Scottish Labour is letting down its voters , says MP Brian Leishman

heraldscotland.com · Feb 21, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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I was telling a prominent Scottish Tory backer that I’d interviewed Brian Leishman, the Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth. Her response was a warm one: there was affection and not in a supercilious, pat-on-the-head sort of way. “I like Brian Leishman,” she said. “You know what he stands for. His constituents know that he’s going into battle for them.” Yet, for some on his own side, Mr Leishman is an irritant and an inconvenience; a Jeremiah figure who reminds them of who they’re supposed to be representing and what they’re supposed to be about. He holds them to account. He tells me of an occasion last year when his wife had visited him at his Westminster place of work. “She’s not really interested in politics,” he says. “There was a welfare debate on and so after we’d had our tea I took her into to catch the last bit of the debate. Some of my fellow members of the Socialist Campaign group were there and others from our party’s new intake of MPs. “One of them stands up and begins to talk about how ‘there’s makers in society and there’s takers in society’, and talks about people ‘scamming the system’. Another one then stood up to urge the Secretary of State to “go deep and hard’ on welfare cuts. Read more 'This is attempt to undermine faith schools' - Leading Catholics' fears over SNP bill Farage’s new ‘shadow cabinet’ exposes Reform’s grand illusion SNP's secret state insults Holyrood's founding values 'My visit to Motherwell reminded me why I first fell in love with this game' “My wife then turns to me and says: ‘Is this like the football?’ I ask her what she means. And she says: ‘Well, when I see you on the TV you sit on that side. Do people swap sides halfway through the debate? They don’t sound like you’. ‘No, no,’ I tell her, ‘that's some of our new Labour MPs’. “They’ve ended up here because they've been hand-selected by Morgan McSweeney and his Labour Together lot. They’ve had a wee look through them and then funded them. Now that's the ideology, or the lack of politics that is currently at play in the parliamentary Labour party.” Brian Leishman is entitled to a degree of schadenfreude by Mr McSweeney’s recent downfall. Sir Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff was forced to resign last week when it became clear that he was instrumental in the Prime Minister’s catastrophic decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to Washington. It later transpired that Mr McSweeney’s Labour Together acolytes had conducted surveillance operations on some troublesome political journalists. They’d have advised Sir Keir when he’d taken the decision to suspend Mr Leishman and three of his colleagues last July for four months for breaches in party discipline. These included voting against the government on its welfare reforms which they said targeted people claiming disability benefits. Mr Leishman had also criticised Sir Keir over the closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery. Many of his Westminster Labour colleagues agreed with him, but such was Labour Together’s grip on the party at all levels that few had dared to speak up. In normal circumstances, Mr Leishman would have expected his collar to be felt by UK Labour’s secret policemen after publicly backing their Scottish leader, Anas Sarwar’s call for Sir Keir to resign over the Mandelson scandal. By then, though, the workings of Mr McSweeney and his malevolent think-tank were being exposed to the light and so they probably felt it best to leave him alone. The Grangemouth oil refinery was closed last year (Image: pa) “I love this party,” he says. “But we're miles off what I think we should be. In Scotland, politics has become totally dominated by Yes or No. And what depresses me about up here and at Westminster is that there's a serious paucity of politicians who talk about class. Yet, class is at the heart of every political decision made in this country and I don't understand why so many of my lot shy away from it. “If the Labour Party in Scotland could get to a position where we focus relentlessly on class issues, then we can shift the narrative here and change our fortunes. Is the Labour Party at UK level and in Scotland bold enough to do that right now? Absolutely not. Upstairs, I've got a team of case-workers battling through 1000s of cases since we were elected. Our voters need to see transformation and change.” He tells me that he’s already been put on notice by one local voter, whom he suspects represents many others in his constituency. “During the election count at the polling station in 2024, I noticed that one ballot paper had a hand-written message next to my name. It said: ‘You've