Katrina Murray: The system makes it easier for some people to be unemployed than to try to work

It’s Easter recess and Katrina Murray is in Edinburgh to meet her mother to go see Calamity Jane at the Festival Theatre. It is a shared passion of theirs, and they have been going to musicals together for years.

Her mother, Catherine, who has been involved in helping stage amateur theatre productions for as long as Murray can remember, and her father, Neil, who was a maths teacher, brought up her and her brother Athel in Markinch. Both Murray and Athel were adopted as babies, and she remembers as a toddler going to pick him up with her parents from social services in Cupar and assuming that’s where babies came from. “It wasn’t until I was six that I realised that babies didn’t come from social work, and that is only because our neighbour was pregnant,” she says. 

Murray and her family are passionate about being involved in public service. Now MP for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch, she spent decades working for NHS Lanarkshire and her brother has just finished a 13-year stint of being a foster carer. 

Murray is clearly emotional as she explains that one of her main passions is ensuring families get “the right start and the right support”. 

“It’s part of the ethos that I have been brought up with. It’s an absolute roll of the dice where you end up. I was very lucky; I got a family with two fantastic parents and a very settled home life in a village on the outside of a new town at a point when those new towns were at a high. Others don’t get that.” 

It’s clear to see Murray has a very close relationship with her family. She recalls the bond with her father, who passed away at the beginning of this year. “My brother arrived at the end of June, which was the beginning of the school holidays, and as my dad was a teacher we were inseparable for those six weeks, we did absolutely everything together. 

“But he went back to work, mum was still very busy with the new baby, and I got sent to nursery and I didn’t react very well to that.” 

However, she says she quickly settled in the following months, and the small family became incredibly tight knit.  

As a child, she describes herself as quite quiet, something she says is “hard to believe now”. She was studious and interested in mathematics and the sciences, which made up most of the Highers that took her to university.  

“My school focused heavily on public speaking, and it was expected every year that the whole school would get involved in writing a speech. That was so valuable, it got me used to talking in front of people. It certainly helped me get ready for 30 years in the trade union movement and where I am now.” 

Murray went on to study maths at Heriot-Watt University, which was “probably not the best decision I’ve made”, she says. Despite that, she fell into a very active student union. “There was a core of really strong people there. The main one that I would highlight is Gary Younge, who used to work for The Guardian and now works for the University of Manchester. 

“Student loans were coming in at that time, first student finance and the poll tax. So, there was a very heightened political atmosphere on a campus which was full of scientists and engineers, the sort of people who wouldn’t normally end up being very political.” 

She says “unlike many politicians” she stayed and got her degree, joking that it wasn’t a very good one. She then did a PDGE to become a maths teacher. In that time, she stayed involved with the NUS and had been a member of the Labour Party for four years, standing in Fife in the council elections in 1995, as a 22-year-old. 

“Looking back on that now, I was way too young for it. And there’s probably something around why it is a lot of women, particularly younger women, tend to do one term and then move on to something else. 

“For me, I needed to concentrate on my career. I was moving to Glasgow and finding different routes, and I got involved in the trade union movement.” 

Murray didn’t complete her probationary period as a teacher; she moved to Glasgow and began working for NHS Lanarkshire as a volunteers manager. At that time, she was one of the first members of the Unison Young Members Forum. 

She says her decades-long involvement in the movement was a great schooling for where she is now. “I was getting to know people and their lives. Often one of the questions I would ask would be ‘how are things at home?’ And you’d find people were caring for family members with illnesses like dementia, children with additional support needs, or living with violent partners.” 

She recalls there being many times when members of the branch committee would be around at someone’s home in the middle of the night to help “get them to safety”. 

“We often had to work with management and get someone out of their role very quickly. And quietly, that was always something the NHS was very good at.” 

Violence against women and girls is an issue Murray has been very vocal on since being elected. In January, she delivered a powerful speech combined with testimony from constituents and her own experience with coercive control, highlighting the profound impact of non-physical abuse.  

She told the Commons: “Violence takes many forms, not just physical or sexual, but emotional, financial and coercive control. Those acts, which do not leave physical bruises, have just as bruising an effect – the effect cutting off the women on the receiving end from their families, from the friends who support them, and not necessarily from their abuser...  

