cut funding for digital inclusion.

Standing up for minorities and promoting equality are in Labour’s DNA but the outbursts from prominent nationalists, in and out of Parliament, on gay marriage show that too many in the SNP just don’t get it.

Labour can be proud of the focus we placed on social justice and in the early years of devolution it was a thread woven through all areas of work as well as a dedicated ministerial responsibility.  My argument is not that the SNP don’t care about creating a fairer Scotland, it’s just that they don’t prioritise the actions needed to deliver it. As Johann Lamont has quoted ‘Don’t tell my how much you care, show me your budget choices’.  Nicola Sturgeon is Scotland’s Deputy First Minister and has overall responsibility for tackling disadvantage and promoting equality, amongst the many elements of her portfolio.  It isn’t that Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t care, it’s that she cares far more about things which will not make the needed difference to the lives of our people. 

For the SNP the kind of Scotland we want to live in will always play second fiddle to saving Scotland from the country that they do not want to live in.  That’s why the child poverty strategy was published late, and why the national poverty strategy is not being reviewed in light of changed economic circumstances. It’s why the Scottish Government were so slow to engage on welfare reform, with little contingency for the changes coming down the line and no consistency on their approach to the devolved benefits which are their responsibility here, and now.

Flags won’t help the fuel poor and constitutional politics are cold comfort to the children in Scotland whose life chances are held back by the poverty of their parents and the exclusion of the communities in which they live.

This May Labour faces a huge and important challenge, and in 2014 Scots will be asked to make up their mind once and for all on separation. 

In 2011, Labour rightly put jobs and protecting services at the heart of our campaign for Scotland.  But we lost the emotional argument.  Our campaign didn’t speak to real people about their desire for fairness and we didn’t make the argument around creating the more equal society, which we know could benefit us all.  The 2011 result should be remembered as Scottish Labour’s ‘wake up’ election.  We support job creation and decent services but we need to say more about what jobs are for, who will have a chance at getting them and how those jobs could transform lives.   Services aren’t just things that we do to people, they must be shaped by what people want, and need, from life and they should do more than provide safety nets which can become poverty traps.  Empowerment can only be achieved by involving people and allowing the powers of the state and local collective action to be harnessed in support of an overall vision of a fairer country. 

Labour must now be prepared to campaign for fairness again, this means a living wage to tackle low pay but it is also for us to challenge the scandal of excessive pay in every sector of the economy.  The inclusion agenda can be about involving workers in our economy as well as tenants in our housing associations.  By putting a crusade for greater social justice at the heart of our local election campaigns, we could begin the process of reconnecting with those who have become disillusioned with us and that ground work will serve the Union well when the fight on that issue comes.  Scots cannot be presented with only a choice between narrow nationalism and the thing that we already know that they reject, Toryism.  Labour’s message in the run up to the referendum has to be that another Scotland is possible and that possibility is based on the promise of our politics and the preoccupations of real people.

 This article was first published in the Spring 2012 edition of ‘The Citizen’.

I spend a lot of my time at the moment out on the doorsteps of Glasgow talking to Glaswegians about the local council elections which will take place in May.

My aim is to support as many of the Labour candidates for the Council as I can, so campaigning has taken me to almost every part of the City.

The response from most people is much more positive than the newspapers might have you imagine. The biggest issue so far is that May still seems a long way away to a lot of people who need to be a bit more focused on the day-to-day.  So despite the brouhaha we saw over the Glasgow budget and the mud-slinging that the Glasgow SNP indulge in and infer with negativity around the City Council, I think Glasgow’s voters want something different and deserve something a bit more.

When as one woman, answering her door to me near Queen’s Cross, said on her doorstep last week, ‘I haven’t really thought about it, it’s still a way off’, I take it as the cue to talk about where we are as a City, what the Council is actually trying to do to improve things and vitally what our priorities and policies are for the next term.  Then I can simply say, ‘That is where we’re coming from, this is where we want Glasgow to go.  If no one from another party comes to your door before May and gives you a better explanation than simply “the cooncil is rubbish, we would dae better”, then please consider giving your preference for Glasgow Labour when polling day does come.’

Glasgow City Council is award-winning in its approach to social work, particularly work with troublesome kids and persistent offenders.  Not a lot of people know that, but I do because I’ve taken the time to visit the projects and speak to the staff and the service users.  It is often interesting what you can find out if you look beyond the headlines and forget about some of the received wisdom of Scottish politics.

