Michael Marra: John Swinney is happy to talk about Reform as long as it splinters the non-SNP vote

So many years on, it can sometimes be hard to remember just how Covid upended all our worlds. But in May 2021, with most of the country still living under some form of lockdown, Scotland went to the polls and among the 129 MSPs elected, 42 were sworn in for the very first time, including Labour’s Michael Marra.

And maybe it is because he entered parliament at such an emotionally charged moment in time, but the passion that Marra expressed then in his impressive maiden speech has not diminished. 
The chamber fell silent as he rose to his feet and by the end of his contribution, many were talking about his skills as an orator and the fact that he was one to watch.

“Let’s look to dialogue, education, justice and peace,” he implored. “We can be sure that a politics that elevates sentiment over action will be the end of progress so, in this moment of pandemic crisis, there is a rightful expectation that we will act deliberately and with consideration, but with principled intent, to make better Scotland’s ills. It falls to us to bind the nation’s wounds and care for those who shall have borne the battle. We must, as we shape our recovery, work together for a future built from the first principles of social justice.”

It was stirring stuff fuelled by emotion which even now remains never far from the surface as he talks about tackling some of the real-life hardships endured by his constituents. And in a deeply personal interview, his voice often breaks as he gives voice to clear injustice and talks of the family that has shaped him. But so too is his anger clearly apparent at the way he believes the country is being mismanaged by the SNP. 

Marra comes from a large and, he would say, noisy Dundee family born of Irish Catholic immigrants who landed in Glasgow in the 1820 having left their homeland to escape the first potato famine and then made their way to Dundee to settle. He has a diary written by a great aunt that the family only found once she died some years back that charts how she arrived by boat in Glasgow as a young girl “with absolutely nothing” and then walked barefoot all the way to Dundee where she found work in the mills, as did most other members of the family. Indeed, Marra is of the first generation in his family not to have worked at some point in the mills during the last 200 years. Most of his family are now largely teachers or musicians and he says there is a storytelling aspect to them all. 

“Family is hugely important to us and when we were kids, there was lots of singing and playing of instruments and whatever else at parties. We would have a massive New Year party on 2 January. We still do it. It’s not as big as it used to be, but when I was younger there would be hundreds of people, literally hundreds – cousins, aunts, uncles, hangers-on, all the branches of the bigger family would come and there would be a band. It was massive, in a hall, and it was a big, boozy, smoky, brilliant affair.”

The Marra family is, he tells me with obvious warmth, “big, loud, and Labour through and through”. 

His great grandfather, Nicholas Marra, founded the Independent Labour Party in the city, was an elected councillor and also set up the Jute and Flax Workers’ Union – the largest trade union in Dundee at the time. His uncle, the late Michael Marra, the acclaimed folk singer, was a socialist, a republican, and a proud Dundonian whose music was rooted in stories of class struggle and injustice. One of the many obituaries following his death from cancer in 2012 said that he “had enough cynicism of mainstream politicians not to be fooled by any of them but enough humility to recognise that even mainstream politics is filled with people trying to make a difference.” 

And the musician’s nephew, Michael, and his older sister, Jenny, the former MSP, would both fall into that latter category. The MSP for North East Scotland joined the Labour party as a teenager, was elected a Dundee councillor in 2017 and also worked for the former party leader, Iain Gray, during that ill-fated election campaign of 2011 when Gray infamously fled into a Subway sandwich shop to escape being harangued by activist Sean Clerkin. It was to become a pivotal moment for Labour. The party had been ahead in the polls for most of the previous year – often by 10 points or more. There was even talk of an outright majority; Gray was expected to be the next first minister, his daughter had moved her wedding in anticipation of her father’s win, but just a month after the Subway incident, the SNP and Labour were neck-and-neck in the polls, Gray went on to lose, Alex Salmond won an unprecedented majority and the rest is history. And for Marra, that real-life experience of how public opinion can turn on a sixpence was not only instructive at the time, but feeds into how he optimistically sees his party’s electoral fortunes for 2026.

