Mandy Rhodes interviews Iain Gray, the new leader of the Scottish Labour MSPs

1980s Wester Hailes was a dismal example of a post-1960s stab at utopia which spectacularly failed. Houses designed for the temperate climate of North Africa and plopped down in an isolated patch of land to the south-west of Edinburgh, cut off from transport, shopping and the rest of city life was a fairly obvious recipe for disaster, creating a disparate population of Edinburgh which soon became cast adrift from the city’s core. Throw in drugs, HIV, high levels of unemployment, a smattering of socially inept tenants and it soon became what is disparagingly called a ‘sink estate’. Fortunately, Wester Hailes was also home to some very bright, forward-thinking residents and community activists who formed a cohesive group, bound together in clear adversity, with one common goal – to improve the area and reverse the decline. It inevitably became a breeding ground for many of our present-day politicians, activists and yes, even journalists.

Perhaps it is appropriate to devolution that while in the corridors of power at Westminster there is a commonality about which school you went to or what university you attended, in Scotland, it is often which council estate you lived or worked in which affords you that common bond of allegiance.
And there’s nothing like naked injustice to stir the senses, which is perhaps why John Mulvey, Nigel Griffiths, Mark Lazarowicz, Colin Bartie, Susan Dalgety, Mark Smith, Simon Pia, Mel Young, Rab McNeil, Andy Milne, Jim Tough, Murdoch Rodgers and yours truly, to name but a few, trod that common Wester Hailes ground and used the experience to go on and fight the cause in their own inimitable way.
Wester Hailes may still be there, albeit a much improved version, but the legacy of its journey lives on in the people that it spawned. Iain Gray lived in Wester Hailes in the early 1980s and while not all of us wanted that particular badge of honour, his was born of necessity as a newly married, newly qualified teacher, to find somewhere cheap to live. I was already consulting a psychologist about my fear of dogs, who viewed my employment on the local newspaper in an estate where packs of closely related mutts patrolled the streets, as a spot of free behavioural therapy, while for Gray, the Wester Hailes experience left an indelible conviction that social injustice was not something that should be tolerated (my fear of dogs, meanwhile, lives on).
Even though one of his first political battles was perhaps more mundane than Marx – a fight over plastic coverings from common clothes-drying areas – Gray remains refreshingly passionate about the need to level the social playing field and within minutes of being elected, the new leader of the Scottish Labour MSPs nailed his colours to the mast when he said:
“While Alex Salmond was studying the dismal science – economics – in the academic birthplace of Thatcherism, I was studying natural science in the academic home of the Enlightenment.
“While Alex Salmond was an official in the Scottish Office, I was learning to be a teacher in a tough school and a community activist in the biggest council house scheme in Edinburgh.
“While he moved to the Royal Bank of Scotland, I moved to Mozambique and taught for two years in a country, literally, fighting for its life.
“While he spent the 80s and 90s developing the tricks of politics in Westminster, I spent them developing my values working for Oxfam.”
Now while one man’s inequality is another’s leg up the ladder, some may argue that Gray was a bit misguided in highlighting these differences, particularly during an economic downturn but it revealed a fairly fundamental political drive in Gray that has been unwavering since those tentative years in Wester Hailes.
He and his second wife, Gil, may now live in a nice house with a big garden and list growing bonsai trees as a hobby but Gray’s political roots haven’t changed since the day he joined the Labour Party in 1979, having been influenced by his feisty trade unionist grandfather and his own particular political hero who he describes as “a bit of an odd one” because Harold Wilson is not always considered the most charismatic of Labour leaders.
“I was the first person in my family to get the chance to go to university, I wasn’t the first that had the capacity, but I was the first that could even think about doing it, and that was because the likes of Wilson’s government had opened up the universities, so I owe a lot to those Labour governments which is also one of the things I said in my acceptance speech as part of my story.”
But does his story make him a better politician than Salmond?
“I think the differences make me a better politician, because I think what I have had is just a broader experience of the world outside politics.”
I say to Gray that I was disappointed that he took this tack because, at the end of the day, the accusation of politicians not having experience outwith politics or the public sector is normally levelled at Labour and is seen as a negative.
“Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I was talking about myself – I’m saying I spent 19 years doing a couple of different jobs, saw a bit of the world, brought up a family, lived in different places, and I think that’s the experience that I bring to this role. The point that I was making is that our stories are different.”
