LEONARD’S NO 2 BETTER TOGETHER
Labour leader rules out working with the Tories on IndyRef2 campaign
Richard Leonard has pledged that Labour would not campaign alongside the Tories in any new independence referendum.
The Scottish Labour leader confirmed there would be no joint Better Together 2 under any circumstances.
Leonard has also added his voice to claims the Union could break up if Boris Johnson becomes PM.
He described the Tory leadership hopeful as a “real and present danger” to the United Kingdom.
His message echoes similar statements from a string of senior SNP figures led by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
Leonard said: “My concern is that Boris Johnson represents a new strain of politics, which is an abandonment of conservatism and unionism and the adoption of an English nationalism.
“For that reason, he poses a real and present danger to the United Kingdom and the integrity of the United Kingdom, which is why we have been campaigning in Glasgow this morning, getting across the message that if you want to stay part of the UK, don’t look to the Conservatives.
“You’re going to have to look to Labour, because we are the only party which is defending the integrity of the UK.” He told how he had been “opposed to the Better Together campaign approach the Labour Party took” in the run-up to the 2014 vote – when Scots rejected independence and opted to stay in the UK by 55 per cent to 45 per cent.
Speaking in Motherwell to promote Labour’s policy for a “green industrial revolution”, Leonard said: “I thought there should always have been then an autonomous, distinctive, Labour case made for voting ‘No’ in that referendum, but with a view to reform and change.
“Nothing in my mind has changed about that.”
He added that in the event of a future independence referendum campaign, Labour’s “distinctive” approach would be based on reform of the UK while remaining in the UK.
He said he was not persuaded that there was a case for another referendum – but acknowledged that the appetite for a fresh poll might increase if Johnson was elected prime minister.
Johnson is the overwhelming favourite to win the Conservative Party leadership and become PM following a vote by the party’s members in which he’s standing against Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt.
Meanwhile, in another Labour attack on Johnson, London Mayor Sadiq Khan launched the capital’s Pride parade by condemning his “homophobic language”.
Khan said the Conservative Party leadership favourite had used “the same sort of language” as homophobes who have mistreated LGBT people, and called on him to “realise that language matters”.
Johnson has been criticised for remarks including calling gay men “tank-topped bumboys” in a 1998 Telegraph column unearthed by the Business Insider website.
He also attacked “Labour’s appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools, and all the rest of it”, writing in The Spectator in 2000.