The challenges we face in terms of poverty, worklessnesss, skills, maintaining and upgrading our school, library and community building estate, pot holes, litter, making tenement recycling work and ensuring that sustainability isn’t just an add on in well to do areas. These are substantial issues.  The ones I have listed are themselves just a sample, but in every one, Glasgow Labour is working day on day to answer each.  In contrast the SNP, from the vantage of government, attack the chance of a college place, threaten the housing budget, oppose bus regulation – which would help us get people around this city better and more cheaply – and most recently their own transport minister continues to moot the possibility of train station closures.

When the SNP came to power in Edinburgh, Glasgow’s school building programme stalled.  The rail link to the airport was cancelled and bus fares are rocketing right now at the same time as services are to be cut.

Glasgow has always fared badly under Tory governments but the cuts we have seen in this recession have been made even worse by the SNP’s attacks on the City, and the unfair budget cut to the Council. This is not because they dislike Glasgow – although you do still hear some of their activists elsewhere blame poorer people for poverty, whereas the local ones just tend to say the problems must all be Labour’s doing.  Yet we are told that the SNP need to win in Glasgow to finish Scottish Labour off, so the theory goes, and advance into the Sun-lit uplands of independence.

Well, as Gordon Matheson has said, Glasgow shouldn’t be stepped on, and it isn’t a stepping stone.  If you want to run Glasgow then tell us what you will do, not what you won’t.

Over the past few weeks, Glasgow Labour has set out an already comprehensive policy vision for what we would do if we are given the trust of Glaswegians again.  Our policy platform is firmly rooted in Labour’s historic vision of ‘cradle to grave’ protection for people.

Further investment in support for vulnerable two-year olds, continuation of our nurture classes, scrapped in the rest of Scotland by the SNP.  Alongside Harriet Harman and Johann Lamont, Glasgow Labour have announced the single biggest investment in childcare to be proposed in any part of Scotland.  We have also now pledged to follow-up our rebuilding of the secondary school estate with a guaranteed rebuild or refurbishment of every primary, unfinished business so far as Glasgow Labour Party is concerned – but remember the SNP’s promise back in 2007 to match our school building programme ‘brick for brick’?  Glasgow Labour were the first to advance the Living Wage in Scotland and it is Glasgow Labour who are committed to using the opportunity of the Commonwealth Games, not to flag wave for the next election or referendum, but to provide work and beat the worst of Scotland’s youth unemployment crisis with the Commonwealth Apprentices Scheme, the Commonwealth Jobs Fund and most recently the Commonwealth Graduate Fund.  These make up the ‘The Glasgow Guarantee’ and all are focused on getting young Glaswegians into and staying in work, while the downturn continues to leave so many others behind.

Two weeks ago, in Shettleston, I handed out dozens of Glasgow Labour’s application forms for the Warmth Dividend which offers a £100 fuel payment to every 80-year-old in the city at the same time as the SNP have let the fire go out in the fight against fuel poverty.

And so what of the Glasgow SNP?  People who have been rather uncharitably described in the past in the newspapers by their own former members as more interested in clambering onto pub tables to cry ‘freedom’ than debating ideas.  In this, the big push to win Glasgow, what policy have the SNP announced?  I am a great believer in the saying, ‘If you can fix Glasgow, you can fix Scotland’ and I hope and believe that there must be some in the SNP who agree and want to do just that.  But other than the indications we have from the their budget amendments that they would actually slash spending on schools and the dear green place’s parks, what do we know about their priorities?  Well its still only that Scotsman interview with the SNP’s Glasgow leader:

The Scotsman – How will you get more money for Glasgow?

Alison Hunter – “Independence.”

The Scotsman – If you seize control of the council, are there two or three policies you would be keen to push through?

Alison Hunter – “We haven’t actually thought about that yet.”

There is a difference between a carer who looks after her disabled daughter telling me she hasn’t thought about May yet when I unexpectedly knock upon her door, to the SNP’s own Glasgow leader sitting down to an interview with a national newspaper and saying there is no need to worry about what happens next, so long as the SNP win.  Regardless of whether you support independence or not, it seems clear that the SNP need to put their thinking caps on and find something they actually want to say about Glasgow that isn’t based on hearsay or Labour bashing.  Glasgow is the best city in Scotland, but it is also the biggest challenge in Scotland.

What would the SNP actually do?

It would genuinely seem that they would welcome some suggestions or they might just find that Glasgow is more a step back than a stepping stone, come May.

The Scottish Parliament regularly publishes information on claims made by MSPs against our allowances provisions.  These claims relate to accommodation, staff and office cost as well as travel.  You can search my claims and those of all MSPs using the Scottish Parliament’s online database at http://mspallowances.scottish.parliament.uk.

