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Gordon Brown at Calton Parkhead church
Former Labour leader Gordon Brown at Calton Parkhead parish church in Glasgow. Photograph: Lucy Christie/PA
Former Labour leader Gordon Brown at Calton Parkhead parish church in Glasgow. Photograph: Lucy Christie/PA

Gordon Brown pledges £800m a year for social justice in Scotland

This article is more than 9 years old

Former PM fights to attract ex-Labour voters away from SNP with Glasgow pledge to spend more on NHS, youth jobs and students from low-income families

Gordon Brown has renewed Scottish Labour’s attempt to claw back votes in its former Glasgow heartlands by promising that his party would spend £800m a year fighting social inequality and ill-health. The former Labour leader and prime minister unveiled the pledge in the key constituency of Glasgow East, where the Scottish National party is poised to unseat Labour’s shadow Scotland secretary, Margaret Curran.

Brown, seen by party strategists as the only senior figure able to rally the several hundred thousand disaffected Labour voters who plan to vote SNP, said this contest would be “the social justice election”.

Speaking as several Scottish parties launched their general election campaigns, Brown said the £800m, to be spent on the NHS, funding for poor students and youth employment, would be made up of Scotland’s share of the UK-wide bankers’ bonus tax, the mansion tax, raising corporation tax, pension tax relief changes and a bank levy.

This is the second headline spending figure Labour has unveiled, drawing on extra taxes that depend on Labour forming the next government and, in large part, on Labour winning the 2016 Scottish parliamentary election. Last week, Scottish Labour party leader Jim Murphy said his pledges so far on the NHS, education and employment would be worth £1bn over the next parliament – promises that have so far failed to dent the SNP lead.

Brown, who is taking a substantial role in Labour’s ailing campaign despite standing down from Westminster at this election, admitted that Labour was now facing a tough fight after SNP membership surged to nearly 103,000 after the referendum. “We are against the odds,” he said, “but the Labour party was born against the odds. The SNP can spend the election campaign, if they like, talking about coalitions, deals, pacts … We will spend all our time discussing with the people what really matters.”

Speaking as SNP leader and first minister Nicola Sturgeon was in one of the constituency’s major shopping centres, the Forge, Brown told the Guardian that Labour would start to recover votes once campaigning intensified. “The questions that people ask me are about housing, health, education and employment,” he said. “Once we start talking about the real issues, people will find that the SNP measures are deficient, that they can’t end austerity with their measures, or they can’t deal with the poverty that they keep talking about.”

Buoyed by the SNP’s record polling figures for a Westminster election, which put the the party about 17 points ahead of Labour at 44%, Sturgeon told supporters and onlookers that “no seat is off limits” to the party in this campaign. She spoke with voters, posed for selfies with campaigners and “high-fived” a confused-looking toddler in his pram.

“By electing a strong team of SNP MPs, the people of Scotland can hold real power and deliver real change. The Westminster establishment have had things their own way for far too long – it’s time for Scotland to lead progressive politics across the whole UK by voting SNP,” she said.

In a further sign that the Scottish election will be won with centre-left and centre-ground votes, the Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, launched her party’s campaign by insisting she stood up for “the little guy”, the unemployed and struggling families. Reacting to a policy agenda set by Labour and the SNP, Davidson said the Tories too would increase the minimum wage and backed the living wage campaign. She stressed that her party had supported pension increases, taken 261,000 of the lowest-paid out of the income tax system, and would oppose zero-hours contracts if they exploited workers.

Insisting that her party had to be proud of its record in government, with 176,000 new jobs created in Scotland since 2010, she said it was “utter nonsense” that Labour and the SNP were more noble and moral than the Tories. “I’m not prepared to see our record trashed by half-truths and lazy assertions,” she said.

With the party hoping to win one or two more seats above the single Commons seat it currently holds, Davidson said she believed the Tories could put on votes in Scotland, but refused to speculate on the number being targeted. With Labour and Liberal Democrat votes slumping and the SNP vote soaring, she said: “I honestly think there will be two parties in Scotland whose vote will go up, and two parties in Scotland whose vote will go down.”

Meanwhile, the Scottish Greens became the first to unveil their full manifesto, calling for the UK-wide minimum wage to be raised to £10 an hour, the renationalisation of rail services, the replacement of the council tax with a new land tax, and capping of corporate pay. While the party’s membership has also surged since the referendum, to 8,600, Patrick Harvie, its co-convenor and MSP, confirmed that the party did not expect to win Westminster seats, but insisted that pushing up its share of the vote was a worthwhile goal.

Describing first-past-the-post as a broken electoral system, Harvie said he was convinced the Green party in England and Wales would win extra seats. He added the Scottish Greens had no complaint with the Greens at Westminster working alongside the SNP, his opponents in Scotland, if it meant finding common cause to fight austerity and cancel Trident’s replacement.

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