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'Scotland has two governments – and they're both failures,' Anas Sarwar charges at Scottish TUC

by Ben Chacko in Aberdeen

SCOTLAND has two governments — and both are failing its people, Anas Sarwar told the STUC congress today.

The Scottish Labour leader slammed Prime Minister Boris Johnson as “a charlatan and a criminal” and said the Conservative Party was the “biggest threat to the United Kingdom.”

But he accused the Scottish National Party at Holyrood of “hiding behind” Tory failures to distract from their own record in office.

While it had promised that Scotland would become the “Saudi Arabia of renewables” and would have created 100,000 renewable energy jobs by 2020, it had failed to deliver on either pledge.

The Scotwind leasing project had done “precious little for Scottish jobs in supply chain” and the renewables budget was not funding a just transition for Scottish workers but “padding the pay of executives abroad,” Mr Sarwar charged.

“Scottish windfarms aren’t built here but imported from Indonesia. Ferries are built in Poland and Turkey.”

Condemning a Scottish political scene that he said was “narrow, binary and frankly broken,” the Glasgow MSP said the biggest issue facing Scots was the cost-of-living crisis.

The focus at Holyrood should be on that rather than “division,” he said in a veiled reference to the independence question.

Mr Sarwar called for the prosecution of P&O managers for the illegal sacking of 800 workers and said a Labour government would pass legislation to ensure it could never happen again “on day one.”

He called for public control of the bus network and a cap on bus fares, a windfall tax on oil and gas companies and a £15-an-hour minimum wage across the care sector.

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