Anas Sarwar has insisted he is “absolutely tough enough to take on Nicola Sturgeon” and said that Tory sleaze is letting the SNP hid their failings in government.
Asked on Sky News if he was ready to take Nicola Sturgeon on, Sawrar said: “Absolutely I can take her on and I’m standing directly in her own constituency as a demonstration of that.”
“I don’t want to take her on in the way that previous politicians want to take people on, which is shouting, getting angry, I think our politics deserves better than that.”
Sarwar repeated his message that Scots faced a “pandemic election, not a normal election” and that recovering from Covid-19 was the main priority over independence.
He told Sky News: “Of course Scotland has the right to choose its own future, but our manifesto makes clear we do not support independence, we do not support a referendum.
“We believe the next parliament should be focused entirely on delivering a national recovery and building our country back together.
“Not going back to those old arguments, not going back to the old divisions, and that is a case only Labour is making in a serious way.”
Sarwar also hit out at the “incompetent and scandal-hit” Tory party over the sleaze allegations against Boris Johnson and said that the Scottish Conservatives do not have what it takes to stand up to the SNP.
With the briefing war between former adviser Dominic Cummings and Downing Street escalating, Sarwar said that the people of Scotland deserve better than ‘Tory sleaze and psychodrama.”
Sarwar said: “We have a failing SNP government and a First Minister who is out of ideas but as long as the incompetent and scandal-hit Tories remain the main opposition the SNP will be able to hide their failings behind Tory failure.”
He added: “After every SNP failure, they can simply point to the mistakes and sleaze of the Tories and say ‘at least we are not as bad as that lot’- Scotland deserves so much better than that.”
“We deserve better than the Tory sleaze and psychodrama on display this week The people of Scotland deserve a better government, and a better opposition.”
