Labour’s top trio at Westminister – Rachel Reeve, Keith Starmer and Angela Rayner and (above) Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar.
It is an honour and privilege to be here with you today in Dundee. A city with a proud history of industry – from the Jute, Jam and Journalism of the 19th century to the new, thriving video game sector here today.
And a city with a long history of workers fighting for a better future – from the radical agitation of the textile workers in the 1790s to the long fight to save jobs at Timex in the 90s.
This is a city born of the workers movement and one with deep links to my party and to this great movement.
And it is a city that Scottish Labour candidates will do all they can to put at the heart of a future Labour government across the UK.
Friends, throughout the last year Scottish Labour has stood shoulder to shoulder with our allies in the trade union movement in their struggles.
With the STUC, we have forced the Scottish Government back to the drawing board over their botched National Care Service Bill that will do nothing for workers and for care service users.
With the STUC, we have continually kept the pressure on the Scottish Government to deliver the long-delayed and much needed Offshore Training and Skills Passport scheme that our energy workers need.
With the STUC, we have fought for a devolved employment injury benefit system that is truly fit for purpose.
With Scotland’s care unions we have continued to fight for better pay and conditions for care workers – with an aim to deliver £15 an hour for care workers.
With Scotland’s rail unions, we have supported calls for continued caps on fares to keep people on the trains.
With Unite, Scottish Labour has demanded action to save jobs and vital infrastructure at Grangemouth refinery in the face of Government apathy.
With our education unions we have demanded a zero tolerance approach to the scourge of classroom violence that has swept the country and affected teachers, assistants and pupils alike.
With the GMB we have continued to fight to defend the terms and conditions of Scotland’s council workers as brutal austerity cuts from the SNP bite.
This is the Scottish Labour Party that I lead – a party that will always be the political wing of the working people of Scotland.
A party that will always be on your side.
Labour government would support trade unions, such as UNITE, UNISON, GMB and EIS.
Conference, when we gathered here in this hall last year it was already clear that the wheels had fallen off this chaotic and damaging Tory government.
But before I turn to the change that we need to see here in the UK, I must address the situation in Gaza.
Since we last met, we have all been appalled by the violence in the Middle East.
The Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on the seventh of October was the largest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust.
The scenes of death and destruction we witnessed on that day and the attacks on Gaza every day since have left us heartbroken.
The people of Israel and Palestine desperately deserve peace, security and freedom.
But right now, we have a terror organisation, Hamas, who have no interest in peace and Netanyahu’s far right Israeli government that isn’t interested in peace either.
The rhetoric and actions of Netanyahu’s government undermine the cause of peace.
We have seen basic humanitarian supplies not being allowed, thousands of innocent lives lost, the destruction of hospitals and schools.
A mother of four in war turn Gaza – the sales of arms to Israel should stop now.
Conference, I am clear – the UK should not sell arms to Israel if there are breaches of international humanitarian law.
To me, it is clear that the actions of the Israeli forces do not comply with international humanitarian law and therefore the sales of arms to Israel should stop.
We need the violence to end right now.
That means an immediate ceasefire, the immediate release of hostages, immediate access to aid and a pathway to a two-state solution where the people of Palestine and Israel can live in the peace and security they deserve.
Peace, freedom and security for all – these are the values that underpin our movement and they are the values of my Scottish Labour Party.
In the last year we have seen the Tories plumb new depths as they desperately try to cling on to power and defer the inevitable judgement of the people of this country.
After 14 years of cruelty and chaos – no wonder they are running scared from the public.
As Rishi Sunak and his dwindling crew of Tory ministers have watched as the polls widen and widen, they have resorted to stoking the politics of division in a desperate attempt to prevent electoral wipeout.
A party looking after their own skin rather than focusing on the huge challenges facing our country.
And while they seek to divide communities from each other, they also seek to divide us between haves and have-nots.
The SNP want to pretend that Scotland’s voice at this election doesn’t matter – but Congress after 14 years you know the price your members have paid.
Families go without heating for days on end so that they can feed their kids.
Families who are in work, and despite working all the hours God sends, they are still struggling to make ends meet… to pay their mortgages… to pay their energy bills… and to afford food prices.
Rishi Sunak and his Tory government still determined to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Meanwhile what do the Tories spent the last 14 years doing?
Sending refugees to Rwanda.