“I suppose I’ve been through these cycles before and, yes, 2011, I was there – I felt it viscerally. And that was basically over about eight weeks, the polls shifted incredibly quickly. And yes, I think that could easily happen again now. Of course, I’m not happy with where we are and where I want us to get to, but it’s pretty clear what’s going on, the SNP are not increasing their support, people are really pissed off with them, they think they are rubbish, and they are right. And so, their support is where it was last year. It’s not growing, and I don’t think it is going to grow. All the sentiment is pretty clear on that. There has been a splintering, clearly, of the anti- or the non-SNP vote, and that’s partly because we’re doing difficult things in government at Westminster and we need to communicate the good things better and spell out the circumstances that we’re in because of SNP mismanagement more clearly, but I think the SNP are at their ceiling in terms of support, and with an improvement in our UK position, which I think is more than possible, in fact, I think it’s likely, and with the choices in this election being framed properly, I think that we can still win.

“My argument is that the Labour Party is making the country better, so I just don’t agree with the premise at all that the UK Government is a liability to our electoral chances next May. We definitely have to tell that story better, and it needs to be a more hopeful story. But you know, working as closely as I have with Rachel [Reeves] and Darren Jones and others, and speaking to them regularly, I know that the scale of the challenges that they faced when they came in were almost overwhelming in terms of the fiscal side of it and the economic circumstances are absolutely huge. So, it doesn’t surprise me, in that regard, that the narrative became about the challenge rather than where we wanted to go and why. But if you look at the list of benefits introduced by, for instance, the new deal brought in for working people and the most redistributive budget in decades, from the top decile to the bottom decile, it put more money into the pockets of people who needed it and the impact in terms of the Scottish budget, which was really significant, much more significant than the SNP expected. So, there’s a huge amount of good news, but there have also been missteps in terms of poor communication. There’s no doubt about that.

“And you’re right, I think the party as a whole needs to show both more empathy and more hope for the country. I think that’s part of who people think we are, and we need to show more of that. I don’t think that’s just around Keir [Starmer]. I think that’s for all of us at a time when we are incredibly fiscally constrained. And no, I don’t agree that is because of our own self-imposed fiscal rules because those rules are a reflection of the reality of being a highly indebted country in a situation where we have much higher global interest rates than we’ve had previously. Ignoring that as SNP colleagues in the parliament want to do, and I listen to this all the time, that essentially they are saying that we should have no fiscal rules at all, that we should just borrow, borrow, borrow, borrow, borrow. They went into the budget in the autumn asking for over £70bn of additional spending. They have opposed £45bn of revenue raisers. So, a net fiscal adjustment of £115bn – Liz Truss crashed the economy on £45bn. I mean, there’s nothing credible about any of that at all. 

Marra photographed for Holyrood by David Anderson 

“John Swinney has this bank manager reputation, but it is nonsense, he doesn’t care about the financial consequences of his decisions, and that is apparent. The nature of those continuous demands for huge spending on anything or otherwise reveals that. But within that, we should remember that the week before the autumn budget, they asked for, I think the number was an additional £16bn in UK spending on the health service, in order to get them the consequentials they thought they needed. Health spending went up by £22bn. They were completely astonished that the Labour Party had taken decisions to put up taxes where it was necessary, particularly on the rich, redistributive taxes, and to put money into public services at the scale they did. I mean, it was the right decision, and that resulted in an additional £5.2bn for Scotland and of course, we knew that would create political capital for the SNP, but it was the right thing to do. And when you look at it, the SNP budget was a Labour-funded budget. It really was. People can talk about the political consequences of all those things, and there are, of course, downsides to employers, National Insurance charges, there are difficulties that come out of that, but, you know, genuinely, what were the alternatives? I tell you something, the SNP wouldn’t know because they weren’t making any alternative suggestions.

“For three years in a row the SNP have had emergency budgets where it’s been chaos. A senior source in the civil service said to me that three quarters of their time is spent fighting to keep the budget that is allocated in December for the forthcoming year because internally, it’s chaos. So instead of making decisions about changing the health service or making it better, they’re fighting to keep parts of the budget in the departments it was allocated to. In health, in education, or whatever, everybody’s fighting to keep their budget. They spend the rest of their time answering FOIs [Freedom of Information requests]. So that is the entirety of your senior leadership in the civil service caught up in this and they know that it’s chaos. The Fiscal Commission knows that it’s chaos. They say it. The auditor general knows that it’s chaos. They say it. It is a total mess. And it needs to be called out. They need to be out.

