MONICALENNON:LABOURMUST BECLEARWHATWESTANDFOR

MONICA Lennon wants to lead a Labour Party that will make it clear to people what it stands for and who it stands up for.

The Lanarkshire MSP said a new approach is needed to win back support from people in communities where previously supporting Labour would be second nature.

She has mooted the idea of a split from the UK Labour Party and is scathing of the Better Together campaign that she feels lost the party support and respect.

Lennon said her top priority is poverty and that she will work with others to eradicate it.

She has already led a successful campaign on period poverty and says that is a signal of what style of leader she would be.

She told Glasgow Times readers: “I’m standing as a new generation of leader. I believe I bring a fresh approach.

“My style in the Scottish Parliament has been to work hard at solutions. On period poverty, it was successful because it was about working on practical solutions. I was able to reach beyond the Labour Party and trade unions. It was a consensual approach and not tribal.”

The union movement is key to her politics and she has the support of Unite and Unison in the leadership contest.

Women play a big part in her political journey too – reflected in many of the issues she highlights. One influential figure is Maria Fyfe, the Glasgow Maryhill MP who died earlier his year, described by Lennon as a “superstar”.

Lennon said: “She made possible for working class women to believe they did belong in the corridors of power and you didn’t just have to look like a man in a suit to get things done.”

Former Cabinet Minister Mo Mowlam is another.

Lennon explained: “Mo Mowlam battled illness but was so committed to achieving peace in Northern Ireland. She genuinely brought people together who were so divided.”

At that time, as a young woman growing up in Lanarkshire, Lennon said it was a typical west of Scotland community where “you could weigh the Labour vote.”

The leadership candidate said over the years the party’s big mistake was “becoming complacent” and “taking that support for granted”.

She said: “People need to know what Scottish Labour stands for.

“For me that is ending child poverty. One in four children in our country live in poverty. That’s a national disgrace and should shame all of us.

“I’ve said my ambition as leader will be to end child poverty. And to do that within a decade and halve it in five years.”

She welcomed the SNP’s Scottish Child Payment, launched at £10 a week, but believes it should be more.

Lennon said: “I think it should be increased to £30 a week in the next parliament term.”

She is of the view that the £90 million for a council tax freeze would be better spent on increasing the Scottish Child Payment.

She has a plan to give unpaid carers – who are disproportionately women – a social security payment equal to the Real Living Wage.

The Scottish and UK it

It can’t just be left to this city to find Equal Pay money

it governments, the MSP said, should shoulder some of the financial burden of the equal pay settlement in Glasgow, which she lays at the door of a Labour administration.

Lennon said: “In Glasgow one of the things we got wrong was the scandal of equal pay. Some bad decisions were made. It shouldn’t have happened.

“We shouldn’t have had a Labour authority hiding behind legal advice. I’m sorry for that. Women were failed by structural inequality and structural sexism.”

However, such is the impact on city finances, she added: “It can’t just be left to the city of Glasgow to find the money. We can’t be punishing the people of Glasgow for the mistakes of the past.”

One of Labour’s biggest challenges is finding a space and being heard in the constitutional debate.

Lennon wants to be distinctly different from the Tories on staying in the UK and feels Labour were duped in the 2014 campaign.

She said: “I do think that the Better Together campaign was damaging.

“I think the Tories used us because we were the boots on the ground.

“They had the money, we had the people and the resource. I just think the Tories saw us coming and took advantage of us and we went along with it.”

She is clear in her opposition to independence, stating: “I don’t believe in independence, It worries me, the damage it would do to the economy and the pain it would cause to the people who are already the most vulnerable and the poorest.”

However, Lennon doesn’t think Labour can stand in the way of a second referendum if people vote for it.

She added: “If we just say to people in Scotland, who might express at the ballot box that they want to have a referendum, and we just tell them that they’re silly to be even thinking about that, and if we take the same line as Boris Johnson and say ‘No you’ve had your referendum’... well, what is the future for Scottish Labour after that? I’m not sure.”

The future is instead about people who need help, Lennon feels.

She explained: “We have to remember who we are in politics for –and why the Labour Party exists in the first place.

“It’s about the people queuing up in George Square for food, the people going to food banks, the women and girls who have not been able to afford period products, the child that doesn’t have an iPad for schooling.”

ANAS Sarwar wants to focus on healing division in a Covid-recovery Scotland, if he becomes the next Scottish Labour leader. The challenges of poverty, education and health, he argues, can’t be tackled if the country comes out of a lockdown and into another battle over independence.

The Glasgow MSP is standing to be leader of his party for the second time after losing out to Richard Leonard three years ago.

