Katy Clark has decided against a run at the Scottish Labour leadership, though she is not leaving the field without instructions.
The left-wing MSP, who had been weighing a bid to succeed Anas Sarwar, confirmed she will stay out. That narrows the contest to three: Monica Lennon, Michael Marra and Joe Fagan.
The vacancy opened when Sarwar quit Holyrood for a seat in the House of Lords and a job in the UK Government.
What she wants from the winner
Baroness Clark’s price for standing aside is a harder line on public ownership. She argued that care, buses, leisure and education services should all be brought back into the public sector.
Decades of privatisation and outsourcing, she said, have left public services structured to produce private profit rather than to serve ordinary people. Handing them to private companies and multinationals has delivered poor value and stripped out democratic control.
Her position is that Scottish Labour should be making the case for insourcing and showing why public ownership works, which means reversing outsourcing and contracting out, with services such as home care delivered publicly. When contracts for justice services like prisoner transfer expire, she wants public provision built up rather than another tender round involving multinationals. UK public funding models, she added, cost far more than those used elsewhere and cannot carry on in their present shape.
Unions and jobs
Clark also pressed for a closer working relationship with the trade unions and a commitment to full employment.
Labour is a socialist party, she said, set up by the unions and others to speak for working-class people. Unemployment and thin opportunity still shape too many lives in Scotland, particularly among young people, and she wants the party to produce a plan covering the economy, full employment and the skills needed for well-paid work in future.
She said MSPs and MPs should be taking up union campaigns directly, describing the link with affiliated unions as what keeps the party rooted in communities. The leadership contest, in her view, is the moment to work out how a parliament that delivers for working-class communities and revives local economies stops being an idea. Part of that, she said, is selecting more candidates from working-class backgrounds, more women and better representation of ethnic minorities.
Why this helps Lennon
Clark’s withdrawal matters arithmetically. Candidates need three MPs and three MSPs to nominate them, and Lennon has been short. She has two MPs and, so far, no MSPs at Holyrood.
With Clark out of the running, she and fellow left-winger Carol Mochan are now free to put their names behind Lennon, which would take her most of the way to the Holyrood threshold she needs.