“It is the effect of cutting off women from the people who will provide support and help, and from those who will utter the immortal words, ‘Do you know you are living in an abusive relationship?’... It was a person uttering those words that got me out.” 

She reflects on the conversation that has grown from the TV series Adolescence in recent months. She tells me “this level of extremism is coming” and says while we must ask ourselves how we police it, it’s also about how “we get back to talking about respect”. 

“My dad passed away in January and one of the last conversations that I had with him was as a result of the violence against women and girls debate [in the Commons], where I said it took someone else to say to me ‘you know you are living in a violent relationship’ for me to realise that none of this behaviour was normal and that I had given up too much of myself.  

“He said if he had known anything about it at the time I would have got that sorted out, but that was probably why I didn’t tell him. I just needed him to be him.” 

At the airport after the debate, she said she turned her phone back on and her social media had blown up with people saying thank you for sharing her and her constituents’ experiences.  

Looking at the last nine months since being elected, Murray says she has found it much more beneficial to have “come in older”. 

“[Elected politics] is such a fundamental change in your life. I have so many colleagues who have young children and families that I honestly don’t know how they can do it.  

“Speaking to my friends about where I am now, I joke this is probably my midlife crisis.” 

However, last year’s general election was not the first time Murray stood for Westminster. In 2010, she contested the Dundee East seat, which was ultimately won by Stewart Hosie. Despite having been involved in three elections, she says, “I never really saw myself as an elected politician – I’m an activist, I like the aspects of campaigning”. 

She tells Holyrood she stood in 2010 for reasons other than winning.  

“In the run-up to that election, my marriage had broken up. Everybody had associated me with my ex-husband [former Glasgow City Council leader, Stephen Purcell] and it was about being myself, as an individual. 

“I went into it with no expectation of winning, it was about going out, being me, and re-establishing myself.” 

She looks back on it now, 15 years on from the election, and says, “I’m doing it this way now, and I’ve realised there’s a whole generation of people that have never known me anything other than I am now”. 

Her reasons for standing this time around were largely driven by the pandemic and the impact it had on the NHS, which she saw firsthand. She says “the level of burnout at all levels” has led to a “huge loss of expertise”, while we have an “ageing population” that is not the “healthiest it could be”.  
“I wanted to talk about what my members were facing. There are people in the health service working three jobs because they can’t afford to put food on the table, we have people about to lose their jobs because they’ve been off sick and have exhausted their sick pay whilst waiting for surgery and still have 18 months left on a waiting list, that was the heart of my reasons for standing.” 

She describes her party’s first nine months in government as “a work in progress”. She tells Holyrood she has been going back to the election manifesto regularly and says one of the areas she is focusing on is making it easier for disabled people to work.  

Murray has been critical recently of the Labour government and its welfare reform plans. In March, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced the government plans to tighten eligibility to Personal Independence Payments and will make adjustments to Universal Credit additional health-related payments, which will halve to £50 per week for new claimants from 2026–27 and will be frozen at £97 per week for existing claimants until 2029–30.  
She spoke out publicly and warned that the changes could “harm” constituents and potentially push vulnerable individuals “into deeper poverty.” She emphasised she has “deep worries” about the impact on children, disabled people, and the most vulnerable members of the community, stating that the proposals could lead to far-reaching consequences that harm many people in her constituency. 

“My starting point is everyone should have the ability to live the best life possibly can and have the best possible opportunities,” she says. 

“We’ve medicalised everything. A big part of the disability movement is the social model of disability. We need to be asking what we can do to make things better. And part of my worry is that they are trying to make a new jigsaw puzzle from the pieces that already exist, at the wrong time.” 

She adds: “The system is set up at the moment for some for it to be easier to not be employed than it is to try to work, to fail, and to deal with all the anxiety within that. 

“None of this is easy. And the starting point for this conversation is we can’t continue the way we are. The system is fundamentally broken, not just for disabled people, but for people escaping domestic violence and homelessness as well. Here are so many cliff edges, and it’s all vulnerable people that are affected.”