Encouraging fascist thugs onto the streets.
Legitimising hatred towards LGBT communities.
Banning tents for the homeless.
Attacking workers who stand up to protect their own rights.
Sending billions of taxpayers cash to their cronies in dodgy PPE contracts.
Crashing the economy raising bills for millions while they tried to ram through tax cuts for billionaires.
Slashing funding for frontline services.
So while the SNP pretend that Scotland’s voice doesn’t matter – we know that the most important thing we can do at the general election is to boot the Tories out of Downing Street.
Because, just imagine the unbearable nightmare of five more years of these Tories.
The Terrible Tories – “What an unbearable nightmare,” Anas Sarwar told the conference.
Imagine five more years of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel, Jeremy Hunt, Liz Truss, Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak.
What an unbearable nightmare.
The sooner we get rid of this entire shower of Tories, the better.
Because Congress let me tell you this – the people that are keeping wages down, devastating our public services and holding back our young people’s potential are not coming here on rubber dinghies
They are the people who are sitting around the cabinet table.
This Tory government is whipping up every form of prejudice possible to cling on to power.
And while families face financial ruin they try to pitch community against community.
But they will fail.
The people of Scotland and people across the UK are tired of the politics of division and despair.
They see right through this Tory government and they know what they want – change.
This is a Tory government running scared of an election, running scared of the public and running scared of democracy.
Conference, it’s time for an election to kick this rotten Tory government out of power and into the political wilderness, where they belong.
Change may begin in Downing Street – but workers need a better deal here in Scotland too.
After 17 years of SNP government – the need for change could not be clearer.
And Congress, the SNP like to pretend to they care about the trade union movement.
But the fact is that when it comes to supporting Scotland’s workers, the SNP cares more about photo opportunities than it does about making a difference.
Let me give you an example from just the last few weeks.
In the latest budget the SNP government has betrayed social care workers – slashing £38 million from the Fair Work in Social Care group.
That was money meant to improve the lives of social care workers across Scotland.
It was focussed on improving terms and conditions – on raising pay to decent standards.
But the SNP decided to cut the fund – abandoning those workers.
Just one more example of working people being asked to pay the price for the SNP’s financial chaos and incompetence.
This week, the SNP will face another test as Holyrood votes on my colleague Mark Griffin’s Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill.
This bill – developed with the STUC – is a chance to give sick and disabled workers a voice in Scotland’s injury benefit system and take a step towards delivering the fairer, more compassionate social security system we were promised.
On Thursday, the SNP and the Greens have a decision to make – they can join with the Tories to vote down this important legislation or they can stand with workers and back this bill.
The SNP’s incompetence has consequences – and that is clear across our country.
Almost one in six Scots are on an NHS waiting lists.
Child poverty remains stubbornly high.
The poverty-based attainment gap persists.
Economic inactivity among young people is on the rise.
More and more lives are being needlessly lost to the drug death crisis.
Local authorities having harsh austerity imposed on them by the SNP-Green government leading to cuts to key services.
And our natural renewable energy wealth is being flogged to the foreign companies.
All while government contracts go overseas and bills rise for working Scots.
But faced with the state of Scotland’s public services, what does this tired SNP government decide to do?
It decides to hike taxes on working Scots – nurses, electricians, train drivers – to pay for their own catastrophic failure to grow the economy.
And to make matters worse, while taxes rise for workers the SNP is fighting tooth and nail against a windfall tax on the enormous excess profits of oil and gas giants.
The choice before the SNP was clear – side with hard-pressed workers or side with multinational energy giants.
And they sided with the profiteers not the people.
This is shameful.
If Humza Yousaf thinks a nurse has broader shoulders than Shell and BP, then I do not know what planet he is on.
Conference, everyone in this room believes in the redistribution of wealth.
But while we want to see wealth redistributed and invested from the top into the bottom, the SNP want to use worker’s wealth to pay for government and corporate failure.
This isn’t socialism – this is cronyism.
I promise you this – the Scottish Labour Party I lead will never balance the books on the backs of working people.
The Scottish Labour Party I lead will never make workers pay the price of government failure.
And the Scottish Labour Party I lead will never put corporate interests ahead of those of working people.
Because the Scottish Labour Party I lead will always be on your side – the side of working people.
Conference, the fact is that both the Tories and the SNP are the parties of the past.
