Do you know that’s a great welcome, I can go home now. You have no idea what I am going to say and yet that sort of welcome - it is really kind of you.
Do you know in just two months time Scotland will decide whether Britain has a second term of a David Cameron government.
In just two months time, Scotland will decide whether we have a decade of uninterrupted Tory austerity.
This is the most important election in my lifetime in Scotland. Not just because the differences between the Labour Party and the Tory Party are bigger than they’ve been for so many years, but because the decision that we take in Scotland will decide what happens all across Britain.
And so for all of us, those of us who know that Scotland’s best days can still be ahead of us, it’s in all of our interests to remove a Prime Minister with a Scottish sounding surname, but who’s entirely out of touch with the nation of his ancestors.
Because we believe in our country, we believe in a sense of optimism, we have a confidence in our nation.
We believe that we can be the fairest nation in the world. We have a confidence in our ability and that are best days aren’t behind us.
Ours is a Scotland of remarkable individuals that have shaped the world over the ages, and can do again in the future.
Ours is the Scotland of someone like Sonny Dhanda. His is a story of raw talent and a Scottish second chance.
Sonny left school in Paisley without any qualifications. He is now a high powered lawyer in California in Silicon Valley.
Because he had a second chance, he went to Glasgow College and studied for an HNC, went on to Glasgow University, got a degree, got a Kennedy Scholarship and is now a power in the land.
Ours is a Scotland not just of Sonny, but also of Mary Barbour. Mary Barbour whom we’ve rightly heard of over and over again, who a century ago saw injustice, wouldn’t let it stand and stood up to it.
She led rent strikes which led to a Rent Act, which led to council houses once there was a Labour government and John Wheatley’s Housing Act which led to the formation of council housing all across the UK.
Maria Fyfe, Cathy Peattie and others have spoken to me about this, about the monument that they are trying to raise funds for in support of Mary Barbour.
So that’s why I am pleased to say that the Scottish Labour Party - and I know that this video says I talk too much about football - but Alex Ferguson has given £5,000 to the Mary Barbour statue.
And today I think the Labour Party should follow in Alex’s footsteps and give a £5,000 donation to that monument to Mary Barbour.
So, yes it’s a Scotland of Sonny and Mary, but it is also a Scotland of remarkable doctors and nurses like Pauline Cafferkey and so many others.
People who give their time, their profession, and their dedication to rescue and support others.
Pauline as we know travelled to West Africa to help support and protect those people faced with Ebola. She herself had to return in an emergency to be supported and saved in our own NHS here at home.
These are just three stories. There are countless others. These are stories of creativity, of passion and of compassion. These are the types of stories that give us a sense of the Scotland that we can create if we have the confidence to do it.
And think back not just to those people today, but what we’ve achieved throughout the generations. Think of all the things that the Labour movement, the Labour Party and the trade unions have achieved together - from our very first day.
From the point where we campaigned for rights for women, the Sex Discrimination Act, the Equal Pay Act.
When we introduced council housing and new towns and national parks, and we introduced the land reform and things like hydroelectric power projects.
Free personal care for the elderly, free central heating, free bus passes, the idea of campaigning on the minimum wage, the idea of campaigning to alleviate hardship, the idea of a smoking ban, the idea of tax credits –all of these things achieved by a Labour government.
The Department for International Development, doubling international aid, cancelling the debts of nations who were never going to pay it back and helping the world’s poor.
Banning land mines, cluster munitions and the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.
That idea of challenging racism here are home with the Race Relations Act.
Guaranteed paternity leave, guaranteed maternity leave, and guaranteed paid time off from work.
And, yes, recognising same-sex relationships and removing the stigma and removing the legal bar that discriminated against people just because of who they fell in love with.
Campaigning for a national minimum wage. Introducing the Scottish Parliament and perhaps the greatest of all our achievements - the formation of a National Health Service with a health system based on your need rather on your ability to pay.
So, over the next 60 days, over the next two months, I would encourage each and every one of us to have the confidence of our conviction.
To have that sense of passion and the realisation that no organisation in our nation’s history has ever shaped Scotland, or ever civilised Scotland in the remarkable way that the Labour Party and the trade union movement has.
Now, we’re determined as we go into this election and we’ve got a great team led by Ed Miliband who we heard from earlier with such remarkable clarity and passion.
We enjoy campaigning and working together and I am looking forward to campaigning like heck Ed, to make you Prime Minister of our country and set out one of the most radical policy programmes of any Labour Party leader in recent history.