The information published relates to Quarters 1, 2 and 3 of 2011/12. 

Since my election in May 2011, I have claimed £3,154.

Since being unexpectedly elected to the Scottish Parliament, the most common question I’m asked is, ‘are you actually enjoying it?’.

Over the last few weeks two other questions have arisen almost as frequently, ‘who are you backing?’ and ‘why are you backing them?’

So do I enjoy it?  Well, sometimes.  The opportunity to ask questions and to speak out on issues and for people is a privilege, but in opposition it is a frustration too.  The leadership election is, of course, a new experience for me but one which I hope provides an opportunity to rediscover and reshape our vision through debate and new ideas.

The election of a new leader of the whole Scottish Party is a historic and important choice and one which as a voter in the representatives section of our electoral college I will have a bigger say than most of the thousands of other members and trades unionists who will be taking part in this process.  It is a responsibility that I take very seriously.

The election of a leader is a difficult process for political parties, we must decide between people who we rate highly and necessarily the candidates must identify dividing lines between themselves and others who they regard as friends as well as colleagues.

Simply picking who you like best is not an option.  The only way to make the choice is to return to first principles, the choice must be a political one.

I supported the change in the rules which allows MPs and MEPs to stand, the institution to which the candidates are elected makes no difference to me.  I only want to be sure that the candidate I back, gets the scale of the challenge, understands where we, and Scotland, is at and has the work ethic, commitment and most importantly real drive and desire to do the job.

For me that candidate is the mother of two teenage kids on the Southside of Glasgow, my candidate is Johann Lamont.

Johann has a record.  Since Johann took her oath, in Gaelic, in the Scottish Parliament back in 1999 she has been a tireless campaigner for equality and for social justice, equally she has been a tireless servant of the Labour Party in Parliament, serving as a committee convener, then a minister and most recently as a loyal Deputy Leader.

Johann likes to remind people, however, that she has still been a grassroots activist for change longer than she has been an elected politician.  Speaking to people in the voluntary sector whom Johann has spent so much time supporting and advocating on behalf of, as well as a group of kinship carers I met last week and a group of women members in her own constituency who regard Johann as their friend as well as their MSP, it is clear that Johann has already used the time and opportunity she has been given to the utmost.  If Johann was one of the senior people leaving frontline politics at this time, she would already have a career to look back on of which she and the Labour Party could be proud.  Yet, at yesterday’s leadership hustings Johann said firmly ‘I want to be Leader of the Scottish Labour Party, I want to be the next Labour First Minister’.

Johann’s political life has already been a journey.  Growing up in Anderston and Tiree and her later work as a teacher in Castlemilk encouraged her to believe that social justice, not constitutional change, was what should drive Scottish Labour.  Only later did she come to be convinced that politics in Scotland also has a uniquely Scottish dimension.  As the campaign for home rule gathered pace she was convinced of the fundamentally transformative power of our own Parliament and is as frustrated as I am by the refusal of the SNP to put devolution to work in favour of their approach of belittling Holyrood and arguing that everything that is wrong in Scotland could be put right by separation.

Johann said on BBC Scotland today that the powers of the Parliament was a debate worth having and that no settlement was ever settled for good but she also made clear that to believe that ‘Devo Max’ could be an option in the fundamentally simple question of what country we want our country to be was a flawed approach to the challenge we face.  I agree with Johann.

Johann argued in the first hustings debate that those in our Party who are casting around for a ‘narrative’ are missing the point.  Scottish Labour has a story to tell, and a duty to retell it for as long inequality, injustice and unfairness exist.  That story is intertwined with the story of our nation much more than the campaigners for narrow nationalism like to admit.  Scotland’s hasn’t tired of Labour’s story, any more than it has concluded that the SNP version is definitive.  The fault is not down to the electorate outwith central belt Scotland, voters that Labour simply stopped trying to speak to in recent years.  Or, to the voters in what some called our heartlands who found our attempts at ‘positioning’ cynical and disconnected from their real lives and their ordinary concerns.

Johann gets this.

Leadership nominations are not down to finding the candidate who we think we can best mould to fit our own ideal.  We don’t need a blank canvas, we need a leader.

Johann knows what she thinks on many issues, not through arrogance, but through her method.  She looks at Scotland and simply asks who is missing out, how can life be fairer, what can I do to change things and who will join me.

It’s an approach which I hope I share, and it’s why I’m backing Johann to lead Scottish Labour.

Welcome to Glasgow conference.

Glasgow stands today at a crossroads, the election results in our city last year were a disaster for Scottish Labour. Conference, I felt the pain of our defeat and I thank Charlie Gordon, Frank McAveety, Bill Butler and Pauline McNeill for their service to this city, and our party.

