Keir Starmer has pleaded with Scots to use next week’s council elections to punish Boris Johnson’s “sleaze ridden” Government.
The Labour leader also urged voters to “send a message” to Nicola Sturgeon ’s Government for its “absolute” failure on the cost of living crisis.
Voters go to the polls on Thursday to elect 32 local councils and Scottish Labour is confident of making gains.
Party insiders believe they can seize back second place from the Tories amid partygate and other scandals haunting the Prime Minister.
Starmer was in Edinburgh yesterday talking to shoppers and workers at a Tesco in Leith.
Speaking to the Record, he responded to the revelation that Tory Neil Parish is the MP who allegedly watched porn in the Commons.
“It shows, yet again, that their first instinct is to try and cover up,” he said.
“There’s a saying that the fish rots from the head down and it applies in this situation.”
He said of the state of the Government: “It is sleaze ridden.
“But I’m afraid when you’ve got a law breaking Prime Minister who then lies to the public and to the Parliament, is it any wonder that it’s a Government mired in sleaze?
“It’s as least as bad, if not worse, than the Major Government.”
However, he said the priority of voters is rising energy bills and other issues like the national insurance hike:
“Whilst lots of the media and newspapers are talking about the allegations at Westminster, understandably, I can tell you out and about, on the doorsteps, in Tesco, there is only thing people are wanting to talk about - the cost of living.”
He blasted the SNP’s lukewarm response to a windfall tax on profits made by oil and gas giants:
“They [voters] hear the Scottish Government saying ‘no, no, no, we don’t want to take that step’, on the argument that it would be somehow unfair on the oil and gas companies. I think they want a Scottish Government that’s on their side and they havn’t got it at the moment.”
“People are too scared to put their central heating up. People sitting in warm clothes all day. People in Tesco’s today saying they pick up items in the supermarket and put them back down again because they can’t afford them. This is the human cost of the failure at Holyrood and at Westminster.”
He said of the election: “I certainly want people to send a message to Boris Johnson and to Nicola Sturgeon about their absolute failure on the cost of living crisis.
“It’s also an opportunity, positively, to vote for a party that’s actually got practical plans.”
Starmer promised an incoming Labour Government would take a very different approach to welfare policy than the Tories have since 2010:
“The Tory policies on social security of the last 12 years have failed abjectly. If you look at the numbers of people now in poverty…it is clear it is not working.
“What we want to do is to have a much fairer system of social security and that is something we are working on.”
An SNP spokesperson said: “The cost of living crisis has been the result of years and years of toxic Tory cuts which Keir Starmer’s party have been happy to prop up, in coalitions with the Tories in councils like Aberdeen.
“On top of that, Scottish Labour’s craven support for the broken and corrupt Westminster system has left the party with absolutely zero credibility."
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