Firstly, yes, this is a very long sub-tweet. As I have said before, Scottish Labour can continue on a path to recovery and relevance by supporting people’s aspirations and by reaching out to build as broad a coalition as possible.
To do that we need to talk about issues the SNP are not comfortable on, education, jobs, economy, health services, and offer up our own alternative vision. That is something we have been doing very well the past few weeks.
What we shouldn’t do, and must not do, is to open up conversations on topics where the SNP are entirely comfortable and can spin populist rhetoric without ever having to explain any of the detail.
That is why it was disappointing to see a Labour MSP voluntarily and proactively open two such topics of conversation this morning. All this will do is give red meat to SNP activists and move the conversation away from where Scottish Labour have successfully kept it during the debate on Covid regulations at Holyrood, on helping tenants and supporting neglected sectors of the economy like hospitality, the night time economy and taxi drivers.
Going off message is inevitable sometimes and we shouldn’t be robots but to proactively give an interview on these topics, allowing the conversation to be dragged away from where it should be is deeply unhelpful and potentially damaging at a time when we were starting to show we were on people’s side.