“And yes, we need to get that message to the public. That narrative will be partly about how they spend the public’s money. And I think on these issues, the public are absolutely clear, whether it be on education, health, stewardship of the public finances, the economy, all of the SNP’s record is massive negatives. And that’s why they don’t want to talk about their record. They want to talk about what’s happening at Westminster or they want to talk about Reform. They want a different question. They don’t want to talk about what’s happening. They don’t want to answer questions like, why can’t disabled kids get care in the school holidays? Let’s not, let’s talk about anything but the record. And that’s putting aside all the stuff that they said they would do that they haven’t got off their arses to get done either. And yes, of course, I’m angry.”
Marra is fully aware that being angry isn’t enough and in the four years that he has served as an MSP his name has become synonymous with fighting, and winning, particular battles on behalf of constituents. I ask him who is in his mind’s eye when he thinks about politics not working for ordinary people.

“I do think of a woman in Dundee who came to me absolutely at the end of her tether. She’d been waiting eight and a half years for prolapse surgery. Her life was in ruins. She was incontinent. She couldn’t make love to her husband; her relationship was in real decline. She couldn’t look at me when she was telling me all this. Imagine, telling this to a man, and a stranger. Luckily, I have an amazing colleague, a woman who she was able to look at and tell the deepest, most personal parts of her life to. And what had tipped her over the edge and made her come to me was that she’d gone to Ninewells for a pre-op meeting, and the women on the desk said, ‘I don’t know why you’re here, we don’t even have a surgeon’. So, they were still calling her for a pre-op meeting in full knowledge that the surgery was not going to happen, and she had been waiting eight and a half years. So people like her who are fighting against a system that is basically stacked up against them, but also people who are being told a story that just isn’t true. And I think that increasingly our public services do just that. The SNP government essentially wants to tell a story about things that are meant to be happening, but aren’t. We got that woman her surgery in the end, and I think, at the last count another 130 or so other women who’ve been waiting multiple years have got the surgery. This was a post-mesh thing, where [the government] didn’t put in place the training to support surgeons to develop alternative means of surgical intervention. Just an absence of that forward thinking. Generally the amount that just doesn’t happen in women’s healthcare in particular is just a scandal. Breast cancer care in Dundee is another thing I’ve done a lot of work on, and I just don’t think it would happen if it was about men’s health care, if I’m honest.”

On the day that Marra and I meet, he is tired after a late night at his candidate selection contest in Dundee. He is also emotional about the debate that he will be speaking to later that day in parliament about wraparound care for children with disabilities. It’s a case he has been working on for a constituent whose son has cerebral palsy and both Leo and his mother, Nicola Donnelly, were in the chamber to hear Marra call for the Scottish Government to properly fund local councils to provide the services for disabled children that they are legally required to do – another policy he says the SNP has failed to properly implement. 

He texts me later to apologise for shedding tears during the interview when we talked about his mother, Eileen, who died just over a year ago from cancer a mere six months after her diagnosis. At the time he posted a tribute on social media, saying: “My wonderful mum Eileen Marra passed away yesterday. The blessing of my life is to have known the depth of her love. Blisteringly honest. Achingly funny. A teacher, a reader. So, so intelligent. My dad’s best friend of 50 years. Above all else a mum and gran. God, we loved her.” It is still very raw and he says that he had been thinking about her at his selection meeting the previous night when his dad had text him afterwards to remind his son that his mother was always very pleased when things were going well politically, but when they weren’t she would give her husband a look which basically said ‘this is your fault’. He laughs at this and says his mother was “probably a more radical individual” than him but instilled in him that real sense of injustice and the need to fight it. 

And of course, Marra was not the first in his family to become an MSP and he started his inaugural speech in Holyrood in the self-deprecating manner that is his bent when referring obliquely to his elder sister Jenny, who stood down in 2021, when he said that his Labour colleagues dubbed his election the ‘Marra Downgrade’.

Marra tells me that despite his own political successes – a place on Scottish Labour’s front bench team as shadow cabinet secretary for finance and the fact that he has been charged with working on the party’s manifesto for next year – that his sister, “in many respects, is the better politician than I am”. I ask him if he hopes she will return to Holyrood at some stage.

“Without any doubt, yes. I persuaded her to do it in the first place and I thought she was absolutely outstanding at the job. But she’s got kids, and that takes a lot of her time, she’s very dedicated to them, and this place isn’t always family friendly but yeah, I’ve got to hope so, because it would be a better place for her being here.”

And yet on one of the most contentious issues of this last parliament, the gender recognition reforms, sister and brother did not entirely agree – for while Michael Marra did not vote for the bill, his sister would have voted against.