Both the Tories and the SNP are out of ideas, out of steam and out of time.
Both the SNP and the Tories are holding Scotland back and telling you that change can’t come.
I can tell you this – change can come and it will come with the election of a UK Labour government.
The election of a Labour government will mean the greatest transfer of wealth and power into the hands of working people and their families with Labour’s New Deal for Working People
Our New Deal – designed hand in hand with our Trade Union colleagues and led by our indomitable Deputy Leader Angela Rayner – will fundamentally re-write the rules of work for millions of workers.
We will scrap exploitative Zero-hours contracts, delivering security in work for millions of workers across the UK and for thousands of workers in Scotland – shamefully the zero-hour capital of Britain under the SNP.
Jackie Baillie MSP and Paul O’Kane MSP on the campaign trail for fair pay now.
We will end fire and rehire, taking this disgraceful practice and the rogue employers that use it head on.
We will abolish the Tories’ shameful anti-strike laws – 40 years on from the Miners’ Strike we will consign Tory anti-trade unionism into the dustbin of history.
We will end the scourge of in-work poverty with a genuine living wage that is extended to all adults.
And expanding access to sick pay for the lowest paid workers, we will make this and parental leave and protection from unfair dismissal day one rights.
Labour’s New Deal for Working People – opposed by the Tories at Westminster and by the SNP at Holyrood.
But soon to be supported and implemented by the people of the UK.
And this is not the only change a Labour government offers –
The SNP and the Tories are both falling over each other to defend the exorbitant excess profits of the oil and gas giants while ignoring oil and gas workers.
Both of them are posting missing while hundreds of jobs are under threat at Grangemouth.
The SNP promised to make Scotland a Saudi Arabia of renewable energy – but all we got was an industrial desert.
That the SNP has still not sorted the ongoing debacle over Offshore Training and Skills Passports shows just how out of touch with our energy sector and workers they are.
It has been 40 years since the miners’ strike, but our governments have still not learned the lessons.
I do not need to tell anyone here about why the fight for coal and the communities that it sustained was so important.
This was a fight for working people – for their jobs, their communities, and their future.
The Scottish Labour party that I lead will always stand beside workers in this fight.
I am proud that it was Scottish Labour that led the fight for the pardon for wrongly arrested and convicted miners in the Scottish parliament.
But that fight for justice is not over – pardons are welcome, but compensation for the wrongs done by Scottish police and judiciary must be made.
And crucially, we must not repeat the mistakes of the past.
So let me say unequivocally – Labour cannot and will not walk away from workers in the transition to net zero.
Miners’ strike — the need to get the Tories out is as great now as it was in 1984.
Just as Thatcher and her hard-right ministers went to war with Scotland’s workers in 1984, so to today is Rishi Sunak and his ministers putting the profits of billionaires before working people.
And the need to get the Tories out is as great now as it was in 1984.
Because it doesn’t have to be like this.
Workers are at the heart of Labour’s transformative green prosperity plan – which will create more jobs, not less; cut bills, not raise them; and provide greater energy security, not less.
Labour will deliver GB energy – a publicly-owned energy generation company based here in Scotland.
Bringing the jobs, opportunities and industries of the future to Scotland.
Unleashing our vast potential as a world-leader in clean energy.
GB energy will drive down bills for millions, deliver energy security in an age of uncertainty and will deliver tens of thousands of new, well-paid jobs.
And as our Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced last week, Labour will deliver £134 million every year to Scotland’s NHS to bring down NHS waiting lists by cracking down on tax evasion by the wealthy.
No longer will the wealthy get away with evading tax through exploiting loopholes.
With Labour they will pay their fair share.
A New Deal for Working People, GB Energy, Economic growth, an end to tax evasion, money for public services and competence at the heart of government – that is the change we are fighting for.
And that is the change that is coming to the UK whether the SNP and the Tories like it or not.
Conference, as we gather here together 40 years on from the miners’ strike the need for a government on the side of working people could not be clearer.
That is what is on offer at this election whenever the Tories pluck up the nerve to call it.
A Labour government with Scottish Labour trade unionist MPs at its core, fighting for their country, community and class at the heart of government.
An end to 17 years of Tory sleaze and failure.
An end to unfair working practices and an end to the politics of despair and division.
Change is coming, conference.
A brighter future awaits the working people of Scotland; let’s seize it!