I wish to thank the people of West Dunbartonshire who placed their trust in me and Scottish Labour at the General Election and by doing so helped elect a Labour Government with an incredible landslide victory.
I shall work tirelessly to serve my fellow West Dunbartonshire residents, those who voted for me and those who voted for other parties, but also those who decided not to vote for any party.
West Dunbartonshire and our country voted for change, to bring an end to 14 years of Tory chaos and 17 years of SNP failure.
However the scale of the challenge is huge, there is much work for me and the Labour Government to get on with and we have been in power for only a few short weeks.
The Tories and the SNP have broken our country. The rot is deep but my Labour Government is working hard to fix the foundations.
Every day we are finding new examples of the chaos the Conservative Government left behind with a £22 billion black hole in public finances:- the worst economic inheritance a government has faced since the Second World War. Then the SNP Scottish Government admitted they had made a mess of our Scottish economy with their own £500 million budget black hole, much bigger than expected due to their incompetence. We can do much better than this, it's time for Labour to fix the mess and deliver the change we all voted for.
We will deliver economic stability to stop the rot and build solid foundations to rebuild our country.
We have hit the ground running, we have already created a National Wealth Fund to grow the economy which will create hundreds of thousands of good, well-paid jobs and unlock business investment both locally and nationally.
The health crisis deepens in Scotland as terrifying stats reveal more than 7000 Scots waited more than a day in A+E and cancer deaths rose to a record 17000. Labour will cut NHS waiting lists and deliver 1000s more GP appointments each week, paid for by cutting down on tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes.
We will reduce household bills by creating GB Energy based right here in Scotland, we have already introduced the Bill to parliament and committed £8.3b to the company over the course of this parliament.
We will deliver on our promise to make work pay with the biggest boost to workers' rights in a generation, we will ban exploitative zero-hour contracts and fire and rehire, we will introduce basic rights to the workplace from day one and deliver a genuine living wage giving thousands of West Dunbartonshire residents an immediate pay rise.
This is just the start of the change we will deliver to improve the lives of everyone in West Dunbartonshire and across Scotland.
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