He says in that short time he has changed, and that in Scotland now, unity is crucial to recovery and building a better country.

Sarwar told our readers: “I’ve changed in the last few years. Our country has undoubtedly changed and I think our politics needs to change as well.

“I have a record of trying to pull divisive communities together and unite against hate and prejudice in all its forms.

“I think coming through Covid, and some people want to entrench us in the old pre-Covid arguments... people want a leader that is serious about focusing on what unites us rather than divides us.”

He believes priorities must based around dealing with the impact that Covid and the lockdowns have had on people’s lives.

Sarwar said: “We don’t have to go back to divisions. We’ve pulled together as a country in the last year.

“We’ve taken an economic hit sharper than the banking crisis. People are worried about their jobs, about their business, their livelihoods. They are worried about what kind of education their kids are going to get, worried about their cancelled operation and whether they are going to get a cancer diagnosis in time.

“That’s the day-to-day things people care about in our country.”

He said a renewed focus on independence again will not help any of the issues he lists as what matter to people’s lives.

Labour, he argues, must carve a new path away from the “flag-waving” of the SNP and Tories.

The MSP said: “My fear is we are going to go into this election with the Tories doubling down on their army-tank-driving, Union-Jack-waving, chest-besting Unionism on the one hand, and on the other, rather than trying to heal the wounds of their own party and the troubles they’ve got, the SNP doubling down on referendum-now, independence-now, Saltire-waving nationalism.”

The people that will lose out, he added, “are those who I’ve said are worried about jobs, businesses, education and the NHS.

“If you think the priorities for the next five years should be jobs, the economy, the climate emergency, education and health, then the Labour Party is going to put those things first.”

Family, and his experience, have shaped Sarwar’s politics. His father Mohammad Sarwar was Britain’s first Muslim MP, and it brought unwanted attention that has stayed with him.

It is his mother who is his political inspiration and who shapes his politics.

Sarwar said: “I remember when my dad was starting off in politics, aspiring to be Britain’s first Muslim MP, he was getting national media attention in a way a local candidate wouldn’t.

“And he was also getting a lot of attention from the far right.”

He recalls hate mail, threatening phone calls and being followed in cars.

He added: “My mum said walk away these people win.”

He sees similarities in his own children’s experience with their father in the public eye and said it “scares the life out him”.

However, rather than “run away from politics”, he said it “makes him want to run towards it”.

At times he wonders how much progress has actually been made.

“I worry are my kids going to hear the same things I hear now? That scares the life out me,” Sarwar said. if we

“If so, failed.”

He sees increasing poverty and growing inequality as the challenges that need urgent attention in Glasgow.

He said: “If you look at what is happening in our city with queues at food banks, queues for homeless people to get something to eat...

“The number of homeless people you see out on the street. The number who are unemployed, the number having to turn in greater numbers to welfare support and to citizens’ advice, there is a glaring inequality issue in our city and a glaring poverty issue in our city.”

He again stressed the focus on uniting against divisions.

He said: “Just imagine if we had spent the last four or eight years obsessed with ending poverty like we’ve been obsessed with independence or Brexit. How different could things be?”

The cuts to local government budgets, he said, are incompatible then my generation has with improving the services people rely on.

He added: “Glasgow has had its budget decimated over the last decade. You have a government, both at a UK level and particularly in Scotland, that talks about ending poverty and inequality and ending austerity but they are delivering austerity by chocking local budgets.”

The Labour domination of the city electorally has been replaced with the SNP, and he accused them of standing by in silence.

Sarwar said: “I find it unforgivable that our elected politicians particularly from the governing party, think, as SNP councillors, MSPs or MPs, their job is to work for the SNP, not to work for the people that elected them.

“Year after year our city’s budget has been decimated and year after year SNP MSPs and MPs and councillors have not been brave enough to say a single word about it.”

He believes local government services are essential to improving lives and need to be funded accordingly.

The MSP said: “The ambition we set ourselves in education, unless you fund local government properly, you’re not going to achieve them.

“If you are serious about ending child poverty, unless you fund local government properly, you’re not going to be able to provide the extra support people need.”

If he wins the leadership contest, Sarwar will lead Labour into the election in May – but he said the job is much more about the longer term.

Sarwar said: “Right now, if you look at the polls, we are literally fighting for our survival – polls suggest we could lose seats.

“I would love for us to win the election but I’m a realist so we have to survive and come through and build and be a serious and credible opposition.

“We’ve got a job to use the eight weeks to pull our party together and establish ourselves as a credible opposition, then use the five years for that re-building programme to be a credible alternative.”

Look at the queues for food banks in our city