You will never see me in the House of Lords - I only want to serve Scotland

That idea worked. My town is what Labour ambition looks like when it builds something real. Across Scotland there are places with the same story. We built a promise, then too many communities were left to hold on alone.

For the last four years I led a council. That job teaches you something Scottish politics too often forgets: people judge you on whether it got done. Not the strategy. Not the press release. The house gets built or it does not. The family gets the keys or they are still on the list.

I am new to Parliament, but I am not new to politics or leadership. I came through local government, where you fix the thing in front of you or you do not. I want to bring that habit into Scottish Labour.

This leadership contest cannot become another conversation inside the Holyrood bubble, about the Holyrood bubble, for the benefit of the Holyrood bubble. It cannot just be about internal structures, parliamentary arithmetic or who is best placed to stop someone else. The people who stopped listening to us are not waiting for a new rule book. They are worried about the rent, the waiting list, the job that went and never came back, and the state of the places they call home.

That is why I am standing.

The communities we build must come first. Scotland has declared a national housing emergency. South Lanarkshire declared one too. As council leader, I saw what that meant in real lives: more families presenting as homeless, more people in urgent need and more pressure on services trying to cope.

The answer is not another statement of concern. It is council and social homes at a scale we have not attempted for generations. It is empty properties brought back into use. It is old stock repaired before it is lost. It is councils given the money and powers to tackle derelict land, boarded-up high streets and the shortage of homes in their own communities.

Then work. East Kilbride was built on the promise that good work would be close to home. From the Ayrshire coast to the Border mill towns to the yards on the Clyde, too many places have seen work leave and confidence go with it.

Scottish Labour should back the industries worth having: engineering, energy, manufacturing and the new jobs of the future. We should use public investment and procurement to support Scottish workers, Scottish businesses and Scottish communities.

All of this rests on one belief: power should sit as close as possible to the people it affects.

That means a stronger Scotland in a changing UK, but it also means Holyrood trusting councils and communities more. Edinburgh has learned too many of London’s habits: holding power at the centre, handing local services less, then blaming them when the job cannot be done.

Let me be plain about myself. I am in this for Scotland and nowhere else. I am not building the kind of career that ends in ermine. You will never see my name on a list for the House of Lords. I want to serve the country I am from, and then go home to East Kilbride.

Scottish Labour will not recover by talking to itself. We will not recover by offering a tidier version of the same politics people have already turned away from. We will recover by being rooted in places again, focused on people’s daily lives and clear about what we would do with power.

Continuity will not cut it. Scottish Labour needs to seize this municipal moment, build local power and local wealth, and prove again that we are on people’s side.

Joe Fagan is a Scottish Labour MSP for South Scotland.