Labour now has an opportunity never given to our predecessors in the party’s century long history: to be elected for an historic second term. We are proud of what we have achieved so far, but there is still so much to do. In Scotland, more people are in work than for 40 years, unemployment is at a quarter century low, 100,000 Scottish children have been lifted out of poverty and we are working towards the abolition of pensioner poverty.
This election is about that which has always been at the heart of the Labour Party – the battle for social justice – not the constitutional wars of the past. Both other major parties in Scotland want these constitutional conflicts to continue. The SNP are more interested in taking Scotland out of Britain than poverty out of Scotland, and the Tories would bar Scots MPs from certain votes in Westminster by the divisive step of insisting on only English votes for English laws.
The SNP try to parade left-wing credentials. Yet in this General Election, like all others, the real division is between Labour and Tory, not Scotland and England. Labour’s message in Scotland is that every vote for the SNP is a vote that takes Tony Blair one step further from No.10 and William Hague one step closer.
Our mission is that every Scot should be ready for tomorrow’s jobs. That goal is driving our jobs policy in Scotland. This means more training for more people, and more modern apprenticeships to banish forever the scourge of youth unemployment.
Our second priority is tackling child poverty. Every child in Scotland deserves the best start in life. Child Benefit is now at an all time high and the new Children’s Tax Credit will be worth £500 per year per child to hard-working families.
Our third priority is education for all. Already 47 percent of Scottish school leavers have the chance to undertake a higher education qualification. We want to drive this figure up to over one in two of our youngsters. We have created over 40,000 extra places in further education and introduced bursaries to provide more help for students from lower and middle-income families with the cost of living while they are studying.
Our fourth priority is pensioner poverty. We need to be the voice of the voiceless pensioners. That’s why we’ve helped the poorest first. Under this Government, pensions will have gone from £68 per week to £92 per week for our poorest pensioners by April, rising to £100 per week if we are re-elected. Our next priority is to help all those who have saved all their lives by rewarding them with a Pension Credit which will go far up the income scale and provide increases in income greater than the old earning link. These are priorities we share – a partnership for social justice. And the Scottish Parliament is delivering Labour’s priorities for the people of Scotland.
In the first year of its life, the question frequently asked was what difference the Parliament had made to Scotland. That is no longer a question you hear. If you are a Scottish parent, you see your child now going to a school that has extra teachers, new classroom assistants, new computers and a major repair programme now under way. If you are a pensioner in Scotland, you will benefit from free concessionary off-peak bus travel from next year and the promise of the installation of central heating within five years for all pensioners, plus better community care for the elderly.
With a Labour leadership the Parliament are tackling some of the worst blights on Scottish life. In housing, we have promised that, by providing sufficient decent hostel accommodation, no-one will have to sleep rough by 2003. We are trusting Scottish tenants by handing the management of their homes back to the tenants and lifting the burden of housing debt which for too long has stopped real progress in tackling Glasgow’s fundamental housing problems. And on land reform, we had swept away the last vestiges of feudalism in Scottish land law and are shortly launching the Scottish Land Ownership Fund, letting local people take more control of the land on which they live.
The Tories may seem harmless, but they are about fostering apathy. In Scotland, many people don’t want to vote for William Hague, but all they need to do is stay at home, or vote for the SNP, for Labour seats to be in jeopardy.
The SNP are a risk to Scotland’s continuing economic prosperity. They present a risk to Scotland’s economy, a risk to Scotland’s jobs and a risk to Scotland’s public services. Why? Simply because they are incompetent. They base their economic policies on the volatile price of crude oil, they massage their funding deficit calculations, they ignore the costs of divorce, they have no exchange rate policy worth the name, and, throughout, they lack details on how they would try to run the economy.
Whether it be business or pensioners, nobody knows what the SNP would mean for them because the SNP cannot, and will not, set out their stall. The SNP will not tell the Scottish people what their policies mean. They avoid mature debate about priorities in the real world we live in. People have had enough of the uncosted promises they cavalierly make. For each promise there is a price to pay and another budget cut to pay for it.
The fundamental dividing lines in Scottish politics are the same as the rest of the UK: full employment versus mass unemployment, stability versus boom and bust, investment in public services versus cuts and strong communities versus social division. That is the message in Scotland. A strong General Election victory here will lay the groundwork for the 2003 Scottish Parliamentary elections.a