Supported of course as I am by Kez Dugdale - what a remarkable, young and principled talent Kez is.
I was at the GMB retired members conference last week - Jimmy’s here - and I was making a wee speech about some of the things we want to do in government.
You get these introductions when you go along to these events - Dave did it today.
I met Dave before, in the East End of Glasgow, and Dave’s got to be careful because, I remember I got to introduce the late John Smith at one of these things - so Dave be careful what happens to you, you too will be here in years to come.
I was at the GMB retired members conference and Jimmy who was doing the introduction, said Jim you are doing a good job but there is just one thing I want from you, one day I want you to be as great as Kez Dugdale.
So look, I’ll try Kez; I’ll try my best. We already know Kez has proven herself to be a dream of a Deputy Leader, but every Thursday she’s proven to be a nightmare for Nicola Sturgeon at First Minister’s Question Time.
And what about Margaret Curran. I remember the story of Wellington before the Battle of Waterloo when he reviewed his own troops, and said I don’t know what they do to the opposition, but they sure as hell scare the life out of me.
Margaret comes from that long tradition of working class Glaswegian women in the ilk of Mary Barbour and so many others. She has been a brilliant Member of Parliament for the East End of Glasgow and in May we want to guarantee that she is returned as the brilliant Member of Parliament for the East End of Glasgow.
Now, all of those things that I spoke about earlier, so many of the reforms that the Labour Party and the trade union movement brought about together, weren’t learned. They were from personal experience, and we are all shaped by our own personal experiences in many different ways.
You are a product of family, you are shaped by your environment and life experiences and I’m no different.
I know that the media, and I totally understand this; the media enjoy focusing on the fact that I first slept in the top drawer of my uncle’s chest of drawers in my granny’s house that we shared with my great granny.
They enjoy writing about that; I know that, I don’t mind. I’m influenced by that, I’m marked by it but I am not scarred by it.
I know that you don’t have to have experienced hardship to want to wipe away the shadow of hardship from people’s lives. After all Attlee and Beveridge and others came from relatively comfortable backgrounds.
But that sense of hardship gives me a belief and a sense of resilience. It gives me a kind of sense of a pride in a working class upbringing, but also shapes my politics and the belief that part of our politics is about ensuring that working class parents have the chance to bring up middle class kids.
The second part of my experiences, that shaped my politics, is the fact that in the first year of Mrs Thatcher’s government our family emigrated to South Africa.
I could see Robben Island every morning when I was going to school as I waited at the bus stop. Now of course back then I was standing a bus stop in a whites only area, to board a whites only bus to go to a whites only school, because this was in 1980s and it was one of the high points of apartheid.
When my family arrived in that country, we did what Scots all across the world do – they try to form friendships with the first welcoming strangers.
We didn’t know anyone, we weren’t going to meet up with friends or family, we were entirely disorientated. In our case it was it was the taxi driver who met us at the airport who welcomed us.
My father spoke to him and one thing led to another and we arranged to meet up that first weekend and go to a beach and yes, play football.
So as I was looking forward to my debut on an African beach as a footballer. We went out and bought one of those lightweight flyaway balls, most of you will know the type, you’ve either kicked one or bought one, kind of yellow and black hexagon shaped colours. When you kick it goes in all sorts of different directions.
So, when the big day came, the two families got on the mini bus. Cape Town where we were has so many beautiful white sandy beaches that stretch as far as the eye can see, but we drove past one after the other and we ended up at a pebbly, craggy outcrop on the edge of the Atlantic.
Why? Because what I didn’t tell you was that this family were what South Africa called at the time ‘Cape Coloureds’.
This man and his ten-year-old son and his nine-year-old son weren’t allowed all the normal ways of life that you would expect and other would enjoy.
And the fact is, while there were more pernicious forms of apartheid legislation, as a youngster that just stuck with me, the extent to which I was immediately confronted by the vile racist laws and the recreational rules of South Africa.
Now I left South Africa to avoid conscription into the South African Army, not because I’m a pacifist and certainly not because I’m a coward but because I was unwilling to bolster that racist regime and their politics.
I don’t know what’s happened to the family that we played football with. I wish I did, I wish we’d kept in touch. And I know this is considered impolite in some circles to remind folk about this, but back then the Labour Party and the trade union movement were campaigning and lobbying for Nelson Mandela to be released, at that time sections of the British Conservative Party were campaigning for Nelson Mandela to be hanged.