got one last chance. Prick.” “That told me it was a bloke who’d probably voted Labour in the past and was seriously pissed off and he had every reason to be so. I thought it summed up what millions of people who voted for us really think.” He still harbours a simmering fury about the fate of the Grangemouth oil refinery and the failure of the SNP and others to lift a finger to save it, despite knowing of the threat to the 400 jobs for several years. "Here, we had a situation where a billionaire who knows his decision to shut Grangemouth would impoverish an entire community and who then spends a fortune on his toy football club in Manchester. And not only that: he gets given a £500m loan guarantee from the Tory government, but still goes ahead with the closure. The Scottish Government knew about this three years ago, but didn't want anything to do with it. There should have been government intervention to keep Grangemouth open.” He recalls one Friday afternoon being told to get down to Westminster the following day to save the Scunthorpe steelworks, which of course is the right thing to do. Fine, I thought, but how's that getting saved when a huge part of the Scottish industry sector, pretty much the biggest industrial issue to face Scotland in 40 years, is being left to die? It’s this that feeds into the Yes narrative, even though the SNP did nothing.” The oil refinery closure was the latest in a depressingly long series of industrial body blows to hit Clackmannanshire. When big factories and manufacturing plants close, the politicians and the journalists all embroider their reports with phrases such as ‘devastating impact to the local community’ and ‘body blow to the local economy’ and then our caravans move on and Grangemouth becomes just another place going further and further down the satnav’s list of last destinations. Brian Leishman sees the long-term ripple effects of a billionaire’s caprice. “Around 29% of kids tonight in Clackmannanshire will go to bed living in poverty. That's mental in the sixth largest economy in the country. We've had mass deindustrialisation. Scotland’s brewing capital was Alloa; they used to make coaches in Alva. In Tillicoultry, Alva, Menstrie you had woollen mills, a textile industry, a heavy textile industry. They've all gone. What are we left with? “The social consequences are profound. This is Scotland's most dangerous place for a young girl to grow up in because of domestic violence. You then look at the societal consequences of de-industrialisation. We had seven coal bings in Clackmannanshire. “We've lost so much ground to the SNP on this and their so-called ‘progressive’ politics, because that’s just basic human decency. I joined the party in 2016 and you don’t need to be Columbo to figure out why I joined. Look at who was leader. Look at who was the Shadow Chancellor. Look at the kind of agenda they were putting forward: it was anti-austerity, redistribution and equalisation of our society. We were talking actual class politics. Read more Much-loved TV favourite makes a satisfying return to the Scottish stage Rethinking Alasdair Gray: A cultural, literary and feminist legacy There is one major problem with Wuthering Heights - and it's ruining it for me Forget Edinburgh Festivals for a moment, closure of this Glasgow theatre is a tragedy “In Scotland, we've seen strong personalities in Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon. But this whole cult of personality is bollocks. I want personality in our politics. I want someone who’ll say we’ll redistribute wealth, and who’s going to actually use taxes for that purpose. As a consequence of that, we’ll raise living standards, and this is how we're going to do it. I want to see those real policies. I'm not looking at their personality; I want to see that transformational change.” He laments the replacement of real policies aimed at improving working class communities in favour of a ‘don’t-scare-the-horses’ approach that favours corporations and those who are already affluent. And how this approach has become the settled will of the shadowy forces who have come to power in the UK Labour Party. “Clement Attlee might not have been the most charismatic politician in the world, but my God, for all his imperfections, he helped create the welfare state and transform the country. We built houses and actually looked after people, so that they could contribute to the economy. Those are the policies I want to see. "The left wing of the party is criticised for causing trouble. But we’re put here to cause trouble by asking for basic things like equalisation of our economy and being creative with capital gains tax or the annual wealth tax. These are solutions that would actually transform society. The solutions are out there, but my God, we need to be bolder.” Kevin McKenna is Scotland's Feature Writer of the Year