On Thursday as I walked from door to door a bit drenched with a group of passionate and motivated Labour supporters I thought fondly of my first memory as a child of politics and elections. I was sitting on the local service bus on a bleak damp night going with my mum to vote and my mum walking up and down both floors of the packed double decker bus asking people if they had voted and telling them they have to vote to get the Tories out.
My mum was passionate in her belief that Labour was the party of working people and we needed a Labour government to stand up for working people.
And on Thursday for the first time in a long time it truly felt like we had not just that passion but also that belief that something bigger was at stake, we were not being asked to vote for personalities and sound bites but for principled Labour politicians with vision and with ideas to transform our country.
The experience of this general election has been for me quite uplifting and one of the most positive campaigns I have been involved in for such a long time. Jeremy Corbyn has shown not only that he is a man of great courage, honesty and principle but more important that there is an alternative to the centre right consensus that has dominated British politics for too long.
And more exciting for Scottish Labour was that in Scotland, in the last weeks of the campaign it was clear on the doors that the Corbyn vision of a better way was breaking through the never ending divisions around constitutional politics. We must now build on that momentum, build on the manifesto for the many not the few and be once again the party that inspires people, the party of working people that will challenge the cosy elites and their trickle-down economics that so badly fail the majority in Scotland and indeed across the United Kingdom.
