Secretary of State for Scotland

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What a year we’ve had. Last year we were saying farewell to Lesley Quinn. We all thought no one could step into her stilettos. But our new general secretary, Colin Smyth, has shown in the last year just how good he is.

We sadly lost John McDougall to mesothelioma, far too soon. He fought against illness and for his constituents till his last. But in Lindsay Roy we’ve got a great new fighter for Fife.

And we’ve got a great leader in the Scottish Parliament – Iain Gray, whose determination to force the SNP to provide new apprenticeships has already shown what a formidable politician he is. And after yesterday’s speech no-one can be in any doubt that he will be our next First Minister.

We have had some setbacks; the result in Glasgow East was a real disappointment. I know we can win the seat back in the next General Election, but the House of Commons would have been a better place, and more importantly the people of the East End would have had a real champion, had Margaret Curran won. I know Margaret will continue to stand up for the east end of Glasgow.

And in council by-election victories in Glasgow, in Edinburgh, in Ayrshire and in Lanarkshire, we have seen that people who want good local representatives will vote Labour when we campaign hard for their votes.

And conference, I want to thank each and every one of you for the work you do – day in, day out, week in, week out – to make the Labour case.

This is my first conference speech as Secretary of State.

Some people have said to me that politics is hard at the moment but I disagree. Politics isn’t tough. Politics is a privilege. You do your best. Make your case and you stand or fall.

Tough is being a mum running a small business struggling to keep her life’s work afloat in the midst of the worst financial crisis in decades.

Tough is what I saw in Motherwell Jobcentre earlier this week. A young dad in his early twenties proudly pushing his six-month old son in the pram as he sheepishly admitted to being out of work for the first time in his life.

Tougher still in another Jobcentre I met a man who was recovering from cancer. He was a lone parent dad with a disabled son. He told me that until the New Deal he was resigned to retirement twenty years before reaching pension age. What stuck in my mind was that he was born the same week as me in the same hospital. He was trying to work for the first time in a decade.

Of course the media sometimes focuses on the relative poverty of my upbringing and contrast it with the relative prosperity of much of the area I now represent. And it’s true that I spent my early years living in a housing scheme just one street outside of my constituency.

It’s a few minutes walk but it can be measured in years. Someone born where I grew up lives 7 years less than someone who lives where I represent. And yet they are only separated by one street and some open fields.

The purpose of talking about this is not to say how fortunate I have been but to say that despite real progress inequalities remain that scar the face of our country.

It shouldn’t matter where you are born. And it breaks my heart to see that still in Scotland today too many people are unable to fulfil their potential. Our party was founded by working people who were denied access to health, education, a decent wage. We have come so far in that the burning injustices which drove Keir Hardie, our first leader, which inspired John Wheatley to create council housing, which led to Aneurin Bevan founding the National Health Service – the most vicious of those inequalities have been tackled. We are a far, far better country for that. But for me the very scale of our achievement in vastly reducing inequality merely makes sharper the injustice of the inequalities that remain.

Conference, most of us grew up in a world in which two great powers – the US and the Soviet Union – faced off against each other. It was a bi polar world. Today we live in a multi-polar world with China re-emerging as a Great Power; the EU developing as an economic model-power; and a Latin America where Argentina, Brazil and Chile are progressive, democratic and growing economies.

In this much more multifaceted world there are far more complex interconnections than there ever were before.

China is dependent on coal from Australia. China burns it and it adds to climate change. Australia suffers from extreme weather events and fires caused by global warming; it is dependent on China joining global action to reduce Green House Gases.

Russia’s oil and gas has become a geopolitical tool in Moscow’s hands against Ukraine which affects more than a dozen European democracies.  

Economic flows grow ever more complex. Remittances – the money sent home by workers in the UK – to Latin America and the Caribbean are larger than Foreign Direct Investment and development aid to those countries.

That interconnectedness is why the world has been rocked by a financial crisis which even the Americans accept was made in America. It has swept the globe in a near instant. A perfect economic storm which is affecting every country, every city and every town. Nowhere is immune from it. Reckless lending in the subprime market in the US was matched by unforgivable banking vandalism here at home.

It is the first recession of the global age. Everywhere around the world the story is the same. Unemployment in the US has risen by nearly 20,000 every day in recent months. In China,  tens of thousands of factories have been shut down and six million workers have returned to rural homes after losing their urban jobs. Rural unemployment now stands at 20 million.

All this is vivid proof of the interdependent world we now live in.

President Obama is emblematic of this. He is the first truly digital President – more people watched his inauguration on the web than watched Kennedy’s on colour TV. With a Kenyan father, an American mother, an upbringing that reached from Indonesia to Hawaii, and political roots in the Mid-West – he is a living symbol of the diversity of the modern age. And in turn his victory was celebrated globally.

The pace of global economic, political and cultural change is set to quicken still in unimagined ways.

Faced with this unprecedented change in a more complicated world internationalism, not narrow nationalism is the only coherent response.

Ours is a politics based on solidarity

Solidarity is Labour’s core value. We will get through this downturn together. No family, no community should be left behind.

So what is the response of the nationalists?

I have made clear over the last six months that my job is to work with anyone to get the best for Scotland. That is why within minutes of being appionted I called the current First Minister after speaking to the next First Minister. I said that we should work together for Scotland. That is what I did last week on the Forth Bridge crossing and will always do.

But the nationalists have a renewed fixation upon a referendum on breaking up Britain. That is a politics of no compromise with today’s economic reality.

