Labour's new Falkirk candidate aims to 'regain people's trust'

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/dec/08/labour-new-falkirk-candidate-karen-whitefield

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A former MSP, Karen Whitefield, said she hoped to begin the work of uniting Falkirk Labour party after being selected as its new parliamentary candidate on Sunday.

She fought off challenges from Pam Duncan and Monica Lennon to win the backing of local party members as the candidate to replace Eric Joyce, who was expelled from Labour after committing an assault in a House of Commons bar.

Joyce had a majority of 7,843 at the last election over the SNP, but the standing of the local party has been badly damaged by the allegation that the Unite union signed up members without their knowledge in an attempt ensure that its preferred candidate, Karie Murphy, won the selection.

Labour has closed its investigation into the affair, but it has refused to publish the internal report it produced. Unite has strongly denied wrongdoing.

Whitefield is a campaign officer for Usdaw, the shopworkers' union, and as soon as her selection was announced the Conservative party claimed her victory showed Labour was in the grip of the unions.

But according to one insider, the Unite faction in the constituency was not responsible for Whitefield's victory and she won because she was seen as the most experienced of the three women on the shortlist, having represented Airdrie and Shotts in the Scottish parliament from 1999 until she was beaten by the SNP's Alex Neil in 2011. Before becoming an MSP she worked as an assistant to the late Rachel Squire, the Labour MP for Dunfermline West.

In the final round of voting, Whitefield beat Duncan, who works as a policy officer for Inclusion Scotland, by about 20 votes. There were about 90 people at the meeting. Lennon was knocked out in the first ballot.

After her selection Whitefield said the local party was "in very good spirits". "It's time to move forward and look to the future," she said. "I think this will unite us. We will look to the future, and be out there working hard to regain people's trust, which they have given to us in the past, and to earn that trust for the future."

She said her next step was to start campaigning so that people "understand what the Labour party stands for, that we care and can make a difference for them and will stand up for them".

Labour officials hope that her selection will draw a line under the Falkirk affair, although one local party member said this was questionable because there was still a "consensus" in the constituency party that the report into the vote-rigging allegations should be published.

The Labour party has refused, on the grounds that people who gave evidence to the inquiry did so on the basis that their evidence was confidential.

After the allegations came to light Murphy, the candidate favoured by Unite, and Stevie Deans, the then chairman of the Falkirk party, were suspended but subsequently reinstated.

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