Clash over teachers – new First Minister John Swinney and Labour leader Anas Sarwar with Sir Keir Starmer under fire for policy pull back.
By Bill Heaney
In yet another week when Labour politicians found themselves having to divert attention from the policies of Sir Keir Starmer, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said: “I was with the Glasgow City Parents Group and many of the teachers affected yesterday by SNP job cuts. This cut will hit people in the most deprived communities the hardest.”
He added: “The very same working-class kids whose grades John Swinney, as education secretary, attempted to downgrade during the Covid exams scandal.
“Of the teachers I met, one told me they had retrained two years ago and was now going to lose her job.
“Another hasn’t been able to get a permanent contract since he qualified.
“And a third said this doesn’t feel like the thanks and reward the Government promised them coming out of the pandemic.
“John Swinney bears responsibility for the broken finances in our councils and the decimation of our education system.
“Let’s look at John Swinney’s record. As Finance Secretary he broke local finances and slashed the budget for local services.
“As Education Secretary he abandoned teachers, standards declined, the attainment gap widened, Scotland fell in the international league tables and shamefully he downgraded the results of working-class children.
“Now, as First Minister, he is trapped by the past, defending his own record while Scotland’s children pay the price. “
Labour, however, are finding themselves trapped too by Starmer’s failure to confirm policies on pension payments for WASPI women and and lack of commitment to scrapping zero hours contracts if Labour are returned to power at the upcoming General Election.
The teachers were the ones being wooed at Holyrood on Thursday though.
Sarwar told MSPs at John Swinney’s first Question Time: “Scotland once had an education system that was the envy of the world. And I believe we can get there again. But continuity won’t cut it.
“To give our young people the education and opportunities they deserve, and to unlock the huge potential of our nation; Scotland needs fresh leadership, new ideas and change.
“After being at the heart of every SNP failure for the past seventeen years, all John Swinney represents is more of the same.”
MP Natalie Elphicke Defects To Labour From Tories
Natalie Elphicke has become the latest MP to leave the Conservatives and defect to the Labour party causing yet more criticism by Labour left-wingers to be slung at Sir Keir Starmer at Westminster.
The MP for Dover announced on Wednesday that she had left the Tories because the party had “become a byword for incompetence and division”, while Keir Starmer’s Labour party has “changed out of all recognition” since the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, who stood down in 2020.
She becomes the second MP to leave the Tories for Labour in the space of a few weeks after Dan Poulter, the MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, did so late last month. His primary reason for defecting was what he described as the Tory failure on the NHS. Christian Wakeford, the MP for Bury South, crossed the floor from the Conservatives to Labour in 2022.
She will not contest the next general election, however. Labour has already selected Mike Tapp as its candidate in the Kent seat.
In a statement, Elphicke said: “When I was elected in 2019, the Conservative Party occupied the centre ground of British politics.
“Since then, many things have changed. The elected Prime Minister [Boris Johnson] was ousted in a coup led by the unelected Rishi Sunak. Under Rishi Sunak, the Conservatives have become a byword for incompetence and division. The centre ground has been abandoned and key pledges of the 2019 manifesto have been ditched.”
Elphicke, who was elected to the House of Commons in 2019, attacked her former party’s record on stopping illegal immigration, saying the government was “failing to keep our borders safe and secure”.
She also criticised what she described as the government’s “failure to build the homes we need”, as well as homelessness levels, and said that she had been asked by Labour to help advise the party leadership on housing policy.
Speaking at Prime Minister’s Questions, just moments after Elphicke’s defection was announced, Starmer said: “One week a Tory MP who’s also a doctor says the Prime Minister can’t be trusted with the NHS and joins Labour.
“And the next week the Tory MP for Dover on the front line of the small boats crisis, says the Prime Minister cannot be trusted with our borders and joins Labour. What is the point of this failed government staggering on?”
Elphicke’s announcement left MPs on both sides stunned – and some on the Labour benches quite sick when they examined her record on the green Commons benches – not least because she was seen as being further to the right of the Tory party, whereas Poulter was regarded as firmly in the centre-ground.
When figures in Downing Street were informed that she was defecting they initially assumed it to join Reform, the right-wing party led by Richard Tice, PoliticsHome understands.
One Conservative MP told PoliticsHome it was “bonkers”, describing their former colleague as “more right wing than Lee” — a reference to Lee Anderson, the outspoken MP who left the Tories for Reform earlier this year.
Stephen Hammond, the Tory MP for Wimbledon, told Sky News: “If there’s someone who, as much as anyone, has dragged my party away from the centre in the last few years, it’s Natalie.”
MPs on the Labour side said they did not any signs of the defection coming, and some admit privately feeling uneasy about the former Tory sitting on Labour benches. “There’s nothing Natalie has said or done that made us think she could cross to us,” said one shadow minister, who told PoliticsHome they were struggling to “compute” the move.
Tapp, Labour’s general election candidate in Dover, said: “No-one is happier than me when someone is persuaded to come over to the Labour cause. I look forward to her supporting my election to represent Dover and Deal in the next Parliament.”
She is one of numerous Conservative figures to have switched to Labour in the run-up to the next general election.
Richard Walker, the boss of supermarket Iceland, announced earlier this year he had stopped donating to the Conservatives to throw his weight behind Starmer’s party. In February, PoliticsHome revealed that former Tory minister Nick Boles had started advising shadow ministers on preparing for government, and on Tuesday he introduced Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves at a speech in London.
A Conservative party spokesperson said: “The people of Dover and Deal will be disappointed having felt the impact of illegal immigration. They did have an MP who sat with the party fighting to tackle this issue head on, now they have an MP in a Party that has worked to block our plans to tackle illegal immigration 139 times.
“We wish Natalie well as she now has to support Labour’s amnesty for illegal immigrants and one that directly opposes her own views – it was only last year that she penned an article titled ‘Don’t trust Labour on immigration they really want open borders.”