So as I say I don’t know what happened to that young family about our age but what I do know is that Prisoner 46664 was released from prison and went on to become their President.
What I do know is that their country was liberated, what I do know is that that family are no longer judged by the colour of their skin, and what I do know is that each and every one of us in the Labour Party and the trade union movement should be permanently proud that we helped lead the world in the campaign against apartheid.
But I am determined to do a little more. One of the remarkable achievements of the last Labour government was in the Department for International Development, the way we wrote off the debt of the poorest nations, but I think we should do more.
One of the problems is the most talent people in some of the poorest nations have is they cannot afford to travel to study at some of the best universities all across the world.
So what I want to announce today, is that the Scottish Labour Party will set-up a new scholarship scheme - one student from every Sub-Saharan nation.
They will come here to study, have their fees paid, they will come here in honour of Nelson Mandela as part of a scholarship arrangement and they will travel home to take the skills and the love for our country with them to help build a fairer country in those nations.
And while we rightly should be proud of our heritage and our history in standing up against racism abroad, and we should be permanently proud of that as I said, we’ve also got to be permanently principled here at home on this issue.
And that’s why the Labour Party under Ed’s leadership, along with myself working with him, will never scapegoat the foreigner, we will never blame the other, we will never turn on the newcomer. Our problems in our country of course are deep, but it’s not their responsibility.
And beyond that I am clear we should all speak loudly, carefully where we can, but repeatedly to the point where we lose our voices and stand up against UKIP and their vile, divisive, disruptive politics.
Now I know as we start to head towards this election there are some people who have been traditionally Labour supporters who are thinking of being SNP voters this time around.
I’ve met many of you, I understand what you are saying, you feel as though you work harder and you can’t get on, you feel as though the rules are rigged against you and no matter what you do nothing changes. We know that you want change, we share that passion for change in Scotland and I want to convince you today that the Scottish Labour Party is that change.
So we’re clear about Tory austerity, Tory austerity is failing Scotland. Tory austerity is confidence sapping, its poverty creating, its zero hours contracting, its foodbank boosting, its NHS threatening and the Scottish Labour Party will call time on their cold and callous policies that’s causing so much harm to our country.
And we do that because our vision is based on an old idea of our values, it’s written in our sense of justice going back over a century in the Labour Party and the trade union movement.
When our country does well when her people do well and for too many families that connection between our nation’s prosperity and their family’s wellbeing has been severed. There’s a sense that no matter how they try, they cannot get on in life.
So in recent years, with the real terms fall in incomes and the changes in the labour market, the fact is that more people are working for less than the living wage.
The fact is that more people are working part-time hours rather than the full-time hours they would like to see.
And as the STUC has said 84,000 Scots, 84,000 proud Scots, who want to do a fair days work for a fair days pay, are trapped in zero hours contracts.
Now some of you have experience of that, it’s hard to imagine how you can plan your life, how you can provide for your children, how you can plan to organise to pay your bills when you don’t know from one day to the next whether you have an income or whether you have any hours at work.
Those people can’t get access to credit; many of them are forced to take expensive payday loans that they can’t afford.
So that’s why we are clear the Scottish Labour Party will commit to banning those zero hours contracts and give dignity to those workers so that they can provide for their families.
I know, and I’m sure Scotland knows, that the most effective anti-poverty policy and the best way of reducing our deficit isn't wishful thinking - it’s about a growing economy.
It’s about an economy that is more productive; it’s about a sense of generating wealth and then talking about how we distribute that wealth.
So when I think about that the number I have in my head it is number ten. Not the Number Ten that Ed will be in shortly, the number on that famous door on Downing Street, but the fact that the poorest 10% of Scots earn ten times less than the richest 10% of Scots.
And that’s had a 10% impact on economic growth in Scotland over one generation.
So our argument isn’t just that this level of inequality is unfair and unjust and immoral. It is also inefficient, it’s bad for Scotland and it’s bad for our businesses.
So ours is a case of social justice, but also about economic efficiency, that’s why we have to do more to address some of the underlying causes of inequality in our nation.
There is too much inequality that cascades from one generation to the next; there are too many youngsters whose life experiences are shaped by their upbringing.
There are too many people who are influenced by whose footsteps they follow in
their family tree, and that’s why we have to act.
Now, when Kez and I were at a school recently, we were reminded about the educational disadvantage that so many of our youngsters experience.
