Jenny Young: It can be easy to label the other side as bad people

The former teacher turned Labour MSP for Central Scotland and Lothians West on how she hopes to improve education standards, as told to Louise Wilson

My first month in parliament feels like a whirlwind. Every week I think gosh, how is it Friday? There’s just so much to get to get to grips with but so far, so good. I’m enjoying it.

I love teaching; I didn’t leave it because I was fed up with it. I loved working with young people, but I just felt the system now is not what it was 10 years prior, when I had been at school.

I told the story in my maiden speech of a boy in an S1 French class that I taught in my first year of teaching who couldn’t read English. He had grown up in this country, was a native speaker of the language, but had profound learning difficulties. He was in mainstream education and he wasn’t getting support – some days there was a support system around him, but that wasn’t always the case.

I just thought, what are we doing here? Why does he need to learn the French for ‘pencil sharpener’ if he can’t read in English? It feels like we’ve failed in quite a basic, fundamental, foundational part of his education. Obviously we want to teach modern languages and science and all these different things, but if you can’t read and write what’s the point of the rest of it?

I’m not naively saying to people on the doorstep that I’ve got all the answers and I can fix everything. I realise these things are much more complex and take a lot longer to change than any of us would wish, but I wanted to go a bit further upstream and try and make a difference for our kids.

When I came for a job interview with Michael Marra MSP three years ago, he said ‘what do you want to be doing in 10 years’ time?’ I said, ‘I want to be doing your job.’ A bit precocious for a job interview maybe, but I’d had the idea before and he very much encouraged me and mentored me in these last three years.

Any campaign is a real test of character, however well or badly the polls may be going. As the candidate, it can feel quite personal. Ultimately people are deciding, do they want to vote for the Labour candidate or not? It was a more emotionally taxing experience than I expected – going to people’s doors and not just saying, ‘will you vote for Labour?’ but ‘will you put your trust in me as an individual?’ I felt quite a weighty burden, and rightly so because I think far too many people don’t see it as that.

It was quite distressing for my family to see some of the things that we’d get on social media during the campaign. Face to face very, very few people act like that. That says something about the online world, it does distort people’s behaviour. On the doorstep, it was vanishingly rare that people would be horrible to me. I don’t think anyone was actually abusive. They maybe weren’t happy with things and they let me know, but they weren’t threatening me or anything. The online space is very different.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the murder of Jo Cox I’ve secured a member’s debate on the subject and on civility in politics – it’s been something I’ve been really thinking about. As I begin my parliamentary career, what kind of MSP am I going to be?

Even when people aren’t extending the hand of friendship to me, or aren’t being gracious to me, I want to choose to be gracious to them. That’s not to say that I will always achieve that, because nobody does. It’s easy to be idealistic at the start when there’s not really been big fights or anything yet, but I do want to try as much as I can in the cut and thrust of politics to hold on to that, hold on to my values and the person that I am and not get totally like sucked into the deadlock of politics in this place.

The best piece of advice I’ve received is from my mum. She always says, ‘integrity is doing the right thing even when nobody’s looking’. My parents have an interest in politics, they watch the news, but they’re not political people. They were never involved in politics. But they instilled in me and my sister a really strong sense of right and wrong; some of that comes from being Christian. They have a real sense of duty to serving your community and they really raised us to value honesty and integrity.

I have made cross-party friends. The Labour and Liberal Democrat members are sitting side by side, and also there’s quite a few first timers in the Lib Dems as well. I’ve spoken to some of them quite a bit, like David Green and Adam Harley, just really lovely people. Also, I stood in the Bathgate constituency, and the MSP for Bathgate is [the SNP’s] Pauline Stafford. There’s some fundamental areas in which we disagree, but in each of those people I see people with integrity, people who are definitely in this game of politics for the right reasons.

But on the subject of working together, it suits the governing party to say ‘let’s all be friends and let’s all work together’. It is partly the job of the opposition to scrutinise – not to oppose for opposition’s sake, but it is to scrutinise. You can have common humanity and get on with people but in the chamber, in committee, on issues of policy, you will disagree. And that’s good.

We shouldn’t just rubber-stamp everything, because there are things [the SNP] do and have done in the last five and 20 years that have damaged this country. We will oppose those. You can come together and not just pick at things just for the sake of it, but that doesn’t mean – and I think other parties like the Greens fall into this trap – giving the green light to everything.

It can be easy to label the other side as bad people that have bad intent for our country. Sometimes that is true and we have to call that out, absolutely, but I think the majority of representatives in this place are here because they want to make a difference for their communities. They want to make Scotland a better country.