Politics must work for communities
With Westminster on recess this week, I’ve been able to spend all my time in the constituency, knocking on doors and meeting with just some of the local groups that make the difference to tens of thousands of people around Renfrewshire.
The contrast with the work and sacrifice of so many in our communities trying to help those around them for no reward other than the satisfaction of making a difference, and the circus that has the UK in its grip, couldn’t be clearer.
I met people helping residents get fit and take up active travel through a community bike library, spoke to those supporting survivors of domestic abuse through their most traumatic experiences and met the Renfrewshire Food Train service providing doorstep grocery deliveries to older people.
This is just some of the amazing work that goes on in our community every day of every week, no glamour or attentionseeking, no never-ending drama played out for the news cameras – just ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
Meanwhile, Westminster is continually consumed with gossip and low-grade flyting, anything to take attention away from the fact the UK political system is a shambolic laughing stock, apparently incapable of even trying to tackle the big issues of our time.
Every week seems to see yet another “plot” to unseat Rishi Sunak as the Tory train heads straight for the end of the line at full speed, although the plotters appear as gutless as ever, with a circular firing squad putting itself in place ahead of polling day.
And the latest wheeze from Sir Keir Starmer’s new model Labour party seems to be “reforming” the House of Lords by taking out the hereditary peers – in other words, the ones who inherited their title and wealth from their ancestors ripping off the people umpteen hundred years ago – but allowing them to keep their access to parliament and its restaurants and bars.
This is the politics of cynicism and timidity, not the prospectus of a party who plan to take radical action to fix our broken society.
Politics has to be about values. I believe that the best of our society is found in our communities and in the households across the country that want to see things get better for everyone.
I just won’t accept the cowardly idea that nothing can or should be done to fix the problems we can see all around us.
I won’t accept that the people of Scotland should feel their choice is between a hard-right Tory party and a soft-right Labour party which under Sir Keir seems to have abandoned what’s left of its values. And I won’t accept that those parties have the right to tell us exactly how far democracy should travel – exactly as far as they think it should.
No government gets it right 100 per cent of the time, and the Scottish Government is no exception.
But the direction of travel over the years has been overwhelmingly positive, whether that’s on the groundbreaking Scottish Child Payment or the universal free public services protected in Scotland such as prescriptions, eye tests and university tuition.
We’re doing our best to protect communities and the work going on to protect the people who make them up.
Here in Renfrewshire, we’ve seen council tax frozen and investment in our roads, schools and infrastructure to help meet the challenges of the future.
I want our government and our politicians to be inspired by our communities and to try their best to bring the best of those communities to wider horizons.
Most of all, we need a politics that understands and sees for itself the work going on in our communities day in, day out – and learn from that to build a better society.