The fact is that in Scotland only one in five of the children in the poorest families get five credit qualifications at the end of fourth year, and yet amongst the most prosperous families it is three in five.
I celebrate all of that success, we all do, but why is there such an enormous chasm?
Why is it that all across our country in the poorest families only 220 of kids do well enough, just 220 in our entire nation from the poorest families do well enough at school to earn the right to go to some of our best universities.
Out of 9,000 of those poorest kids just 220 – that’s less than 1 in 40, that means in many classrooms not a single child is doing well enough to get into one of those universities and that has to end.
But think about the wider nature of inequality and disadvantage of Scotland today - it’s wrong that the poor live nine years shorter lives than the prosperous. It is wrong that the poor are seven times more likely to be admitted to hospital because of alcohol abuse. It’s wrong that the poor are 16 times more likely to be admitted to hospital because of drugs abuse.
And it is wrong and it is immoral that the poor are three times more likely to take their own lives in Scotland today.
It’s wrong and it’s unfair, it’s unjust, but we don’t exist as the Labour Party to just identify problems, we exist to address them and change them and that’s what I’m determined the Scottish Labour Party will do.
Now when we were in that school, Kez and I sat down and we spoke to a lot of the children and we joined in their maths class. These sparky kids wanted to do well, they were clever, they were ambitious and despite Kez and I being there they were enjoying themselves, genuinely.
But once we had finished one of the teachers took us aside and said that a young girl the group had lost both her parents, she had lost both of her parents within three weeks of one another to suicide.
Now, I can’t, none of us can imagine the raw emotion and the real hurt at that age, to be put through that as that youngster. But those teachers were doing a remarkable job in really difficult circumstances, to support that child and many others in that school.
And that’s why that story and so many others about educational disadvantage means that closing that educational attainment gap is my personal passion.
We have a plan and the truth is that some of the richest brains and minds of our country are sometimes locked behind the doors of the poorest families in some of our biggest housing schemes.
The engineers, the entrepreneurs, the inventors, are in those houses, in those areas, they just don’t know it yet and it’s our job to unlock that potential.
That’s why along with Kez and Iain Gray, we will identify the 20 schools where working class kids are being let down most.
That’s a mixture of the schools with the poorest academic performance but also other schools with a mixed academic performance, but where the working class kids are escaping through the net.
We are not going to name and shame these schools, that’s not our business, those pupils, those staff and their parents don’t deserve that stigma, they don’t need to be named and shamed, they need to be nurtured and supported.
So what we will do is we double the number of classroom assistants going into the primary schools associated with all of those secondary schools.
We will introduce Chartered teachers, teachers with a proven capability to support those kids to get on.
And importantly we will also help their parents to learn. It’s an idea we have taken from Liverpool that we’re going to improve upon.
We’re going to turn some of these schools into community learning centres. Many of you will have the experience of a teenage son bringing home their homework, maybe their chemistry homework or maybe a teenage grandson bringing home their chemistry homework, and you are thinking – I have no idea, no idea what that’s about.
Maybe you make a good guess at it, and maybe it’s the same for your 14 year olds or whatever, but you’re more confident when your 8, 9 and 10 year old child brings home their homework - you can do it all.
But unfortunately in Scotland there some families where that isn’t possible, where the parents missed out the first time round, in particular the mums who take on so much of the responsibility in helping their kids to succeed.
That’s why we will turn these schools into community learning hubs and that’s why we should never rest, and I won’t rest as First Minister, until every single kid in Scotland achieves the best and their full potential.
Now having spoken at length about education I want to touch more briefly on the National Health Service. Our proudest ever achievement as we have heard time and time again and we will always have that sense with us.
But when we talk about the National Health Service, yes it’s about the buildings, it’s about the GP surgeries, it’s the hospitals and A&E centres, but it’s not really about the buildings, we all know that, it’s about the people.
It’s about the doctors, the nurses, the cleaners, and the ancillary staff that help make it all happen.
That’s why Ed’s right, and why we support the introduction of a mansion tax to fund a thousand more nurses here in Scotland.
Now, of course two thirds of the money from the mansion tax on houses worth over £2m will be in London and in the South East of England, so it’s a real transfer of wealth from the most prosperous to the poorest, but also from the South to parts of the North including Scotland.
So that’s part of our answer on the NHS A&E crisis. But I also want to talk about something else, that I want us to do more on and that’s mental health.
Politicians don’t talk enough about mental health and not enough gets done to challenge the stigmas of mental health, or to provide and support those people who experience a mental health problem.