Marra with Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar | Alamy

“I think, broadly for [Labour] around these issues, there has been a culture of talking about the party being at the vanguard of progress. And I think this has shown that when some people are claiming something as being progress, sometimes that is a rights agenda, they want to strengthen people’s rights. And as a normative case, I would be generally in favour of that. But what’s come through this process is that there was a clear clash of rights, where one set of people’s rights were then being elevated above another, and that to me was clear through the process of the legislation. I went with amendments to the cabinet secretary and one of her advisers said to me in the meeting, ‘you do realise that if you were saying this 20 years ago about gay people, you would be called a bigot’. And I said to her that I simply did not accept that at all; it wasn’t true. I think there was a zealotry around the way that some in government pursued these issues, frankly, and some of it was unacceptable conduct in the way they treated other people.

“So no, Jenny and I didn’t agree on it in the end. She would have preferred that I had voted against it clearly. I mean, you know her views well, and I was in a process at that point about balancing off a set of different responsibilities that I had, which she is fully aware of and understands as someone who, in essence, is a politician to her core. So, she understands the tensions that were there in terms of collective responsibility, and how you govern that, and how you try to change people’s minds within persuasion and private conversations. But ultimately, I just didn’t vote.

“Obviously I had those discussions with colleagues at the time, and we came to different views about the bill, and I didn’t feel that I could vote for it. It was no small thing for me not to adhere to the whip in that regard. But there were an awful lot of very strong discussions about it, and amendments that were laid that weren’t passed. Anas [Sarwar] has talked about that and said that those should have been red lines, and the assurances were given that were proven to be false.

“I wouldn’t say I feel embarrassed about it, no. I think I took a difficult decision at the time, and some people, I think, more than justifiably, would say, ‘well, you didn’t go as far as you should have gone.’ But I feel I played my role. Nothing like the women who have led the case and put their own livelihoods on the line to make the progress that they’ve made in recent weeks, nothing like that, but when you’re part of a movement, you have those conversations and you try to move things slowly in the right direction as best you can, then you have to balance those things out, and I think in the long run, that’s been successful.

“But I think the SNP government’s approach across this issue has made life worse for everybody involved. I think they have been neglectful of women’s rights, to say the least, and actually, the flip side of that, I think they have made trans people’s lives worse as well. It was a ridiculously ill-conceived piece of legislation, poorly drafted, and the ministers could not defend it in any coherent way. That’s why I didn’t vote for it.”

“But now we’ve got the follow through of the Supreme Court judgment, and the position of the Scottish Government on this is as clear as mud, frankly. Do I think this will be an election issue next year? For some people, yes. For many people, absolutely not. But there’s also many women who say to me that they will never vote for the SNP again and yes, it’s fair to say some will not like our position.”

Marra has been tasked with working on the party’s manifesto for next year’s election. Looking at the opinion polls, that is an ominous ask, and while he won’t be drawn on specifics given, he says, the SNP has form in just simply copying Labour’s manifestos, he says he will be guided by the principle that Scotland needs to work in the interests of ordinary people. And right now, he says, it isn’t.

“The first minister is very pleased to talk at length and voluminously about Reform, and you can understand why he wants to do that, partly because Reform is splintering the non-SNP vote so it’s entirely opportunistic of him. He knows he’s not increasing his own support so his strategy is to maintain the fractures in the rest of the country that are against the SNP. That’s how they hope to get to next year. I think they’ve given up on winning more support and they’re playing a strategy that’s saying, as long as the rest stays divided the SNP will be ok. But where does he go if it doesn’t? That’s his challenge. Clearly we’ve got our own challenges but when it comes down to it, it will be a clear choice: SNP or Labour. For the first minister and the programme for government that he has brought forward, it is about clearing the decks of the legacy of Sturgeon and Yousaf, trying to get out moving away from the gender issues, taking some of the social stuff off the table, and then trying essentially to sit back quietly and point the other way for a year. That’s not going to fix the NHS. It’s not going to fix schools. It’s not going to fix what is now, I think, a boiling crisis in our universities. And if you think what’s happening in universities is bad, speak to college principals. 

“I mean, the whole social infrastructure that they [the SNP] are responsible for is in turmoil, and they have no idea and no will to do anything about it. They deserve to lose. Deserve badly to lose. Our challenge is to win the argument.”