Here in Glasgow we failed to convince the voters that Scottish Labour had the answers to the challenges we face, we failed to convince the voters that we had the vision to meet the ambition of our people.

The problem, conference, is political not organisational. Changing our rules will not save us.

However, I do believe that this rules conference presents us with an opportunity to begin the journey back, not for power’s sake, but for the right to advance our cause.

A new leader, a leader of the whole of our Scottish Party, will challenge us to rise to the task we face.

A leadership election is our opportunity to debate how we wish to articulate our historic and timeless values in a new age. An age of new faces, an age when for the first time, separation on our island is a real possibility, an age in which our Scottish Parliament has matured but in which it is being run by those who belittle its real power to transform, an age in which a new generation must face down a new Tory threat to those institutions and ideas which we value most.

Given the scale of the job we have to do, why wouldn’t we want to involve our whole party in sharing the load? Why would we say the answers must come from politicians in one institution or another, from activists in one part of the country or another, from interest groups in one section of our party or another?

Today could be the first step for Scottish Labour. Perhaps it is a step we should have taken before today, but it is the step that we must take if we are to raise a new voice, a Labour voice, a voice that can speak to, and for Scotland.

Gordon Matheson has already spoken about how we have begun the fightback here in Glasgow. He has my support, and the support of all our Glasgow MSPs. Working together, candidates for the City Council, Glasgow MSPs, Glasgow MPs, Glasgow CLPs, the trades unions, all of our Party, we are determined to put right what went wrong for Labour in Glasgow in May. There is no arrogance in our desire to retain control of this city, there is simply an unwavering commitment to the people, challenges and opportunities of Glasgow.

A new leader, of the whole Party, will as never before have the authority and responsibility to make sure that winning back people’s confidence in next May’s local government elections is the Scottish Labour Party’s first and highest priority.

A new Party leader should, and must mean, all of our representative, at whatever level, and all of our Party – working together.

We cannot divide and win in Glasgow, we cannot divide and put the case for home rule within a strong and mutual union with our neighbours. We cannot divide and settle our arguments with each other in the press, and then expect our message to be taken seriously. We cannot divide in public and then expect the public to give us their trust.

Glasgow Labour is determined not to allow next year’s elections to be a stepping stone to separation but today in Glasgow, Scottish Labour can take the first step towards a new relationship with each other and with the Scottish people.

Conference, I urge you to support the Rule amendment, and I look forward to the final report of the Review Group which I hope will be bold enough to jolt our certainties and radical enough to meet our challenge.

Click here to find out more about the Review of Labour in Scotland and the rules change agreed by Special Conference.

As ever, welcome to my website and my blog about my work as a new Glasgow MSP.

First of all, fair play to Mike Russell, Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning.

One of the few announcements we have had from the Scottish Government over the summer has been Mr Russell’s apology over the SNP’s failure to properly manage teacher numbers.  A recent answer to a parliamentary question of mine made clear how badly handled things have been, with a lost generation of two thousand newly qualified teachers lost to the profession since 2007.  Almost half the teachers qualifying each year have not found a job in a school and the result is a huge waste of talent, as well as public money.

Recess is drawing to a close and I am busy fitting in as many meetings and events as I can before MSPs return to Holyrood on Tuesday 6 September.  Some highlights of the summer for me have included shadowing an unpaid carer and her daughter in Glasgow, meeting with Glasgow 2014 and of course my campaign with Neil Bibby MSP to save the Paddle Steamer Waverley. 

Neil and I have lodged a motion in Parliament to raise awareness of the Waverley’s situation and we have also written to the Scottish Government asking them to meet us to discuss how agencies like Scottish Enterprise and Visit Scotland could help to keep the paddles turning on this iconic ship, the last on the Clyde and one of very few in the world which still trips as she was built to do. You can donate to the Waverley campaign by following this link.

I also spoke out over the summer on the issue of marriage equality, and I was delighted to attend the launch of the Glasgow Youth Council’s  “Love Equally” campaign with my colleague, William Bain MP.

Finally, and again with Neil Bibby, I took some time off to visit Labour in the Welsh Assembly.  Over a few days at Cardiff Bay, Neil and I met with many colleagues in Welsh Labour, the trades unions, the press lobby, Cardiff commentators and the Welsh Assembly Government.  Our visit attracted some attention in the Welsh media and it was clear that there was an interest in events in Scotland too.  The primary purpose of the visit from the point of view of Neil and I was to see what lessons can be learned from Welsh Labour’s electoral success and how the development of devolution in Cardiff, and the policies of the Assembly Government might suggest ideas for what we can do in Scotland.  I intend to write-up my thoughts on the visit, so I’ll post again with some more detail on that soon.

