LABOUR in Scotland has gone “backwards” under Jeremy Corbyn’s watch, Owen Smith claimed, as the two rivals for the party crown clashed several times at the Scottish hustings.
Before a lively audience in the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, Mr Smith blanched when some members laughed at the quality of leadership provided by Kezia Dugdale, who is backing the Pontypridd MP.
After some people reacted scornfully at his assertion that the Lothian MSP had done a brilliant job and was a great role model, Mr Smith said: “I’m really worried that I’m hearing a Labour audience laughing and jeering at the leader of Scottish Labour, really worried.”
Mr Corbyn said he had worked with Ms Dugdale before the leadership contest and would do so again if he won. “I will work whoever the[Scottish] leader is and am quite capable of forgetting anything else that’s happened,” he said.
On what went wrong for Scottish Labour, the UK party leader said there had been “very tough challenges” but the party was now growing north of the border. What Scottish Labour had to do was to challenge the SNP Government’s austerity programme and stress the need for the redistribution of power and wealth.
Mr Smith, noting how the party was at the lowest ebb since 1982 with opinion poll ratings of 26 per cent, took Mr Corbyn to task, saying to cheers: “You can’t argue with the fact, Jeremy, that we have gone backwards on your watch in Scotland…The reality is in the last year when you have been the leader of the Labour Party across the UK we’ve have gone from second to third behind the Tories.”
He noted: “This is not progress…When are we going to start winning?”
The Labour leader responded by saying Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP was very good at adopting Labour clothes in Scotland but the reality was very different and that their economic policies had to be challenged.
“Yes,” he declared to cheers, “everybody’s clear there is a big fight ahead and a long road back but you have to start on the basis that the health inequality in Scotland, the levels of poverty, the insecure working conditions have to be challenged. What the SNP is doing is an austerity programme while pretending it’s not an austerity programme.”
On the monarchy, Mr Smith insisted he would not call a referendum on its future and said he was in favour of retaining the Queen as the head of state but Mr Corbyn, a staunch republican, appeared to refuse to rule out holding a poll, saying he would not make the issue a priority in a general election campaign but wanted to see greater democracy such as replacing the House of Lords with an elected chamber.
However, the strongest confrontation came on the EU referendum.
Mr Smith accused his colleague of being “complacent and passive” on the Brexit vote and said he was, in reality, “happy with the result”.
Declaring he would use every vehicle possible to keep Britain in the EU, including a Commons vote to block the triggering of Article 50, the Welsh MP told his colleague: “We are sleepwalking now, allowing the Tories to get towards the Brexit door without even putting up a fight. We’re going out with a whimper right now and you should not be as complacent as you are; you should be much tougher.”
He claimed the party leader had “never wanted us to stay within the EU” and challenged him on whether or not he had actually voted for Remain in the referendum.
Amid jeering and heckling, Mr Corbyn responded angrily, saying: “Owen, Owen, I thought we were grown up and we weren’t any longer going to use those kind of questions or remarks.” He later, after being pressed, made clear he had voted for Remain.
But the Labour leader stressed how the June 23 vote had to be respected and the party had to “work with it; we have to do our best to ensure we get the protections we need, the market access we need and the relationship we need with the EU”.
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