The Labour leader will use a visit to Edinburgh, where the world-famous fringe festival is taking place, to unveil his plan to increase investment and participation in the arts. After the NEC ruled they were not, a group of members won a high court challenge against the decision, only for this to be overturned on appeal.
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The visit follows the accusation from Mr Smith that Mr Corbyn is responsible for Labour finishing third behind the SNP and Conservatives in May’s Holyrood election. “He should have told people who were jeering me to keep quiet”.
Mr Smith is also visiting Scotland after gaining the support of Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale to replace Mr Corbyn.
Senior MPs, including former shadow cabinet ministers Lilian Greenwood and Gloria De Piero, vent their frustration about Mr Corbyn in the video message supporting his leadership rival Owen Smith.
“The issues have to be the Labour party’s commitment to redistribution of wealth and power”.
“Let me make it clear”.
The Labour leader also accused the pro-independence party of being “good” at “adopting Labour’s clothes”.
“I’ve been Labour all my life and I’ll be Labour till I die”.
He said he reserved the right to disagree with the SNP, adding that the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures released this week showed how fragile the SNP’s vision of independence is.
Mr Smith said: “The reason I think Jeremy can be so complacent and passive about this is he’s happy with the result”.
But Mr Smith has picked up support from two other major unions, the GMB and Usdaw.
The Pontypridd MP said Scotland is “underfunded” and pledged to invest £20bn through a UK-wide “new deal” which would be past on through Westminster’s block grant funding formula to Holyrood.
“There is creativity in all of us but we need to give people the opportunities for this creativity to flourish”.
“People in Scotland can not look to Labour in Westminster right now and anticipate us winning a general election, therefore we are ill serving the Scottish Labour Party and we are ill serving the people of Scotland”.
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“The biggest priority right now should be protecting Scotland’s place in and relationship with the European Union, and while the SNP are focused on that objective, Labour prefer to spend their time navel-gazing and deckchair-shuffling”.