The fact is that one in four Scots, one in four Scots at some point in their lives will experience a mental health illness, that’s hundreds of you in this room, one in four Scots.
And those of us who have seen this happen know that it can turn a close friend into a complete stranger.
It affects everyone, it affects the employer, the employee, young and old, men and women, and it respects no geography or no class and is, of course, often linked into issues of alcohol and drugs abuse.
So I want to prioritise mental health provision in Scotland. We will dedicate resources to help make that happen, and while our first nurses that we’ve identified out of the thousand we would double are Motor Neuron Disease specialists, I also want to have more nurses dedicated and expert in dealing with mental health.
We all know that there is rarely a stigma when it comes to physical injury, someone breaks their leg, someone experiences arthritis, someone is living through dealing with cancer – there is no stigma and we should be clear that there should be no stigma at all in modern Scotland for those who experience a mental illness or a fractured spirit.
These are the types of things that we talk about social justice, that we should be proud of, a determination to drive out that degree of inequality in our young people.
I am also pleased that today we have taken some big decisions, and while I don’t want to re-run the debate, as a consequence of the decisions that we have taken today on a new Clause 4, we have got a more confident and powerful Scottish Labour Party.
A confident and proud Scottish Labour Party that also shares in that sense of patriotism about our country.
Ours is a remarkable nation, with a huge sense of history and a huge sense of pride in what we’ve achieved.
But that pride and patriotism and sense of our past, and optimism about our future don’t belong to any one political party.
I don’t want to lose the audience here today when I say this, but this pride in our country is shared by other political leaders. While we disagree with them fundamentally on policy, of course we do, but that pride in our country is also felt by Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon and many other party leaders here in Scotland.
And we should be clear that our history belongs to no political party, our flag belongs to no political cause, we are proud and patriotic Scots and our history belongs to no one organisation in our country.
But also because of the changes that we’ve made today in this modern Clause 4, it’s more power for the Scottish Labour Party.
I am proud of our relationships with the wider UK Labour Party and wider UK Labour movement. Ed and I love campaigning together and we’re going to do more and more of it between now and the General Election and I look forward to Ed Miliband as Prime Minister coming to campaign for us in 2016.
But the truth is that some people believed that the Scottish Labour Party wasn’t in charge when it came to decisions here in Scotland.
Now as a consequence of the decision that we’ve taken today, decisions about Scotland will be made here in Scotland, by the party of Scotland.
And those days where people believed that decisions were taken elsewhere in the UK - by someone else, for some other reason - those days are gone and those days are gone for good and they are not coming back.
So in saying that we want, and that we are determined, to have more power for our party, we also want more power for our parliament.
We supported the Smith Commission and the all-party talks on the future of devolution but we want to go further still. And we will go further in a unique Labour offer - where we feel most comfortable and most passionate is about the world of work and in getting people off welfare into work so that they can support their families.
So the Labour Party will go into this General Election with an additional offer on top of the Smith Commission; if you have just had a child or if you are out of work or if you are on a pension, it’s important that you have got the back-up of the pooling and sharing of resources of the UK system.
But we want to ensure that, yes, if you’ve had a child you get child benefit, if you are out of work, you get access to an unemployment payment and if you are a pensioner you will get the state pension, but in future that should be the minimum in Scotland.
We should have the power here in Scotland to top up those benefits from our own resources if we wish to do so.
We should also have the power from our own resources to introduce a new social security benefit to suit our needs, if that is necessary. We should also devolve welfare state.
There is little point in devolving power in London only for it to be captured in Edinburgh and not cascaded across our country.
We recognise that a jobs crisis created by an oil crisis in the North East of Scotland is entirely different from generational poverty in so many of our other cities, so we will act on that.
We will also do something else, again uniquely. £1.8 billion is the housing benefit bill in Scotland and we want to devolve that as well. Most of that money goes towards subsidising private landlords, that isn’t a sensible use of such a huge amount of money. So if Labour wins the election and we devolve that £1.8bn of money, instead of subsidising private landlords, we will address the fact that Scotland is building fewer houses now than at any time since the 1940s. We will build houses for Scotland’s families to live in.
Look, colleagues, I want us to go further. I want to go further than dealing with that educational inequality, protecting the NHS, and building those houses.
Last week, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls rightly announced a change in the arrangements for those who earn over £150,000 and the pension arrangements.
Now, down South that money is going to be used, rightly, to reduce the cost of tuition fees, from £9,000 to £6,000. It’s a sensible and progressive move.