The week ahead sees the first of committee business resuming with a planning day on Tuesday.  Amongst the other meetings in Glasgow this week I’ll be seeing the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce and the RSPB in Kelvingrove Park, which promises variety at least.

Thanks for visiting the website.

Cheers,

Drew

So, I promised to update the site with some of my thoughts about the new job and a week or so into recess seems as good a time to do it as any.

First off, thank you to all the party members, friends, family, organisations, colleagues, and ordinary Glaswegians for the many good wishes.

I will do my best to live up to the responsibility I have been given.

Parliament is an interesting place. So far I’ve learned that meetings and requests for meetings can easily take up all of your time; and secondly, that in this job some things change pretty fast and some things look like they rarely change at all.  The first lesson I will ignore partially by just finding more time to do all the things that are important to me and the second I will take absolute heed of, with the knowledge that the best change comes about because it was intended.

Since being elected, I’ve tried to get to grips with parliamentary procedure, my post bag, and took some time to get to know my colleagues.  I’ve asked some questions that I think the Scottish Government should answer (follow the link on the “In Parliament” pages of this site to see some) and I was gutted to miss one maiden speech on the Labour side, but enjoyed being in the Chamber for all of the others, and most from the other benches.  The different voices in the Scottish Parliament after the election will, if for no other reason, make it a very different place now.

The review of my Party following our election defeat is well underway and there are lots of good ideas, some less good and lots that I am open to persuasion about.

Time will tell which are runners and which should be implemented.

One thing that has struck me from talking to those who lost their seats as well as those who have been, often unexpectedly, elected is that there is some pessimism out there about how, or whether, Scottish Labour will bounce back.

So here’s one prediction which I think is worth considering: Salmond will resign the SNP leadership in this Parliament.

He will do so after the referendum, and it will be either after he has won our national freedom and is standing for Speaker, Queen, Presiding Officer, EU President, UN Secretary General (after that sectarianism debacle, Pope seems unlikely) or contented retirement in Linlithgow with Moira.  Alternatively, he will resign following a decisive, but not embarrassing, vote of confidence in the Union.

First Minister Sturgeon will do well and enjoy the 2014 Games, but she will be unable to account for the failings of the Scottish Government which will have ignored too many of Scotland’s problems for too long while the referendum campaign took precedence.

In contrast, Scottish Labour under the overall leadership of Johann Lamont/Jackie Baillie/Jim Murphy/Ian Murray/Ken Macintosh/Anas Sarwar/Hugh Henry/Jenny Marra/Greg McClymont/Gemma Doyle/Douglas Alexander/Patricia Ferguson/David Martin will be putting the Government under pressure.  The Scottish Party will prioritise the defence of ordinary Scots and bring forward radical ideas in tune with our progressive values which are in harmony with the public mood.  Scots will be looking for Labour optimism after years of Tory cuts and constitutional navel gazing.

I will be doing my bit both inside my Party and by speaking up for Glasgow and the causes I care about.

Scottish Labour will bounce back because, for the people we represent, we have to.

One further thought, the SNP will sensibly decide not to ditch Nicola Sturgeon after one defeat and she will become an impressive leader of a constructive opposition and a Party which will be ready to work with the new Scottish Labour government on the many issues and concerns in which we share Scotland’s interest.

If you are a constituent, (or even if you’re not), get in touch if you would like to know more about my priorities in this term or if you want to share your own with me.  I have been working away since the start of recess and out and about in Glasgow as much as I can.   I’ll take my two weeks in the sunshine before the end of the month and will post again in August.

All the best,

Drew

Here you can find out more about me, how to contact me and information about my regular surgeries.

I was elected to the Scottish Parliament to represent Glasgow Region on 5 May 2011.  Since then I have already spoken in Parliament a number of times and I have been asking many written questions mostly about Glasgow and how it can be better supported but also about many issues which Glaswegians care about.  In addition, I have been working hard to set up my office as a source of advice and information for constituents.

In just a few weeks, I have already responded to around 500 enquires from constituents about a wide range of issues which matter to people in Glasgow.  If you would like to contact me too, then please use this site to do so.

In my maiden speech to the Scottish Parliament I said that I was honoured and humbled to represent Glasgow and I promise to do my best as a new voice for our city.  I look forward to working for you over the next 5 years.

All best wishes,

_

Drew Smith MSP
Glasgow