Yesterday, I kicked off our General Election campaign in Rutherglen.
Like most communities in Scotland, families here are currently represented by the SNP at Westminster.
Margaret Ferrier, like so many of her colleagues, promised to ‘stand up for Scotland’ yet has done nothing but seek division and campaign for an unwanted second independence referendum.
The people of Rutherglen and Hamilton West deserve better.
They deserve a hard-working local MP who will stand up for local families, and that’s what they will get by voting for Ged Killen, our fantastic General Election candidate.
Last week’s council elections proved that only Labour can defeat the SNP in seats such as Rutherglen.
We were a very close second to the Nationalists, with the Tories a distant third.
The same is true in Inverclyde, Midlothian, Glasgow East and elsewhere across the central belt, while Labour is now in pole position in places such as Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill, East Lothian and Edinburgh South.
Tory leader Ruth Davidson has been crowing about last week’s results, claiming her party is in the ascendency from the Borders to the Highlands.
Unfortunately, she forgot about everywhere in between. That’s where only Labour can beat the SNP.
Much has been made about the Tories’ slight revival in Glasgow, but it was Labour which prevented the Nationalists from securing their top priority of a majority on Glasgow Council.
SNP MPs across Glasgow will now be incredibly nervous about their future job prospects – and so they should.
Across Scotland, we defied the experts. Opinion polls had us on 14 per cent, and pundits said we would lose every single council. In fact, we won three, tied with the SNP in the fourth and came within one seat of the Nationalists in North Lanarkshire and West Lothian.
And the SNP lost its majorities in Dundee and Angus, with its overall vote share across Scotland plummeting from 50 per cent in 2015 to 32 per cent. The tide has turned.
And the reason for that is clear. People are fed up with Nicola Sturgeon’s attempt to force another divisive independence referendum on the people of Scotland.
With 4,000 fewer teachers in our schools, and local NHS services facing cuts and closure, people want the Nationalists to focus on the day job.
So as we look ahead to the General Election, the hard, simple truth is that in many of Scotland’s towns and cities, the only way to defeat the SNP is to vote Labour.
At this election, people shouldn’t take the risk of voting SNP. In 2015, Labour warned that a vote for the SNP would help the Tories back into Number Ten. That’s exactly what happened, and now we have the chaos of Brexit and the threat of a second independence referendum.
The only way that people across Scotland can reject this Tory Government and reject the threat of a divisive second independence referendum is to vote Labour on June 8.
This article originally appeared in the Daily Record on 09/05/17
