Labour leadership contest: Tories used us in Better Together says Monica Lennon

The Lanarkshire MSP said a new approach is needed to win back support from people in communities where previously supporting Labour would be second nature.

She has mooted the idea of a split from the UK Labour Party and is scathing of the Better Together campaign that she feels lost the party support and respect.

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Lennon, said her top priority is poverty and that she will work with others to eradicate it.

She has already led a successful campaign on period poverty and says that is a signal of what style of leader she would be.

She said: "I’m standing as a new generation of leader. I believe I bring a fresh approach. My style in the Scottish Parliament has been to work hard at solutions. On period poverty, it was successful because it was about working on practical solutions. I was able to reach beyond the Labour party and trade unions. It was a consensual approach and not tribal.”

The union movement is key to her politics and she has the support of Unite and Unison in the leadership contest.

And women play a big part in her political journey and can be seen in many of the issues she highlights.

Maria Fyfe, the Glasgow Maryhill MP, who died earlier his year, is one, who she said was a “superstar”.

Lennon said: “She made it possible for working class women to believe they did belong in the corridors of power and you didn’t just have to look like a man in a suit to get things done." 

Former Cabinet Minister Mo Mowlam is another.

She said: "Mo Mowlam, battled illness but was so committed to achieving peace in Northern Ireland. She genuinely people together who were so divided.”

At that time, as a young woman growing up in Lanarkshire, Lennon said it was a typical west of Scotland community where “you could weight the Labour vote.”

She said over the years the party’s big mistake was it became complacent and took that support for granted.

She said: “People need to know what Scottish Labour stands for.

“For me that is ending child poverty. One in four children in our country live in poverty. That’s a national disgrace and it should shame all of us.

“I’ve said my ambition as leader will be to end child poverty. And to do that within a decade and halve it in five years."

She welcomed the SNP’s Scottish Child Payment, launched at £10 a week but said it needs to be much more.

For it to have an impact, she said: “I think it should be increased to £30 a week in the next parliament term.” She said the £90m for a council tax freeze would better spent on increasing the Child Payment.

She has a plan to give unpaid carers, who are disproportionately women, a social security payment equal to the real Living Wage.

The Scottish and UK governments, she said, should shoulder some of the financial burden of the equal pay settlement in Glasgow, which she lays at the door of a Labour administration.

Lennon said: “In Glasgow one of the things we got wrong was the scandal of equal pay. Some bad decisions were made. It shouldn’t have happened.

“ We shouldn’t have had a Labour authority hiding behind legal advice. I’m sorry for that. Women were failed by structural inequality and structural sexism.”

However, such is the impact on city finances, she added: “It can’t just be left to the city of Glasgow to find the money. We can’t be punishing the people of Glasgow for the mistakes of the past.

One of Labour’s biggest challenges is finding a space and being heard in the constitutional debate.

She wants to be distinctly different from the Tories on staying in the UK and feels Labour were duped in the 2014 campaign.

She said: “I do think that the Better Together campaign was damaging.

“I think the Tories used us because we were the boots on the ground. They had the money we had the people and the resource. I just think the Tories saw us coming and took advantage of us and we went along with it.”

She is clear in her opposition to independence, stating: “I don’t believe in independence, It worries me that the damage it would do to the economy and the pain it would cause to the people who are already the most vulnerable and he poorest.”

However, she doesn’t think Labour can stand in the way of a second referendum if people vote for it.

Former chancellor Alistair Darling, the chairman of Better Together

She adds: “But if we just say to people in Scotland, who might express at the ballot box that they want to have a referendum, and we just tell them that their silly to be even thinking about that and if we take the same line as Boris Johnson and say ‘No you’ve had your referendum’. Well, what is the future for Scottish Labour after that? I’m not sure.”

The future she said is instead about people who need help.

She added: “We have to remember who we are in politics for a and why the Labour Party exists in the first place.

“It’s about the people queuing up in George Square for food, the people going to food banks, the women and girls who have not been able to afford period products, the child that doesn’t have an I-pad for schooling.”

Read our exclusive interview with Lennon's rival, Anas Sarwar