The Scottish Socialist Party and its candidate Collette Bradley have accused Labour’s Davy Russell of running scared of the public, after he refused to appear at the public debate between candidates organised in Hamilton on Wednesday 14 May by the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. They’ve offered to organise a public debate with him ‘any time, any place’.
SSP Election Campaign Organiser Richie Venton said:
“Why did the Labour candidate reject the repeated invitations from SCND? Why did he even turn down their offer of arranging a substitute Labour speaker? His excuse to a SCND officer that ‘I’m chokka’ is an insult to other candidates, and more to the point, to the members of the public who wanted to judge their options by hearing the candidates.
“It surely can’t have been a problem of transport; the venue for the SCND hustings was all of 50 metres from Labour’s campaign office, across a pedestrian crossing!
“The SSP offers him a second chance to come out of hiding and reveal what he’s all about. We will organise a public debate between him and Collette Bradley, any time, any place.
“And maybe Anas Sarwar and the Labour party could chip in half of the costs of a venue, if they’ve not run out of cash from big business donors!
“We make this offer in the spirit of democracy and public accountability over politicians.”
SSP candidate Collette Bradley said:
“I wasn’t the only one angry at the Labour candidate’s refusal to turn up for this public debate, which SCND took the time and trouble to organise, advertise and apparently invite him to, not once, but repeatedly.
“What has he got to hide – apart from Labour’s devotion to nuclear weapons of mass destruction that squander £205billion while one-in-four kids in Scotland start life in poverty? Or their continued arms sales to Israel so the right-wing Netanyahu regime can slaughter innocent Palestinians in a hospital, as the patients there recover from a previous aerial assault by the same government? Or Labour’s cuts to the incomes of pensioners, children, workers, sick and disabled people, local services like school buses?
“Come to think of it, no wonder he went into hiding, in case the public asked him questions about Labour’s betrayal of every principle its founders stood for.
“My challenge is for him to publicly debate with me on these and other issues before he expects local voters to just blindly support him out of the tradition of voting Labour, without hearing what he has to say for himself. That’s the least he owes local people.”
