Labour Kirsty: I was raised by the SNP
Poverty campaigner McNeill to run in election
ONE of Scottish Labour’s rising stars has revealed she was “raised by the SNP”.
Former Gordon Brown adviser Kirsty McNeill is hoping to oust the SNP in Midlothian at the general election. The Save the Children executive director has been tipped for a future government job even though she is not yet an MP.
But unlike most other Scottish Labour candidates, much of her childhood was spent at SNP meetings.
She said: “It’s actually quite surprising that I’m running to be a Labour MP. I’m not from a Labour family. I don’t just mean that my family were Yes supporters, although they enthusiastically were.
“I mean they are lifelong SNP members, activists. Everyone that I call auntie who is not my actual auntie is from the SNP. I was raised by the SNP, all of my earliest memories are being plonked under tables at meetings and being told to fold leaflets, being sent to race nights to staff tombola stands.”
McNeill, 43, said Labour’s focus on social class, rather than independence, is what drew her to the party.
She said: “My childhood was very involved in the SNP. It was only when I was a teenager that I realised that we disagree about something really important. The thing that was pulling at my heart... it’s intolerable that we allow poverty to happen and that there’s some people globally who are dying just because they’re too poor to stay alive. Or that there’s some people in Scotland whose life expectancy is so much lower for no reason other than that.
“That fixation of poverty and inequality made me Labour and made me pull apart from my family but not in a hostile way.
McNeill worked in Downing Street from 2007-10 as a special adviser while Brown was PM.
She is now Save the Children’s executive director of Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns.
This is her second time as a general election candidate, having stood in the London constituency of Bermondsey in 2005. She was also a Labour councillor in Southwark from 2006-10.
McNeill aims to unseat SNP Westminster chief whip Owen Thompson at the general election.
Labour held Midlothian from 2017-19 and it is one of the party’s top target seats.
More than a decade on from leaving Westminster, McNeill said she never expected to return: “I’m a lifelong anti-poverty campaigner and that’s what I thought I would do for the rest of my life but the cost-of-living emergency is so profound and that sense of it genuinely being a national emergency has tugged me back.”