Gray was elected the new leader of the Labour MSPs – the fifth in eight years – ten days ago and after the event, when it is always so much easier to say these things, commentators were quick to call his victory ‘widely predicted’ or ‘unsurprising’ or even ‘inevitable’ but the reality is that no one really knew who would win. Both Andy Kerr and Cathy Jamieson were strong contenders in a battle that just 12 months previously had attracted just one candidate – Wendy Alexander. Kerr was being ruled out at a fairly early stage for reasons not quite clear, other than he threw his hat into the race fairly late, while Jamieson was seen by some to be the best prospect against the mighty Salmond, who might be exposed as a bully if he tried to harangue the ‘wee Ayrshire wifie’, as opposed to when he did it to Wendy, and no one really cared. However, Gray, the former teacher, aid worker, community activist, politician and special adviser, was seen as the stalking horse, the quiet, more serious candidate who didn’t really come with any baggage and would play with a straight bat. He was duly elected and walked straight into controversy. So, for the record; yes, he knows what he has been elected to do; yes, he knows Gordon Brown is the leader of Labour in the UK including Scotland and he only attended the exclusive George Watson’s College for a year.
He laughs and says that some of the press need to stop inventing rows, go and re-listen to their tape recorders and look again at their research.
“When I was ten, George Watson’s ran an experiment where they poached able youngsters from primary 6, out of the state sector and put them through a scholarship exam and put them into the first year of secondary, so they jumped ahead a year, and that was what happened to me. So I jumped ahead a year, had a scholarship, went to Watson’s but I didn’t feel I fitted in but in the course of that year, my family moved up to Inverness and I had the choice of staying on or going to Inverness and living with my family, so that’s where I went. So yeah, on a CV I always put that I went, I’m not hiding it. I was a scholarship boy for a year, I didn’t like it and I left. End of story.”
Does that mean he is against private schools?
“Well, no. I think it’s one of these things that we kind of live with and I concern myself far more with the quality of schools which most people use – that’s got to be our focus.”
So, talking of focus, Gray inherits a party that was, until recently, still reeling from its historic defeat in the Scottish parliamentary and local elections, a party that is suffering from in-fighting south of the border with Cabinet resignations and an increasingly dodgy-looking PM, a party shocked at its defeat at the Glasgow East by-election and a party facing the prospect of a trouncing in Glenrothes, a party in Scotland that elected Wendy Alexander in an uncontested battle to lead them in the Scottish Parliament and who then resigned, following the fall-out over an illegal donation debacle and a party that is so viciously negative towards the SNP that it is blinded to almost anything else. Why did he want the job and how, when he has just over two years before the next Scottish elections and even less before the next general election, is he going to make a difference?
“I really think there’s a job that needs to be done and I think that I can bring something to that. I think that what we need to do is rebuild conviction and self-belief in Labour in Scotland, we need to develop our policy programme so that it reflects the concerns and the aspirations of the people in a way which resonates with them more than I think we’ve managed to do over the last eighteen months and the third thing I think is, to take the argument and the fight to the SNP. The purpose of it, though, is to try and move back to a position where we’re at least the biggest party in the Scottish Parliament and we can actually implement that policy programme.”
Does he feel that Wendy’s tenure in office damaged the party further?
“I think it was a bad year for the party, but I think the truth is that Wendy was hounded out of office. The final issue which led to her resignation was, to my mind, really a very dubious decision by a standards committee which was acting in a politically partisan way, and I think it’s been demonstrated that they didn’t have the confidence of the Parliament in doing that.”
Did that make him think again about putting himself in the firing line?
“I think if you put yourself forward for this kind of job, then you have to think about some of those consequences, but for me, the prize is greater than the risk. And by ‘the prize’, I don’t mean power, I mean the opportunity, the capacity to actually shape the future of the country, and so I think it’s worth putting up with the downside.
“That said, I do think there is a danger if politics becomes a vocation which people don’t want to participate in because their private lives will be examined or they’ll be pursued and hounded, then I think that’s a very damaging thing for the fabric of society, so it’s unfortunate.
“There’s a difference between the kind of day to day political banter and the kind of thing which Wendy suffered over the last year. I think there’s a qualitative difference. I’m no kind of shrinking violet when it comes to politics, and you’re going to get jibes aimed at you and all the rest of it, you’re going to get people criticising you, but I have to say that I think there is a difference here.
“I’m very proud of this Parliament, and I was a member of the first Scottish Parliament. I was part of the Labour Party which delivered the Scottish Parliament. I co-ordinated the ‘yes/yes’ campaign in the referendum for Labour in the south of Scotland, and all of those things, and I think the Parliament is something that we should be proud of – it’s an instrument, a powerful instrument for progress and social change. I think it’s demonstrated that it can do that: it did it with things like with the adults with incapacity legislation that we put through in the first Parliament, land reform, which Scotland had waited centuries for and that includes the right to roam for Scottish people in their own land. All of those kind of things, – very, very powerful and I do think that the approach Alex Salmond takes to politics in his role as First Minister, and the language that he uses in the Parliament sometimes lets the Parliament down. I’m not po-faced about this and a bit of banter is fine but I really do think that, for example, if he chooses to make up nicknames for his political opponents and uses that to score political points, I just don’t think that’s the kind of approach that a First Minister should take. A First Minister does represent Scotland and I don’t think he should be using the kind of jibes that I’ve said are more suited to the playground.
