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NICOLA STURGEON launched her bid for the Scottish National Party leadership yesterday.
If she succeeded Alex Salmond at the party’s convention in November she would become Scotland’s first female first minister.
Ms Sturgeon declared that her “guiding ethos is a social-democratic one” as she warned Westminster parties to keep promises of greater powers for Scotland they made before the country’s independence referendum on September 18.
Despite the Yes campaign losing the referendum by over 10 percentage points, SNP membership has soared in the week since the vote — from 25,642 a week ago to over 57,000 today.
That makes it the third-largest political party in Britain and by far the largest in Scotland.
Ms Sturgeon called for “a fair society with strong public services” and named her priorities as “democracy and equality” in an open challenge to Labour, which has lost support because of its association with a “Westminster consensus” in favour of cuts and austerity.
But she dodged confrontation with big business, saying that a “vibrant business community” and the welfare state were “two sides of the same coin.”
Former Labour first minister Henry McLeish claimed that his party was in danger of “dying out” north of the border as former supporters signed up to the SNP and the Scottish Green Party, which also backed independence.
“We can’t ignore this. It’s happening in solid areas of the old Red Clydeside and in Dundee,” Mr McLeish warned.
“Far too often we are seen trying to catch the middle ground but it doesn’t exist. We need to get our values in order and explain what they are,” Mr McLeish argued, calling for a fully autonomous Scottish Labour Party since “Ed Miliband’s Labour is seeking English votes on different issues.”
But Communist Party Scottish secretary Tommy Morrison said that Labour was losing support because of a failure to promote working-class consciousness and solidarity.
“The forces causing austerity are at British and international level, not Scottish level,” he pointed out, meaning an autonomous Scottish Labour Party would not help.
“The SNP are selling us a national solution, not a class solution — and it seems McLeish is falling into that trap.”
