White privilege doesn't exist for white working class boys says Sarwar

Today, the repartee is more circumspect. Our Celtic/Rangers banter is dispensed with quickly. He’s not seeking updates on who’s hitting who in the newspaper world. It’s straight down to business. His eyes betray a crouched wariness you’ve not previously seen. That same morning, another pre-election poll had Labour disputing with UK Reform to finish a distant second behind the SNP on May 7.

This is one of the perennial mysteries of Scottish politics. Why are the SNP, which has demonstrably failed by every metric of good governance over the last 10 years and which seems to operate in a cycle of endless scandal, still the runaway favourites to win its fifth successive Holyrood election? What does that say about the effectiveness of Labour in Scotland during in this period? And please let’s not start talking about that bionic baby box.

Read more

• Anas Sarwar: 'Broken' Creative Scotland provides poor value for money
• Living on a Scottish island has taught me you have to rely on people - not systems
• Our village has no gas supply so we need oil for heating. It's not a lifestyle choice
• 'I know you’re fed up with politicians. I get it. But this Scottish election matters'
• Five heart-soaring Scottish walks to make the most of spring's lighter evenings

He doesn’t really answer the question, but instead runs through the SNP’s failures, insisting that they’ve put political tribalism ahead of addressing Scotland’s major challenges. “The reality is, they're out of energy,” he says. “Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon both had huge mandates which they could have used to transform our country; to modernise our public services; to take a different approach in the economy. They could have used it to bring the country together. Although, I will say that at least Alex took the view that the best way he could persuade people to leave the United Kingdom was by running an effective government.

“But after the independence referendum in 2014, that's not been the approach. Yes, Nicola was popular throughout the Covid pandemic, but she often put tribalism before doing what was right by Scotland. She didn't use that huge mandate to transform the country or pull it together. I'll take a different approach and I won’t be hostile to people who support independence.”

His party’s manifesto pledges are as ambitious as you’d expect from a party that’s had so much time to think about them: fixing and then future-proofing the NHS; restoring Scotland’s lost reputation for educational excellence (perhaps the SNP’s most chronic failure); investing in nursing and science. “We’re also going to have investment in our colleges and 9,000 new apprenticeships,” he says. “We’ll drive down the cost of living by making childcare more affordable. We'll give tax relief of up to £3,000 per child for families. If they've got a child with a disability that will rise to £6,000. How do we build homes in this country? Look at Glasgow City Centre, something I know you and I are both passionate about. Glasgow is neglected.”

We know though, that election manifestos become porous when exposed to actual government. Sir Keir Starmer’s now reads like a political Ponsi scheme. So what would Anas Sarwar pledge to do in the first 100 days of his Bute House residency?

“Firstly, we’ll be cutting waiting lists by maximising the capacity of the National Health Service and that will be led by Mike McKirdy, the former President of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. He’s a fine candidate for us in this election campaign and we’ll drive down waiting lists and begin the reforms we want to do.

“Second, we’ll start the process of creating 1500 new classroom assistants and 2,000 new specialist teachers so we can support children in the classroom with the resources they need. And alongside this, we'll catch up on literacy, numeracy, the sciences and our AI expertise because that will become very important.

“Third; we'll get this country building again with a new planning hub, where people will get faster decisions so that we can start building houses again and creating the construction jobs that come with that.”

I need to discuss the rise of Reform with him, not the least because it’s from his party’s traditional supporters and communities that they’re deriving most support. Does he recognise that years of the boutique Scottish left like the Greens and SNP and trade unions, as well as some in Labour, gas-lighting working-class voters and scolding them have been chiefly responsible for creating this cultural migration. I tell him too about attending the press conference last week where both Malcolm Offord and Thomas Kerr seemed to re-affirm Nigel Farage's tactic of accusing Mr Sarwar of "prioritising the Pakistani community". He refuses to dwell on this though, perhaps thinking that to do so legitimises Reform knuckle-dragging.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar with Kevin McKenna pictured during The Herald's Unspun podcast (Image: Colin Mearns)

And then he makes what I think is one of the most profound and authentic declaration about race and culture made by any Scottish politician in recent years. It both strips Reform of their allure and rebukes the class-based disdain that the liberal elite in Scotland reserve for working-class communities. “Look,” he says, “we talk a lot about inequality and prejudice in this country, and challenging it, whether it be homophobia, racism, religious prejudice. But there's also a huge inequality in this country that we haven’t confronted for generations.

“Take the example of a white working-class boy in some of the hardest parts of Glasgow. That white working-class boy's life chances and life expectancy is defined not by his ability; not by his talent but by his postcode or his social class. That white, working class boy and all those communities hear about grand debates about the so-called concept of white privilege.

“Yet, what privilege have these guys grown up in? How can anyone say that a young white working-class boy in some parts of Glasgow, who automatically because of his postcode, has a 15-year shorter life expectancy, has some kind of privilege? They don't. And that's why I think we've got to be really, really careful that we're challenging inequality, that we aren’t pushing people away.

“You made the point earlier about how there are some similarities between the SNP and Reform. Now, I'm not saying they've got the same political ideology: of course they don’t. Nor, am I saying they do the same style of politics: of course they don't.

“Ultimately though, where they are similar, is in being very good at identifying the right problems, but not at identifying the solutions. Instead, they use those problems to create us-versus-them scenarios.”

He recalls his years as a dentist in working-class communities in Paisley at a time when the town had some of the worst dental health outcomes in Europe. “The reason why I decided to go into politics and do public service in the political sector was the number of teenagers I was seeing as patients, where I was having to remove all their teeth.

“And that was happening partly because they didn't have access to skills. They didn't have access to the education they deserve. They didn't have access to the employment they deserve. They got caught up in addiction issues. Many of them were parked on methadone for so long, that it was ruining their teeth.

“That's going to impact on your confidence and your ability to access a college place or a job and your future income. It will affect your relationships and the kind of housing you’ll have. It will have an impact on the rest of your life. That’s chronic, structural inequality in communities that hasn’t been broken down for generations.”

Read more Opinion

• Drivers face yet more misery as SNP swerve decision on critical roundabout
• Glasgow’s mural advert row shows how weak oversight is failing the city
• Abolishing prisons in Scotland : a mad idea or a missed opportunity?
• For goodness sake, who cares what John Swinney thinks about Kanye West?

He rebukes those on the left and the right who have sought to infantilise narratives around ethnicity and belonging and patriotism.

“What other country in the world can you have someone from my background standing to be First Minister? So, let's look at the positives here. That only happens in great countries like Scotland.”

Only once in our interview is he moved to express anger. It’s directed at John Swinney and the SNP as they’ve sought to push the idea that Labour and Reform are acting in unison to remove the SNP.

“Let's look at this really dodgy narrative that John Swinney is playing here. And I don’t say this lightly; I’ve thought about this a lot. A racist advert was put out about me costing tens of thousands of pounds. And John Swinney rightly, condemned the advert; said it was racist and that it shouldn’t have happened.

“But now when his future’s on the line, he wants to pretend that the very same people that have spent all of that time and every single day since, race-baiting me are now the people that apparently I'm secretly in cahoots with.

“I think that tells you something’s really, really sinister about what John Swinney is trying to do. I can see why he’s trying to do it for political reasons. But morally, I think he needs to have a long look in the mirror.”

Kevin McKenna is Scotland's Feature Writer of the Year