Welcome to this week's Branch Office updates! It's Xander Elliards stepping in for James Walker – but we never got a new graphic made.
ANAS Sarwar has faced an intense grilling on his General Election pledge that Labour would save jobs at Grangemouth in a TV interview labelled “excruciating”.
The Scottish Labour leader was challenged by STV’s Colin Mackay in the corridors of Holyrood on Thursday.
The previous day, hundreds of Grangemouth workers had been sent redundancy letters, with only around 65 out of 500 being kept on.
The news came despite Sarwar having said, in a debate ahead of the General Election, that a Labour government “would step in and put our money where our mouth is and invest … and step in to save the jobs at the refinery”.
“We would put hundreds of millions of pounds behind it to make it a reality,” Sarwar said in June last year.
However, in power since July, Labour have only half funded a £100 million growth deal for Falkirk and Grangemouth (with the other half coming from the Scottish Government). Instead of focusing on the refinery, that deal’s funding is spread over 11 projects.
And despite Grangemouth having the capacity to develop Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), Chancellor Rachel Reeves last week announced £63m for the UK’s Advanced Fuels Fund to “support thousands of jobs in places like Teesside and Humberside”.
At Holyrood, Mackay challenged Sarwar on his past pledges.
“You said you would save the jobs at Grangemouth. Have you let the workers down?” the STV political editor asked.
Sarwar said: “Look, it's really important here that we recognise the concerns in the Grangemouth community, that we are working to deliver a positive transition for the community of Grangemouth and that industrial site, and that's something that we'll continue to press.”
Mackay then said: “But they're closing it, they're closing it by the end of June. The jobs will be gone. There is no positivity there.
“You said, during the election, you would save the jobs at the refinery and you're not.”
Sarwar repeated his answer, but Mackay continued to press: “Did you lie during the election when you said you'd save the jobs? Were you misleading voters?”
The Scottish Labour leader then pivoted to say that Petroineos – the joint venture between Ineos and the state-owned PetroChina which runs Grangemouth – was a “private company” so Labour could not step in.
Mackay kept going: “But you said you would save the jobs. During the election, you said ‘vote Labour to save the jobs’. People voted Labour, you've got a Labour MP. But you’ve not saved the jobs.”
Sarwar then pivoted again, saying: “I would emphasise, Colin, that Labour has been in government for six months.
“The previous Tory government and this current SNP Government have known this was coming five years earlier, and they had no plan in place to secure a positive future."
Sarwar's argument that a Labour Government could do nothing about a private company's decisions but the previous Tory and SNP governments could is certainly an odd one.
In all, Mackay pushed the Scottish Labour leader for more than five minutes on whether he had misled voters with pledges to step in and save jobs at Grangemouth.
Responding, SNP MSP Graeme Dey said Sarwar had been doing “his best Michael Howard impression” – a reference to the former Tory leader’s refusal to give a straight answer in a now infamous interview with Jeremy Paxman.
Ross Colquhoun, the SNP’s head of digital, said the interview was “one of the most excruciating five minutes you will ever experience”.
“Sarwar was desperately in need of a Subway,” he added, in reference to former Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray jumping into a branch of the sandwich shop to avoid protesters in 2011.
And SNP councillor Lloyd Melville added: “Good to see Sarwar pressed on this. Hard to reach any other conclusion than his ‘we’ll save the jobs’ pledge during the election was a deliberate attempt to mislead the voters.”
The whole furore reveals a fundamental truth of Scottish Labour's position: their fate is in the hands of their bosses in London.
When Sarwar pledged that Labour would step in and save jobs at Grangemouth, perhaps his only real mistake was believing Keir Starmer when he said the same thing.
