LABOUR have a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to govern at Holyrood and Westminster, the campaign chief behind the party’s General Election victory has said.
Pat McFadden, who was Labour’s campaign co-ordinator for last summer’s election, used the phrase now inexorably linked to Scotland's independence referendum as he spoke about a “potential partnership” between Labour governments in Edinburgh and London.
Speaking at a fringe event at the Scottish Labour conference in Glasgow on Friday, McFadden, a key ally of Keir Starmer, said: “We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity here to have a government in Scotland and government in the UK trying to address the same sort of problems.”
Speaking at the Friends of Scottish Labour event, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster highlighted a range of issues where “people have to get more bang for their buck”.
He told how NHS waiting lists and educational outcomes need to improve, as well as issues over the “look and feel of the streets of a city like Glasgow”.
Adding people “want more and they are right to want more”, he said there could be a “powerful shared agenda and shared opportunity for us” if Labour wins the 2026 Scottish election.
He said this could bring about a partnership “between Scotland and the UK that hasn’t been there for a couple of decades”.
Labour MSP Paul O’Kane agreed it would be a “generational moment in terms of the change” if the party can seize power in Scotland.
Setting out how the party can achieve it, he said Labour will “prosecute that case” against the SNP for its record on public services.
But he said Labour also need to “offer hope and vision” to voters.
O’Kane said: “We have to show we can be a reforming government that can change these things.
“Because I think this election will be for the first time in a long time about those public services, particularly the NHS, because people are so concerned and so worried about that.
“It’s about hope, and about an agenda of change, that generational moment. We have to offer that change.”
