RICHARD LEONARD had to put back his interview with the Star. But who could blame him? 

The new Holyrood Labour leader’s Central Scotland constituency is at the heart of the unprecedented Red Alert zone prescribed by the Met Office this week.

Scotland’s central belt has been gripped by Narnia levels of snow this week, leaving roads closed, trains cancelled and thousands of workers stranded.

When I was due to speak to Leonard on Thursday afternoon, he was one of them.

He had also been gearing up to speak to Morning Star readers at the paper’s Glasgow conference tomorrow, entitled An Industrial Strategy for People, which unfortunately had to be postponed due to the snow.

And to top it all, he’s currently dog-sitting a Hungarian vizsla called Copper. Unsurprising, then, that he’s firmly behind Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge to force landlords to allow tenants to keep pets.

Indeed, unlike previous Scottish Labour leaders, he hasn’t made a dog’s dinner out of attempts to distance himself from Corbyn’s leadership of the Britain-wide party.

When Leonard became Scottish Labour leader in December, he had campaigned very much as the left candidate for the role — against Anas Sarwar, a former vice-chair of Blairite group Progress. A former GMB union official, Leonard was elected to Holyrood only in 2016.

His predecessor Kezia Dugdale, now best known for her time on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, had been a strong supporter of a second referendum on Brexit. 

Leonard, on the other hand, was one of just three left-wing Labour MSPs — the others being Neil Findlay and Elaine Smith — to vote against a symbolic motion protesting at the triggering of Article 50.

Opposing a second referendum is “absolutely” a decision he stands by.

“I’m clear that we need to respect the result of the referendum,” Leonard tells the Star. “It’s not about going back on the 2016 decision — it’s about what deal we secure to facilitate Brexit. It’s not the place for elected politicians to try to overturn the will of the people.”

He is “pleased” with Corbyn’s announcement earlier this week in support of a new customs union with the EU after Britain quits.

“Jobs, the economy and the maintenance of workers’ rights are the right priorities for negotiation,” he says — but he has little confidence that Britain’s negotiating team will deliver the goods on these counts.

Leonard says he can foresee a situation where the Tories “won’t find support” for their proposed deal among their own MPs and, with Labour opposition too, their blueprint could be voted down.

“There’s a distinct possibility of a constitutional crisis later in the year,” he says, not without some appetite. 

But this would not mean undoing Brexit. Instead, MPs could force a general election, and with a change of government, a new negotiating team under Corbyn could return to the table with new demands.

Leonard doesn’t see Nicola Sturgeon’s demand for a “special status” inside the EU’s existing single market as a serious demand. 

“The EU will not fashion a deal with part of a member state, or part of a previous member state. 

“The SNP’s own position has changed over time, but in the end they would like to see Scotland becoming an independent state with its own membership of the EU.”

But, he stresses, there was a “clear referendum decision” against this in 2014. And trying to overturn this has as little traction with the public as trying to overturn the decision to leave the EU, Leonard argues.

Indeed, he says this is even the case with a “huge cohort of people who voted Yes” to independence. And there are plenty of SNP voters who “don’t like their votes being used as a proxy for remaining in the EU.”

This was part of the reason, he believes, for the SNP’s loss of support in the Westminster general election last year. But he’s also clear that Labour gained ground thanks to the party’s leftward shift.

“We spoke once again about public ownership, about being anti-austerity — we spoke once again about Labour wanting to redistribute not just wealth but power.” 

For a man with his trade union background and a history on Labour’s left wing, this was music to his ears.

And these “enduring themes” have a particular relevance to Scotland, he believes. Well before he ran for the leadership, Leonard was working on a vision for a Scottish industrial strategy — something he argues the SNP government is sorely lacking.

For the Scottish Labour leader, there’s no better example of this than the threat hanging over the BiFab yards. The engineering firm, which produces fabrications for offshore oil, gas and renewable electricity generation, threatened to close its sites last year after it ran into financial trouble.

Workers staged a “work-in,” in the model of the occupation at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders which brought their union convener Jimmy Reid to national fame in the 1970s. 

The Scottish government bailed the company out — but it was only a temporary reprieve, with redundancy notices sent out last month.
Leonard’s own union, the GMB, has been at the forefront of the continued fight to keep the yards open and secure more work for the yards. 

Yesterday a cross-party delegation of MSPs wrote to Westminster’s Business Secretary Greg Clark to demand a key contract be awarded to BiFab.

An industrial strategy is “exactly the answer for BiFab,” but the Scottish government has “no industrial strategy at all,” he complains. 

“The SNP, in office but not in power, lurch from one failed rescue to the next. There’s far too much market, and far too little planning.”

This is the kind of rhetoric that would have sounded absurdly radical among Labour’s establishment a few years ago — and unbelievable even more recently in Scottish Labour. 

But Leonard’s tone shows a confidence of being part of a new mainstream, and warmth as well as anger at the state of the world. He’s been listening to Paul Weller’s album A Kind Revolution, after all.

It’s no surprise that it’s on industrial issues that Leonard sounds most confident, having made a life out of advocating for workers and secure jobs.

But he has faced troubles closer to home, not least in his own party’s machinations. As the Star reported last month, some of Leonard’s supporters have spoken out against “the sort of refusal we saw to accept Corbyn’s victory in 2015, now being repeated in Scotland.”

Leonard stresses that Scottish Labour’s prospects for revival are dependent on “having a Labour Party that’s united in Scotland” — and that means united with Corbyn’s leadership too.

“I don’t think that people on the whole vote for divided parties,” he warns. But he rejects the notion that the Scottish party is currently in a state of division.

“No, we’re building not just a unity, but a unity of purpose,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to put forward a hopeful vision for a different kind of Scotland.”

Crucial to this will be his ambitions for a “community organising culture inside the Scottish Labour Party.” That means building in workplaces, forging “links with trade unionists in workplaces as well as with trade union regional secretaries.”

And local government too can lead the way. “Down the years local government has often been the place radical ideas have been developed.”

Leonard’s current reading is The Nothing, a recent novel by Hanif Kureishi. But taking on the helm of a party that has undoubtedly faced years of hollowing out, he’s under pressure to deliver the full monty.