Labour’s shadow Scottish Secretary has admitted he wants to quit because he is unsure if he can juggle two senior roles in Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench team.
Following a mass resignation from the shadow cabinet, the under fire party leader was left without enough loyal MPs to fill the positions required to officially hold the UK Government to account.
One of those who quit was Ian Murray, the party’s sole MP in Scotland, forcing Dave Anderson to add Scotland to his brief focusing on Northern Ireland.
In a visit to Dundee, the MP Blaydon admitted juggling both roles, which each involve critical detail and subtleties given the constitutional make ups of the countries, was proving “quite tough”.
He revealed he was “reluctant” to add Scotland to his brief and hinted that he wanted Edinburgh South MP Mr Murray to step back into his role when the leadership contest has finished in the autumn.
Mr Anderson said: “It’s really hard to see it at the minute whether I’ll be able to do it because we’ve been in a strange position.
“Really, to an extent, we’re in a position where we will just have to work our way through and see where we get to. Clearly the election of the leader has distracted from what’s going on.
“Obviously the outcome will dictate what we look like as a frontbench team going forward. I hope that whoever wins, that my colleagues see the need for us all together.
“I’d be delighted to pass this job on to someone else if they’d be happy to do it. That would give it the attention that it fully deserves.
“If that doesn’t happen I’ll carry on trying my best and working with good people up here, working with colleagues wherever I can, but I think the job does deserve to have a standalone person doing it.
“That’s out of my control and sadly that’s outwith the control of the leader we have got.”
He added: “I have a lot of time for Ian Murray. He’s a great friend of mine and will continue to be.
“I’m hoping that if and when the leadership contest ends, Ian comes back on the front bench at Westminster as well as what he’s doing up here, in whatever capacity he wants and whatever capacity the leader offers him, whoever the leader is.
“But clearly we are in very, very strange political waters. There’s no point trying to pretend anything other. If we did we would just be kidding ourselves and kidding the public and that would just be nonsense.”
The SNP called on Mr Corbyn to sack his new man.
Callum McCaig MP said: “This is an astonishing admission from Dave Anderson – and he should be replaced as shadow Scottish Secretary immediately by someone who will give the job ‘the attention that it fully deserves’.
“Shadowing Scotland’s only Tory MP may not be the biggest job in the world, but if Labour are remotely serious about being listened to again by people in Scotland they should get someone in place who will do the job properly.”
Meanwhile Mr Anderson spoke of his passion to bring industry back to Dundee as part of a drive to see more Scots in work.
This largely centred on decommissioning for the city’s port and he lashed out at the UK and Scottish Governments for failing to secure the contract to decommission the Janice Floating Production Unit, with work instead going to Norway.
He said: “Why was the contract lost? Did the Norwegians undercut on price? I would be surprised.
“If you look at one of the main things in decommissioning it is the cost of the labour and I would have thought the cost of labour is at least as high in Norway as it is here.
“Maybe they have better facilities, which again you then ask do we need to be investing in the port as both Westminster and Holyrood?
“Let’s use this really bad experience that men and women have gone through up here as a way of saying let’s avoid these mistakes in the future.
“If we’ve got to spend public money taking people out of work, why don’t we turn it round and invest it in the industry?”
