The Irvine Times on 24th May, platformed Labour candidate, Allan Gemmell to studiously ignore the awful prospect of what a New Labour UK Government and a client government in Holyrood, might mean for the good folk of Central Ayrshire. I’ll come back to the promises he made after listing only a few of the losses he forgets to mention:

• Prescription charges of £10 per item for you
• Tuition fee debt of around £36 000 for your children
• £1 200 a year worse off for households with children in the bottom third of income
• Higher council tax and less affordable housing
• An end to the Child Payment, Bedroom Tax and Rape Clause benefits
• Like in England & Wales, fewer GPs, nurses, doctors, home visitors, radiographers, teachers, police officers and firefighters
• Like in Labour Wales, far longer waiting times for all patients, cancer patients, A&E patients
• Less subsidised ferries to Arran and so higher prices
• More dead children in Gaza and in the next wars too
• More sewage in your water

He promised:

• Make work pay, with a New Deal for Working People that will deliver wages that people can actually live on. According to TUC, to be watered down by Sir Keir Starmer to suit big business
• Set up GB Energy, a publicly-owned clean power company, headquartered in Scotland, to cut bills for good and create jobs. His GB Energy to transfer our green energy revenue to London with no benefit here, just as with the oil and gas before
• Deliver economic stability so we can grow our economy and keep mortgages and prices low. He says ‘change’ 6 times yet thinks that creates stability?
• Cut NHS waiting times by investing in our NHS and funding more appointments in Scotland. Six key waiting times list are already far shorter in Scotland: https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2024/05/22/factcheck-the-six-key-nhs-waiting-lists-which-are-shorter-sometimes-only-half-as-long-in-scotland/ and Labour’s promises of additional appointments adds up to an increase of 0.61%! https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2024/02/17/sarwars-non-dom-tax-might-increase-medical-appointments-by-less-than-1/

More on the candidate:

I’m sure the photographer was just trying get in all the food brought to an Irvine food bank by local rich guy, the former Director of the British Council in India, the former Her Majesty’s Trade Commissioner and British Deputy High Commissioner for South Asia, Allan Gemmell, Order of the British Empire 2016 (when Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary) and now Labour (Starmerite) candidate for Central Ayrshire, but it doesn’t half tell a story.

The report in the Irvine Times is of a sickeningly insincere PR event build on outright lies about Labour’s intent to deal with child poverty and what the SNP, uniquely in the UK have done about it.

Nowhere to be seen, the facts that matter to the electorate in Irvine and across Central Ayrshire:

From the Scottish Government on February 28th:

The First Minister has welcomed analysis which estimates 100,000 children will be kept out of relative poverty in 2024-25 as a result of Scottish Government policies.

Updated modelling of the cumulative impact of policies such as the Scottish Child Payment indicates the relative child poverty rate will be 10 percentage points lower than it would otherwise have been.https://www.gov.scot/isbn/9781835219850

From the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in January 2024:

On child poverty: ‘Child poverty rates in Scotland (24%) remain much lower than those in England (31%) and Wales (28%) and are similar (if slightly higher) than in Northern Ireland (22%). ‘This is likely to be due, at least in part, to the Scottish Child Payment. This highlights the effect benefits can have in reducing poverty.’https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2024-the-essential-guide-to-understanding-poverty-in-the-uk

Finally, from Gemmell’s boss Sir Keir Starmer in February 2024:

Keir Starmer will continue austerity. That means keeping vulnerable people in ‘brutalising poverty’ At a recent speech at Labour’s Business Conference, Starmer doubled-down on his new-found commitment to austerity, stating: “We cannot and we will not allow public spending needs, however important, to threaten the stability of our finances”. It’s a rhetoric so ubiquitous we no longer question (or really even notice) what it means. A Jenga tower of abstracted buzzwords. But what Starmer is committing to is a continuation of brutalising poverty.https://www.bigissue.com/opinion/keir-starmer-austerity-u-turn-labour-poverty-suffering/