“Yes, the SNP has a core principle that Scotland should be independent, which is an anathema to the Labour Party, but it’s not an anathema to the Labour Party for any kind of weird politically ideological reason – it’s an anathema to the Labour Party because we believe that it would be bad for Scotland and because focusing on it actually holds us back from making the most of the opportunities that we’ve got in the circumstances that we’re in.”
But surely, there must be recognition that the SNP don’t want the worst for Scotland?
“Well, I don’t think that anybody in politics wants the worst for Scotland, but I think the SNP may want the best for Scotland but they are taking some fundamentally wrong decisions. The SNP say that Scotland’s economic process is their key priority and yet they’ve got a core flagship policy of local income tax which every business organisation in Scotland has said would be damaging to Scotland’s economy, and yet they continue to press forward with that.
“They’ve created a hiatus in infrastructure development in Scotland to the point where the Scottish Building Federation have said it’s already reached a critical point – Scotland’s closed for business. And on top of all of that, the constant pursuit of the idea of independence creates an uncertainty for the business environment in Scotland which again, most companies would say privately, causes them problems when they look at investment decisions in Scotland. So I’m not saying the SNP set out to harm Scotland’s economy, but I think that some of the decisions they’re taking actually do have that effect.”
Isn’t that the conundrum of politics – that all of that being said, the SNP is still the party that appears in the poll of polls to be the most popular?
“I think voters don’t make choices on a great big string of policies – I think they make choices on who they think is going to lead the country in the way which is best going to address their concerns, and support their aspirations and I think in 2007, a lot of people – too many from my point of view – believed that the SNP were the ones that would do that, and I suspect a lot of them still feel like that.
“People also like confident and optimistic leadership, and that’s one thing the First Minister doesn’t lack - confidence and that’s served him well. But equally, I think that people are beginning to wonder about some of the things that were promised which haven’t happened and they are beginning to see some of the effects of decisions that are coming through, and they don’t like them. They don’t like class sizes going up and they don’t like to see home-care charges for the elderly going up.”
Well, it sounds as if all Labour needs to do is wait for the SNP implosion and then run in and snatch power so why did Labour lose at the last Scottish elections?
“To be honest with you, as a member of the Holyrood Group, it would be quite an easy thing to say that the defeat in 2007 wasn’t our fault and it was someone else’s but, you know, I don’t think that would be facing reality. I think voters look at parties and say, ‘Who really understands the things that are difficult for me and is actually trying to address that and who best wants the same thing for me as I want for myself?’ – which is about a better house, a safer community, a better school for the kids, a better job, better chances for a job for the family – all of that stuff and I think in 1997, people thought that was Labour and in 2007, a lot of people thought that was going to be the SNP and that wasn’t about Westminster, it was about us.”
Why, when all those aspirations are surely, Labour ideals?
“They are Labour things but in eight years in power in Holyrood, I think maybe we had become too managerial, concerned with governing and perhaps not always thinking about the politics of it, not always winning over communities for the changes that we thought would provide the kind of things that they wanted to see. Maybe in those eight years, Labour had some tremendous achievements, but we sometimes weren’t quick enough to say to ourselves, ‘What’s the next thing?’ And we should have because the electorate are always looking for the next thing, because in your own life, you’re always looking for the next thing. So, for example, we passed the best homelessness legislation anywhere in the world, but then we didn’t build enough houses to make it work, and so we end up setting one person’s housing need against somebody else’s housing need. Or we brought in the bus passes, free bus passes – really popular – for the elderly and disabled, but where I am in East Lothian, and it’s the same all over Scotland, there are lots of communities that just don’t have a decent bus service, so it wasn’t joined up and we always need in politics to be thinking, what’s the next thing, what do we do next and maybe we had lost that a bit and we need to get it back.”
Gray agrees that it has taken his party longer than expected to get over that defeat but has felt that pain on a personal level when he lost his Pentlands seat to the Tories in 2003 and has had time for introspection. What did losing feel like?
“Horrible. Losing anything is horrible. Losing live on television is even worse, but you know, I like to think I handled it in a reasonably dignified fashion, in fact, from what I remember from the evening, we were so determined to keep smiling that Brian Taylor actually commented on it on the radio – he said ‘we don’t understand this… we think the Tories may have won Pentlands, but Iain Gray’s team seems to be smiling broadly’. So we probably went too far. It’s a pretty chastening experience, but you know, what doesn’t kill you makes you strong. What was it Hemingway said? Sometimes after, you’re stronger in the broken places. So I like to think that I did learn my lessons from it and came back stronger

So I like to think that I did learn my lessons from it and came back stronger

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