After winning the ‘One to Watch’ category at the Herald’s Politician of the Year awards in November, I spoke to the woman herself about her life inside and out of the political arena.
Background in tackling child poverty
Before becoming an MP and then minister following Labour’s UK General Election success, Ms McNeill was the executive director of Save the Children. The minister was at the charity for over 9 years in what has been her longest job to date.
“When I got that job I did think this was me for life,” Ms McNeill told The Herald, “I thought I would do that sort of frontline work forever.”
Yet, witnessing the impact of the cost of living crisis on families across the UK drew Ms McNeill back into the world of politics.
“Despite it being rewarding and very in line with my values and I felt I was making a difference in living my values out in the world, the pull away from it [Save the Children] was really just the extent of that cost of living emergency,” Ms McNeill said, “It just really made me feel that the work I was doing, whilst I was fantastically proud of it, it wasn’t solving problems. Just too many people were turning up at Save the Children services.”
In her role at the charity, Ms McNeil ran programmes giving practical support to families across the UK side as well as running work overseas.
The minister said “witnessing so many people who never thought they would use the service” turn up at the charity’s door fuelled her decision to leave and return to politics.
“That was just so enraging and so intolerable that charities were having to provide the basics to so many people,” Ms McNeill said, “In Scotland, we’ve now got ourselves into a situation where it’s taken as read that there is a foodbank in every town.
“This is where the lure back to politics came from. Politics is a place where you solve problems and you don’t just simply mitigate them.”
Two child benefit cap views
Yet, Ms McNeill’s move into government comes at a time when the Labour party has been caught up in a row over the two child benefit cap and whether it should be scrapped or not. An imaginably difficult conversation for Ms McNeill to have given her former charity has called and continues to call on the government to scrap the policy introduced by the Conservatives in 2017.
Asked about what she makes of the UK Labour Government maintaining the two child benefit cap policy given her background with the charity, Ms McNeill told The Herald: “Fighting child poverty is the cause of my life and it’s because I’m so committed to it that I’m so intent on seeing it done properly and not turned into political stunts.”
“We are looking at this in the round in the Spring and people then will get to hear where our thinking has got to on this and there will be a spending review concluding next year.
“I personally don’t think it’s realistic to have expected one lever to get pulled in isolation this early into a government which has such a monumental task ahead of it in terms of rewiring the economy so it works for working people and fixing the challenges in the public finances.”
The month Ms McNeill started as an MP, SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn brought forward an amendment to scrap the two child benefit cap which Ms McNeill voted against.
The Scotland minister told The Herald she voted against this at the time on the basis that what Mr Flynn had proposed did not follow the right process in making long-term decisions.
Ms McNeil said: “I think everyone, including my former colleagues, expects us to deal with the fundamentals and the fundamental problem facing families is their pay package doesn’t stretch far enough.”
Ms McNeill said the UK child poverty taskforce would look at welfare reform and other packages of measures to support families.
Meanwhile, in the Scottish Budget, the SNP has vowed to ‘scrap the cap’ putting pressure on Scottish Labour to back the budget in a vote on the spending plans next month. However, it is not yet clear what the mechanisms will be to implement this policy, how much it will cost or how it will work.
As a result, Ms McNeill has urged the SNP to “raise their ambitions” when it comes to tackling child poverty- a Scottish Government priority the First Minister singled out in his Christmas message last month.
Former adviser to Gordon Brown
This is not the first in a raft of tough decisions the Scotland Minister has had to consider and she told The Herald she is “no stranger” to how difficult life in government can be.
“Our job in government is to make difficult decisions and I’ve certainly been there before”, Ms McNeill said.
Before she was a charity leader, Ms McNeill worked as a Downing Street adviser to Gordon Brown during the financial crisis between 2007-2008.
As well as taking on other roles at this time, Ms McNeill was involved in speech-writing. The minister said this job was made particularly difficult during the crash as ministers were having to relay important but complex issues to the public.
The minister said: “What was happening with the bank recapitalisation plan and some of the international agreements was there was a huge amount of really technical things happening which were going to have an implication for people but drawing the links between them in communication terms was just incredibly hard.
“People were literally locked in rooms overnight doing agreements as people needed to feel like we were there with them in their living rooms.
“Gordon was so focused on what are we going to do today, what are we going to get done by the time we go to bed that will have protected people’s jobs, their houses, their savings, their pensions.
“Knowing who and what you are in politics for is, I think, Gordon’s greatest strength. So I hope that my time learning at his feet has given me a similar resolute focus on how people’s lives need to be better at the end of the day than they were at the start.”
Reflecting on her time in government, Ms McNeill said: “I think the experience of being in and around government before has certainly made me very alive to the fact that life is about trade offs and difficult decisions.”
In her previous role as a charity leader it was her job to “demand things” from the government, the minister said, adding: “But in the end, trade offs need to be made and the life of the nation is about reconciling competing interests with the constraints you face. In our particular case, the inheritance of the public finance is quite an extraordinary set of constraints.”
Asked about what the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown thought about her being appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Scotland Office, Ms McNeill said her former boss is “very proud”.
“He’s very thrilled and we’re still very close,” the Scotland minister said, “His advice, which I hope I’ve taken on board, is, ‘You must 100 per cent remember your first job is serving your constituents.’ So he was delighted but he was keen that I keep my feet on the ground and as am I.”
First woman in the post in well over a decade
The overall parliamentary Scotland Office department has been male-dominated throughout its history and Ms McNeill is the first woman in the post of Scotland minister in fourteen years.
Speaking about her feelings towards being the first woman for over a decade, Ms McNeill said: “I don’t come into work every day saying it’s very interesting being a woman minister in the Scotland Office but there are times where I think about it a lot.”
One instance where Ms McNeill has spent time contemplating being a woman in her position was during 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence.
The minister told The Herald: “I did think about it a lot then and then when we were introducing the new deal for working people – the work we are doing there is going to benefit 200,000 of the lowest paid Scots and we know the majority of them will be women.”
Ms McNeill also said trying to drive up mothers’ pay would deal with “a lot of problems” concerning child poverty.
“I’d like to think that a feminist understanding informs quite a lot of what I do,” Ms McNeill added.
Local priorities
After becoming the new MP for Midlothian after taking the seat from the SNP in July, Ms McNeill said one local priority of hers is supporting working men’s clubs.
With a strong mining heritage in Midlothian and a focus on pension injustice in the constituency, Ms McNeill said enhancing community spaces is “incredibly important”.
Ms McNeill said: “Now that I hope I’ve got my feet under the table in the Scotland Office, I hope I can think through how I can do more of that campaigning locally to make sure our local infrastructures like this stay and in many ways are enhanced.”