SNP succeeding with ‘unattainable vision’ of independent Scotland claims Sweeney
Paul Sweeney has claimed the SNP are succeeding through offering an “unattainable vision” of an independent Scotland.
Speaking to The Scotsman in the fifth part of our exclusive election video series, On The Holyroad, the former Glasgow North East MP explained Scotland’s governing party offered a clear purpose despite suggesting it was not possible.
Mr Sweeney is now a Labour candidate for the Glasgow Regional next month’s Scottish Parliament election.
He explained: “They’ve got a sense of purpose behind them that is unattainable at the moment.
“Whatever model of an independent Scotland you want, you can have it, however contradictory these objectives are, so it kind of pulls these nefarious bands of people together, whether they're kind of Tories or socialists. They’re all unified by a clear purpose. That’s not something Labour has got.”
Mr Sweeney was speaking at Springburn Winter Gardens, which have lain derelict since 1983. Now trying to restore it, he is a founding member of the Springburn Winter Gardens Trust and hopes to see it stage events in future.
The former MP also had harsh words for the SNP over drug deaths, with Scotland having the highest drugrelated death rate in Europe. He said: The war on drugs as it has been called has failed, and it’s instead a war on the people who use them rather than the criminal elements. What
we’ve seen in Scotland is a really complex picture of, you know, people who use injecting heroin and cocaine but they're also on methadone and they're also taking alcohol so it's a combination of different drugs legal and illegal that's killing people.
“What we've seen most recently is a spike of deaths in the last four years that has been caused by a change to
the NHS prescribing policy on antidepressants. We're not really recognising the reality that, in order to solve this problem, we need to understand where people are actually at and what the problems are. It's not about saying necessarily rehab is going to be a silver bullet or even the safe consumption spaces are going to be a silver bullet. It has got to be everything at once evehe
rywhere. It includes the reality of accepting that prohibition has never worked wherever it's happened and we have to move towards a public health model which totally removes the criminal element to drug consumption and recognise that it's an addiction problem.”
Since losing his seat, Mr Sweeney has been on Universal Credit, an experience
he says has informed his approach to politics.
He explained: “I've been working since I was a teenager, I had a job all through university and then went onto a grad scheme in the shipyards and then worked for Scottish Enterprise and became an MP so I've always had a fairly stable working career.
“I experienced unemployment through my dad when
was made unemployed from the shipyards in the 90s, so I have experienced that and its not getting a decent Christmas because your parents are skint.
"If it can happen to an MP, it can happen to anyone, so maybe we should have a less punitive welfare system.”