But we already have free tuition fees here in Scotland, that is a UK wide change that Ed announced last week, so the Barnett consequentials of that are over £200 million here in Scotland and I want to tell you today what we do with some of that money and the commitment that we make in advance of the election for our manifesto.
Look, tuition fees have been free in Scotland ever since Donald Dewar fifteen years ago made that the case.
We are going to be clear with Scotland in this election, and beyond, that under a Scottish Labour government, tuition fees will remain free.
But despite fees being free in Scotland we still have some of the worst student support here in Scotland and some of the highest dropout rates anywhere in the United Kingdom and that’s why we are going to act.
So when it comes to bursaries for the youngest and poorest Scots, we want to do things differently. We will reverse Nicola Sturgeon’s cut in bursaries for those students in higher education and studying an HNC and an HND, we won’t just reverse it, I want to confirm today to those poorest young students studying those courses will see a boost in their bursaries of £1,000 a year.
But I want us to go further than that still, what about the youngsters who don't go to university? The youngsters who don’t go to college? The youngsters who go straight from the world of school to the world of work, why should they miss out on the support of a Labour government? And they won’t.
Do you know the world of work has been important to us since the day of our formation – that’s why we are the Labour Party and it’s why those people who go straight from school into the world of work also deserve our support.
At the moment the average tuition fees spend in higher education in Scotland per year is £1,600. Why should these youngsters who don’t set foot inside a college or a university not also benefit from that?
So, we are going to set up a Future Fund for each of those 18 and 19 year olds. It’s a fund that they can use to get on in life, perhaps when they leave school, perhaps they set up a small business, perhaps they get driving lessons, perhaps to buy tools for a job.
We will invest in each and every one of those 18 and 19 year olds who go straight from the world of school to the world of work, a total of £1,600 to help them on their way in the world of work.
So that’s what we’ll do with this new source of money. It’s a Labour answer to how we would spend and invest this money in helping to support people so that they don’t have to experience the generational disadvantage that perhaps their parents or grandparents had to endure.
So I started by saying that I know that people want a sense of change. I started by saying that I know so many Scots who are thinking of perhaps not voting Labour this time round, wanting to be certain that the Labour Party is that change again and that’s what I’ve set out to do today.
Do you know in this forthcoming election, there is only one organisation that can save David Cameron in Scotland and it isn’t the Conservative Party.
The fact is that any seat the SNP take from the Labour Party is an enormous step towards David Cameron clinging on to power in Downing Street in May.
This is the closest election in my lifetime, the votes of Scotland will matter in a remarkable way in this election and in all the recent polls it shows it’s all within the margin of error, in fact a poll this week showed the two parties, Labour and Tory tied at 272 seats each. It’s all within the margin of error.
So, let’s make sure that Scotland never becomes the error in David Cameron's margin. This nation that in 1997 came together to expel the Tory Party from Scotland, let’s come together with a sense of pride and determination and let’s not inflict another Tory government with their austerity on ourselves or the whole of the rest of the United Kingdom.
I’ll just finish by saying this we don’t want to win an election for its own sake, wining an election has got to be about more than just avoiding defeat, it’s about building a fairer Scotland for the people that we want to support.
When I think about this, building an education system that opens our children’s eyes on the world, where the only limit of their ambition is their imagination.
It’s about the skills and entrepreneurship of our companies who take the names of Scotland all across the globe and export to markets once again.
It’s about the brilliance of our surgeons and our scientists who invent and innovate and can bring new cures to deal with the world’s problems.
It’s that sense of pride, it’s that sense of faith in our party and confidence in our country and it’s also this:
It’s saying to Scotland that if we don’t stand up to Tory austerity no one else will.
If Scotland doesn’t help prevent Cameron from getting into Downing Street, think of what it means for those families who are struggling to get by on foodbanks.
Think of what it means for that mum who is juggling the problem of mental health while also trying to support her family.
Think about what it means for that pensioner who often the only connection they have on a daily basis with the outside world is a 15 minute care visit from an overstretched care worker.
Think of all of those challenges, realise that we don’t want to win for our own sake, it isn’t about a Labour government for its sake, it’s a Labour government for the sake of the people of this country.
Let’s go out together in May and ensure that together we make sure Scotland is again the fairest nation on earth.
Thank you very much.
Leader of Scottish Labour Jim Murphy gave this keynote speech to Scottish Labour's Special One-Day Conference on 7th March.