The sound of the discordant drumbeat of the constitutional debate from the Scottish Government is not in tune with Scotland’s mood.  

They are putting their Party’s obsession before Scotland’s priorities. Scotland will never forgive those politicians who at this time put their narrow party interest before our Country’s.

By contrast our message is a straight forward one. We are all in this together and we get out of it together. Scotland trades more with England than with all the other 195 countries of the world put together. The United Kingdom is the longest lasting and most successful Union of Nations anywhere in the world. It offers prosperity in good times, and greater security in these more difficult times. Most Scots and most Britons agree.

Remember their Arc of Prosperity? Journalists now dub it the Arc of Insolvency. The nationalists said that Scotland could be like Iceland. They said the UK was holding Scotland back, when in truth it helps keep us strong. Their economics was based on record oil prices and looking enviously to Iceland.

Well the oil price has collapsed from 0 to and tragically Iceland’s economy has fallen even further. Their banks did not have the back up that ours did. They collapsed, while ours have been rescued with £50bn of public money – nearly twice the budget of the Scottish Government. Scotland’s future prosperity cannot be based on oil volatility or Icelandic economics.

The Scottish Government’s own figures show that Scotland separated from the UK would have a substantial budget deficit. But the nationalists say that they can cut taxes, spend more on services and build an oil fund. This isn’t just double counting, it’s spending the same money three times. Scottish families know that you cannot run your home the way the SNP want to run a separated Scotland.

Conference, in today’s world nationalist economics are a fantasy beyond fiction.

But their paper-thin arguments have been protected in the past because they wrapped themselves in the folds of our flag.

And sometimes we have let them do this.

Of course what is most important is the fabric of our society.
In the past we were too reticent about the symbols and emotion of patriotism. And we let the SNP assert that patriotism and separatism were the same thing.

That is, and always has been, a shallow assertion. The Saltire is our flag as much as anybody else’s. I believe that everyone in Scotland – every party in Scotland - has the right to celebrate the Saltire as a symbol of their Scottishness. No political party has a monopoly on patriotism.

There is a patriotic case for the Union and we should be proud to make it. It’s precisely because we love Scotland so much that we do not wish to see it weakened by leaving the rest of UK. Scotland is bigger because of the Union of the four nations of the United Kingdom. We are game-changing players in the UN, EU, NATO, the WTO and the G8. In truth, within the UK, we are probably the most influential small nation on Earth.

Today Scottish Labour is more confident at the intersection between our politics and our patriotism. Iain Gray and I are working together to fuse modern social democratic values with Labour's progressive patriotism. A patriotism that is welcoming, tolerant, open and liberal.

And while for the Labour Party unity is strength, ours is a unity founded on diversity, since uniformity has always been the hallmark of a weak and under-confident country. Scotland is not that country.
    
But of course our openness will be challenged in these difficult times. I want to warn against a rise in recessionary racism. I know that all of our mainstream Parties share this worry.

Very few of you will know this. My family emigrated to South Africa and I spent all my teenage years there. I have never talked about it in a speech before. It was during apartheid and Nelson Mandela was not only imprisoned he was demonised as a banned person. His picture was not allowed to be published.
 
I could see Robben Island as I stood at the bus stop every morning waiting for the “Whites Only” school bus to travel to my racially segregated school.

The primary purpose of the State was racism. I remember having to go to school in cadet uniform as we did military parades on the rugby fields. I left South Africa to avoid compulsory conscription into the South African army.

We all have our own reasons for being Labour. But growing up poor in Glasgow and white in South Africa is what gave me a sense of right and wrong and it is why I’m standing here today.

This is the first recession in a genuinely global labour market. European workers, including Britons have freedom of movement and the UN now estimates that today there are 176 million people living outside the country of their birth. All of this creates additional pressure points that were not so prominent in previous recessions. While understanding people’s fears and insecurities no-one should pander to credit crunch racism. The way through this is about having fair immigration rules, strong border controls and a tolerance towards those whom we welcomed to the UK in better economic times.

That is why, with the support of the trade unions, I was pleased to be joined last month by Scotland’s Faith leaders, Including Cardinal O’Brien and David Lunan, the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, in opposition to recessionary racism. This crisis wasn’t caused by Polish plumbers or Bangladeshi shop workers. It was precipitated by international bankers, some of them very close to home. We should continue to make clear that it is irresponsible bankers on million pound bonuses not the industrious migrant worker on the minimum wage to blame for this financial calamity.

We have had some great speeches this weekend from the Prime Minister and so many others.

I listened to James Purnell’s plans for welfare reform and he is right. It is a shocking statistic that if your on Incapacity Benefit for two years or more you are more likely to die or retire than ever work another day in your life. We should be proud of these reforms as a Labour reform.

We heard from Ed Miliband and the leadership our government is giving on climate change.

And from Harriet Harman plans to reinvigorate the Party. This weekend we have gone from average to the most internet savvy Party in the country.

But the best speech was from young Callum Munro who introduced Iain Gray yesterday. I remember being a young delegate and introducing the late Donald Dewar to speak at Conference. So be careful Callum.

This is the Conference where Scottish Labour put our 2007 election defeat behind us. We have learned the lessons. And we are confident and ready for the tests ahead.

But we won’t allow the remarkable confidence of this weekend to become arrogance. We will leave that to others.

Because no-one owes us a fourth term. We have to re-earn every single vote.

After Glenrothes we have got that wining feeling again.

So let’s go out - together - and win for Scotland.