Scottish Labour hopefuls make their final pitches in leadership election race

Jim Murphy, Neil Findlay and Sarah Boyack make their final pitches for the least secure job in Scottish politics.

The fickle world of football management probably offers more job security than being Scottish Labour leader these days.

This Saturday we’ll know who’s won the race to try to end a managerial turnover this will be the fifth Labour leader since the SNP took power in 2007 that even billionaire Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich would blush at.

The two frontrunners, Jim Murphy MP and Neil Findlay MSP, have this weekend set out their last gasp pitches before voting closes for Labour’s 13,000 members on Wednesday.

For Murphy his big idea is radical changes to educating Scotland’s poorest youngsters and their mothers, ensuring “working class parents have the chance to have middle class kids”.

In the Findlay camp it is all about creating jobs and building affordable houses, a policy-heavy rehabilitation programme for the party designed “to bring back those traditional Labour voters who have been tempted elsewhere”.

The pair have produced a string of policies which look and feel like traditional Labour ideas, enough to encourage more than 1,000 new members to the party in the past six weeks.

Tiny acorns compared to the 65,000 who have joined the SNP since the referendum but a relatively clean election fight between Findlay, Murphy and Sarah Boyack has given hope to some supporters the party may finally be ready to stop a damaging conveyor belt of internal squabbles.

But then winning is always harder than fighting.

Findlay yesterday made his pitch that he is already in Holyrood and ready to take to the despatch box on December 18 for the first battle with Nicola Sturgeon.

Murphy has a more complicated path to the Scottish parliament if elected leader, raising the prospect of the new deputy expected to be Lothians MSP Kezia Dugdale taking on FMQs duties for up to 18 months.

East Renfrewshire MP Murphy yesterday unveiled plans to raise the performance of the lowest 20% achieving pupils wherever they study in Scotland with a new programme of investment at the 20 worst schools in the country.

The leadership candidate wants to reintroduce Chartered Teacher Status, scrapped by the SNP Government, to incentivise the best teachers to work in the most under performing schools.

He explained: “Too many kids in working class communities get locked out and it has happened for far too long. I am hugely unsettled by it.

“Collectively the political class looks the other way because it is not their kids.”

Murphy highlighted the damning statistics which show just 220 out of the 8,872 children in the poorest fifth of Scotland’s households achieved at least three A-grades at Higher.

By contrast, pupils from the wealthiest fifth of households were more than six times more likely to achieve three A-grades at Higher.

“These poorest kids have not been budged by devolution, it just hasn’t happened,” he added.

“Without getting sanctimonious about it, these kids get one chance and they are being let down. Politics cannot carry on regardless while this happening.

“By the time I finish first time as First Minister I will move these figures.”

Murphy’s plan would also involve doubling the number of teaching assistants in the primary schools that are feeders to the secondary schools and focusing on parents too.

He continued: “A key to this is mothers’ literacy, who is it who is going to read to these weans? It is the mums, they are more regularly around, and the numeracy and literacy levels in some of these families is not strong enough.”

On the chartered status, he said: “Some talented teachers feel like they have go into management to get a career enhancement or to get increases in their wages and I want these talented teachers not to feel they have to go into management but to focus on these 20 schools at a time.”

Mr Murphy said he would take money off Scottish universities, which he claimed banked more in fees from English students than they expected, as well as cash raised with new tax powers, to fund the initiative.

Private schools would also be expected to contribute teaching staff.

Despite opinion polls showing Scottish Labour are going to lose seats in May’s General Election, Murphy took the unusual step of making a prediction his party would “win everything we have and to pick the Liberal’s pocket in one or two places”.

Murphy also revealed he will stand for Holyrood in 2016 even if he doesn’t win the leadership race.

Labour’s health spokesman Findlay has spent his last few days of campaigning concentrating on what he describes as the key question, “can we beat the SNP in the post-referendum climate?”.

He said the party needs to recognise that “many Labour voters don’t feel like they left us, they believe we left them”

He added: “Sharing a platform with our sworn Westminster opponents disorientated many. Others have been tempted by SNP promises on issues where Labour should have been better and done more.

“So my response to how we take on the SNP is quite simply to be more Labour.“

“I’ve spoken to new Labour Party members up and down the country some who voted no, some who voted yes who have joined our Party because of a renewed faith that we can and will be better.

People in Scotland have been frustrated by Labour and have grown sceptical of politicians. We can change that. I will change that.”

Findlay’s message to members over the next few days will be “there is no time to waste” as he tries to persuade those undecided that the time it takes to get Murphy into Holyrood would be damaging to the party’s chances of electoral success.