STEWART PATERSON

Political Correspondent

FIRMS can afford a Living Wage of £10 an hour to end poverty pay across the UK, Kezia Dugdale has said.

She launched the Labour Party’s Scottish manifesto for the General Elections and said the single most transformative policy was to increase the minimum which workers could be paid.

She said the warnings from Tories that increasing the Living Wage will “wreck the economy” were the same as when Labour introduced the National Minimum Wage in 1998.

Ms Dugdale said: “Some are saying the same now, but the truth is our businesses can afford to pay a little more so that workers aren’t paid a poverty wage.”

Ms Dugdale said with the flexibility demanded by some companies must also come certainty for workers.

She said: “It’s not too much to ask that people at work shouldn’t have to put up with the Victorian standards of employment. Our economy needs to work for the many not just the few.”

Ms Dugdale attacked the Conservatives for seven years of cuts which she said have “hurt the country”.

The Labour leader said the promises of a new conservatism were merely words.

She said: “Their actions were very different. They delivered cuts to disabled people, the bedroom tax and the rape clause.

“At every chance they slashed support and threatened opportunity.”

Labour’s manifesto commits to overturning much of the Tory welfare reforms.

It promises to scrap the “punitive” sanctions regime. Scrap the bedroom tax, reinstate housing benefit for under 21s and scrap cuts to Bereavement Support Payments.

Ms Dugdale said the Tories were standing in the election on a “miserable and mean manifesto” which she said would take the country backwards.

She said the Tories and the SNP were “two sides of the same coin”.

Both parties, she said, were “intent on distraction and diversions, ducking the real issues in this campaign.”

She added: “It suits them both to only talk about independence or Brexit.

“For one to blame London and the other Brussels.”

In the same speech the Labour leader urged Tory and LibDem voters to back a Labour candidate top defeat the SNP.

Ms Dugdale urged tactical voting for her party in a bid to “break the hold of nationalism”.

She said: “In 2015 we lost out because people who wanted to stop the nationalists voted for different parties.

Today, I’m asking people in those communities to think before they vote.”