Writing for the Record, MP Zubir Ahmed backs Michael Marra to become the next Scottish Labour leader.
Michael Marra(Image: Getty Images)
Plenty has been written about who’s to blame for Labour’s defeat on May 7. Some of it fair. But a lot of what happened was decided in Westminster.
We spent a year knocking doors in places like Crookston and Mosspark defending some decisions we couldn’t defend to ourselves. Scots can smell it when you struggle with your own lines.
I quit as a health minister four days after the count. I’d only had the job since September and I loved it. I got to the point where I couldn’t sell the arguments I was being handed. I knew we could do more, and do it more quickly.
Several of us Scottish MPs went that week for the same reason. We said Labour needed to move faster and go further, and the party heard it. There’s a different buzz about Andy Burnham and the SNP know it. The Scottish end is harder, because there’s nobody else left to point at.
I’m backing Michael Marra for leader. I know the argument for putting someone from the west in charge. Glasgow is the biggest prize left. Next May’s council elections will be won or lost here. I understand it but I don’t subscribe to it.
We’ve had Glasgow leaders before and the winning feeling didn’t last. Families in this city are closer to the edge than ever, living in hotel rooms because there’s nowhere else for them. We still have a drug death rate that would be a national emergency anywhere else in Europe.
What actually decides Glasgow’s fortunes is a document published in Edinburgh every December that hardly anyone reads. It sets what our council gets. Glasgow has been squeezed by it for 20 years, quietly, a line at a time.
Michael, a trained economist, is Scottish Labour’s finance spokesman. When he attacks the SNP he doesn’t just reach for a superlative. He tells you which year the squeeze started and which fund the money came out of.
That’s why he’s the best street fighter we have. Anyone can be angry at the SNP. Loads of us are. Michael takes their own numbers and walks them back through their own decisions until the minister has nowhere left to stand.
You can watch it happen in the chamber. They get sharp with him in a way they don’t with others. Ministers who love a barney suddenly start shuffling their notes. That’s not a debating trick. It’s what happens when only one of you has kept the receipts.
He comes from Dundee, which carries the same weight as Glasgow on a smaller scale. Kids leaving school with less than their parents did. Drug deaths nobody in charge seems able to stop. He can feel what’s wrong in Pollok because he sees what’s wrong in Lochee. Work that stopped covering the month, and services worn away over 20 years while politicians scored points off each other.
A week on from the racist rioting in the city centre, what I can’t get past is how few of those involved were ideologues.
I said then that our politics has been placard rich and plan poor about this. My own side needs to chew on that too. Reform understands something we’ve been slow to grasp. Frighten people for long enough and someone will turn up to tell them who’s at fault, and it won’t be their landlord, their boss or the social media tech bro who lights the touchpaper.
Michael calls Reform a malignant force that trades on insecurity. He’s right. But saying it doesn’t stop them. What stops them is wages that hold up for the essentials and the odd treat, the GP appointment that comes through when your kid or your parent is unwell, and restoring the sense that everyone is playing by the same rules.
Somebody will make the obvious point, so I’ll make it myself. Michael was in the shadow cabinet that lost. He’s not pretending he was somewhere else. He’s fessing up, which is more than can be said for the general mood in our party, where the defeat appears to have been carried out by persons unknown.
My friends and comrades Monica Lennon and Joe Fagan both deserve better than a nod. Joe has actually held power, running South Lanarkshire, and he knows what it costs. Monica changed the law on period poverty and half the world copied it.
But the job from next month is to pick our movement up with urgency and give our activists the confidence to knock doors with their heads held high.
Our communities have been left threadbare, and we owe them a party that demands more from the people hoarding power and money at Holyrood. We need someone who knows how to follow that money. Michael knows and Michael can.
Zubir Ahmed is Labour MP for Glasgow South West
