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Richard Leonard

@richardleonardmsp.bsky.social

2.2K followers 830 following 270 posts

🌹 Labour MSP for Central Scotland ✊ Trade unionist 🙌 The cause of labour is the hope of the world

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Apr 3

'The main thing is to give people hope'

Great words from the great Tony Benn, on the centenary of his birth ✊

How we miss him

fb.watch/yK9AFF3Q7h/

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · 12h

👀 Watch John Swinney (eventually) admit he has NEVER visited Ferguson Marine as First Minister

www.facebook.com/reel/1917815...

Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · 1d

One quarter of the price you pay for your train ticket currently goes to private companies to pay shareholders

I'm backing @aslefunion.bsky.social's demand for public financing of new trains through green bonds so that every penny can be reinvested

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · 2d

Great to see Battleship Potemkin at the Bo’ness Hippodrome at the weekend with a live musical accompaniment by S!nk

Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · 19d

Not everyone who has joined the protests outside hotels where asylum seekers are staying would call themselves far right

But anyone who stands with people making Nazi salutes and holding up signs bearing white supremacist slogans ought to conclude that they are on the wrong side

Richard Leonard MSP: ‘Let us vow to change it….and let us be united’

Let me speak as plainly as I can, the protests outside the Cladhan Hotel have been fuelled by far right propaganda and attended by neo-Nazis, and I stand fully behind the anti-racist campaigners who f...

www.falkirkherald.co.uk

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · 19d

I know which side I am on in @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social's dispute with Edinburgh University bosses: @ucu.org.uk

Which side is the Scottish Government on?

fb.watch/Cd4eHs8sAW/

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · 20d

#OTD in 1959, 47 miners went to work in Auchengeich Pit and never came home

Every year, their village remembers them by coming together to reaffirm the values of solidarity and unity

fb.watch/Cbu_6uG3wA/

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · 21d

❌ Stop Trump

💥 Scrap nuclear weapons

🌍 Make the world a safer place

fb.watch/CaFMUVzAnA/

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · 23d

This is a win for the workers and their trade unions who refused to accept that what they had been told was inevitable

Alexander Dennis to keep sites open after £4m furlough pledge

The company had set previously out plans to close the plant with the loss of 400 jobs and move production to Yorkshire.

www.bbc.co.uk

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · 24d

Today the community of Moodiesburn remembered the 53 miners who perished in the Auchengeich pit disasters of 1931 and 1959

I was deeply honoured to address the memorial service

Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · 27d

We're not going to grow our economy by relying on the war machine and the arms trade

fb.watch/C2Kl2LqvbM/

Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · 29d

Why aren't new trains being bought through issuing green bonds, as @aslefunion.bsky.social proposes, instead of by rip-off private lease deals with money siphoned out of the country?

fb.watch/C04XX8Om8p/

Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · 29d

I joined the @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social picket line this morning to show solidarity and hear first-hand about the devastating plan for £140 million of cuts to jobs and courses

They are asking people to email the university principal to oppose it

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Sep 4

This is a victory for the rail unions who campaigned with banners bright

fb.watch/BVxbpD2G4t/

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Sep 1

Great to visit this exhibition of posters by Alistair McCallum and Jane Carroll from the Cranhill Arts project at Street Level Photoworks in Trongate, Glasgow

Lots of happy memories

Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Aug 30

Migrant workers on farms across Scotland spent another night last night in unsafe overcrowded, unsanitary, inhumane accommodation

@brianleishmanmp.bsky.social and I had productive discussions with the @workersupportc.bsky.social on the campaign to end this scandal

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Aug 28

Songwriter, poet, socialist, feminist, revolutionary

Mary Brooksbank is the timeless voice of our culture and our class

fb.watch/BLMtwC-st8/

Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Aug 19

It feels like we are living in the middle of an attempt to turn back the clock

We need to act together so that hope defeats both hate and fear

Opinion: 'People should be able to be themselves', according to MSP Richard Leonard

When Parliament is in recess it is always a good time to catch up with grassroots organisations and listen to what’s important to them.

www.falkirkherald.co.uk

Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Aug 15

Happy birthday Keir – one of a kind ✊

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Aug 14

In 1926, socialist and peace activist Clarice McNab Shaw proposed this motion at the Scottish Labour women's conference

How apt

This conference re-affirm their belief in the futility of all war, and preparations for war, and their intention to oppose them to the utmost. Believing that the war and armament system is the natural product and instrument of the present competitive and capitalist order of society, they also resolve to continue with all vigour their efforts to overthrow that order, and to oppose all foreign policies and relations based upon it

Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Aug 13

Continuing my research into the pioneering and principled life of socialist Clarice McNab Shaw

Today in the magnificent Mitchell Library in Glasgow

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Aug 12

Spent a very enjoyable and productive morning at the Ayrshire Archives researching the life and politics of Clarice McNab Shaw: the first woman to become a Labour councillor in Scotland and a great socialist MP

Huge thanks to all the staff there

Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Aug 5

These are the images of the destruction of Gaza that Israel does not want you to see

fb.watch/Bi1Ed4R066/

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Jul 17

The Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum has a wonderful collection relating to the socialist RB Cunninghame Graham

Thanks to Aoife McKenna and the staff for arranging for me to visit today to research his life, work, culture and politics

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Jul 16

'Communism is the philosophy of hope and faith in humanity'

– Willie Gallacher, working class agitator

fb.watch/AT3-Ptap60/

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Richard Leonard @richardleonardmsp.bsky.social · Jul 15

Thoroughly enjoyable and informative visit to Brownsbank cottage, where Hugh MacDiarmid lived and wrote. Thanks to Denham and Susan

The trustees have great plans to restore this national treasure to help future generations appreciate MacDiarmid’s contribution to our political and cultural thinking