Inside Track Interview


nothing to do with the cuts, that’s everything to do with short-sighted, politically-driven mismanagement of our economy and so I hold him directly responsible for the fact that today in Scotland, you are more likely to be unemployed than in the rest of the country and less likely to be in work. “I can be the next First Minister and I am


certainly ready for that. I think the country needs leadership and at a time like this, when we can’t get Alex Salmond to bring forward his proposals for how he will deal with the cuts that he says are certainly coming, then it is not good enough. I met council workers in my own constituency during recess and they are really worried about what is going to happen and their own so-called government is saying they don’t know, they don’t know what will happen, don’t know what they will do and it is not good enough. Tere is a leadership vacuum at the moment and I am in the privileged position to be able to fill that but there is not one shred of complacency in the Labour Party or among Labour MSPs.” But sometimes, you have to be careful


what you wish for. Labour has never been in power in Scotland when it has had to think about making savings and with the Scottish budget still to be announced, there is only one certainty, and that is, it won’t be as much as last year or the year before that. For the first time, Labour would not be in a position to spend its way out of a problem. “No, it absolutely can’t be just about spending anymore and I accept that but let’s take literacy, for instance, and we are being told by business people when we talk to them, which I do a great deal, that they will say the fundamental skills are reading, writing, numeracy, and they will say that is wanting – I accept that they were saying it to us in government but we deal with where we are now – and we saw nothing coming from the SNP on this so we set up our own commission and they have shown us that one in five of our young people coming out of our schools have functional literacy and numeracy problems and that is totally unacceptable in the 21st century and they describe what we should do to address that, and we know it can work because two local authorities in Scotland have done this, and have done the kind of things that our commission recommends and they have done it within existing budgets, without requiring more spending, so there’s something where I think this is not about a spending commitment, it is about a focus commitment; to make that a focus of our key education policy and if we can make Scotland the first fully literate nation in the world then that will have the knock-on effect on our prosperity because our businesses will benefit, so it’s not about


“Whoever forms the government after 2011


is going to have to make difficult decisions”


spending, it’s about what is important. “Te way we would free up the building


programme would be by freeing up the funding mechanisms and allow local authorities to use the full range of funding models but I am not going to lie to you because it will still depend on the resources available and they will be less in 2011 than they were in 2007, which is why the SNP administration has to be considered nigh on a crime because when in the best years, when money and funding was available to build schools, to build hospitals and to build transport programmes, they stopped them, cancelled them and stymied them and there is no point in pretending that come 2011 we are back to 2007, we won’t be so a lot of those projects are lost forever. “Whoever forms the government after


2011 is going to have to make difficult decisions and the important thing is what values and principles you bring to that and we would make those choices on labour values and principles, which is about protecting the most vulnerable and investing in those things that help get people back into work because work is just the thing to social justice, it just is, it opens up opportunity and if there is a magic bullet, it is work, it is jobs. “I think you can judge opposition in two ways; in what way have you bested the


government and we have a government that we forced to drop LIT, drop his referendum bill, forced them to deliver on 20,000 apprentices, when the recession hit, we came up with a 15-point recovery plan which the Government adopted and presented as their own, so we have bested them on stopping them doing the things they wanted to but also, by bringing forward things like the climate change targets and making them better, so I think we have been a successful opposition because we have made life hard for Alex Salmond and exposed him but also, if you look at any of the positives, most of them are down to us; the 20,000 apprentices are down to us, the climate change targets are down to us and here is an example from this week – we have a threat to, perhaps, as many as 15,000 jobs because of the aircraft-carrier contracts and on Monday, we are having a meeting to set up a cross-party delegation to protect those contracts and why are we doing that? Because I brought it up at FMQs and forced them to do that. If opposition is about forcing the Government to be better than it really is then we have done pretty well.” While some may question Gray’s


interpretation of events or indeed the lack of any substantive thinking on how he would run Scotland, they couldn’t question his self- belief and that belief has been reflected in recent opinion polls which put Labour way ahead of the SNP, with early predictions that the party will lead the next Scottish Government but in terms of first choice for First Minister, Salmond bests Gray by as much as 60 per cent to 6 per cent. Why is there that disconnect? “I square it by saying, we don’t have a


presidential system here and Alex Salmond may like to act like he is a president but he isn’t, he is the leader of the biggest party and the opinion polls show that if the election was today, that the biggest party would be Labour and I know we have to work hard to make sure that happens in May but I will be looking for people to vote for Labour, for fairness, for social justice, for opportunity and it was Alex Salmond that put his name on the ballot paper, like he was going to be President of Scotland last time and I will leave presidential politics to others.” Te problem is, I remind him, it was a


strategy that worked for Alex Salmond last time… “It might have worked for him on the day


but it hasn’t worked for Scotland and that’s for sure.” And maybe, given the criticism levelled at


the style of government operated by both Blair and Brown, that is one more lesson from Scotland the new Labour leader should consider..


20 September 2010 Holyrood 21


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