Paul Sweeney
Paul John Sweeney FIES is a Scottish politician. A member of the Scottish Labour and Co-operative Party, he currently serves as Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Glasgow region in the 6th Scottish Parliament, elected in May 2021. He previously served as Member of Parliament for Glasgow North East from 2017 to 2019.
Early life and education
Sweeney was born at Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow on 16 January 1989 to Anne Patricia Sweeney, a bank clerk and John Gordon Sweeney, a shipyard worker. The elder of two brothers, he was brought up in Auchinairn, and Milton. Sweeney attended St. Matthew's Primary School and Turnbull High School in Bishopbriggs.Sweeney studied for a degree at the University of Glasgow, where he graduated with a first class MA in Economic History and Political Science in 2011. At university he also became involved in debating with the Glasgow University Dialectic Society, of which he is an honorary life member. He served as a trustee on the Glasgow University Union's board of management from 2013 to 2020.
Before politics
At the age of seventeen, Sweeney joined the Army Reserve, initially serving in the Royal Corps of Signals with 32 Signal Regiment, before transferring to 52nd Lowland, 6th Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland at Walcheren Barracks.After an internship with BAE Systems at Portsmouth Naval Base as an undergraduate, Sweeney joined the company's graduate development programme with BAE Systems Maritime – Naval Ships in 2011, based at the Govan and Scotstoun shipyards on the Clyde, where he undertook a series of roles in production engineering and shipbuilding operations management on the Type 45 destroyer, and Type 26 frigate programmes, including co-authoring a 2014 publication on the construction programme for the Type 45 destroyer. Whilst at BAE Systems, Sweeney also initiated a project with the Glasgow School of Art's Digital Design Studio to introduce virtual reality methods into complex naval ship design and construction.
At the end of 2015, Sweeney joined the national economic development agency Scottish Enterprise as a senior executive, working with the leadership of companies across the defence, marine, shipbuilding, aerospace and engineering sectors based in Scotland. In April 2016, he was elected as a Council Member and Fellow of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland.
Early political career
Sweeney joined the Labour Party and Co-operative Party in 2008 and first became an active campaigner during the 2009 Glasgow North East by-election, after receiving a telephone call from Sarah Brown encouraging him to get involved. While working in the shipyards he joined the Unite and GMB trade unions, later joining PCS whilst at Scottish Enterprise. He is also on the executive committee of the Scottish Fabian Society and a member of Open Labour, Momentum and Campaign for Socialism. Sweeney came to prominence during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, after he organised an open letter signed by young shipyard workers opposing the break-up of the UK, and subsequently spoke at a rally alongside Gordon Brown on the eve of the referendum.Sweeney was twelfth on the Scottish Labour Party's regional list for West Scotland in the 2016 Scottish Parliament election.
Member of Parliament (2017–2019)
2017 election
At the 2017 general election he stood for Glasgow North East where a 12% swing to Labour led to him defeating Anne McLaughlin of the SNP by just 242 votes, overturning a 25% majority of 9,222 in an unexpected result, having not even prepared a victory speech. McLaughlin had taken the seat from the previous MP, William Bain of the Labour Party at the 2015 general election, and she had been elected with a 39% swing; which was the largest swing at the 2015 general election seen anywhere in the UK. The seat and its predecessors had previously been held by Labour MPs continuously since George Hardie, brother of the Labour Party's founder Keir Hardie, was elected for Glasgow Springburn in 1935. At the age of 28, he was the second youngest Labour MP elected in 2017, after Danielle Rowley.MP for Glasgow North East
On 3 July 2017, he was appointed by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as the Shadow Under-Secretary of State for Scotland. During the 2017 Scottish Labour leadership election, Sweeney endorsed Richard Leonard, who was ultimately the successful candidate, having previously worked with him to co-author Scottish Labour's industrial strategy in 2016. In an interview with Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian shortly after his election, he described himself as being on the soft left of the party.He was a critic of the seven Labour MPs who defected to form Change UK in February 2019, describing them as "self-centred careerists" at a meeting which took place the following month to mark the relaunch of Tribune magazine.
In November 2018, he won 'Best Scot at Westminster' in the annual Scottish Politician of the Year awards, following his lobbying of the Home Secretary and Prime Minister in asylum seeker rights cases such as that of Giorgi Kakava, a ten-year-old orphan who had been threatened with deportation following the death of his mother, the Kamil family who had been left without status for 18 years, teenage brothers Somer and Areeb Umeed Bakhsh, who were also supported by the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn during a visit to Possilpark in August 2018, and trafficking victim Duc Nguyen.
In February 2019, the Daily Record reported that an unnamed Scottish MP had made a formal complaint that Scottish Conservative MP Ross Thomson had groped them in Strangers' Bar in October 2018, in the wake of a similar incident that was alleged to have occurred earlier that month. The Daily Mail named Sweeney as the complainant in November 2019, leading to the chairman of Thomson's local Conservative Association refusing to sign the nomination papers to allow him to stand as a Conservative candidate for Aberdeen South in the December 2019 general election. Thomson's former civil partner also came forward to cite similar instances of behaviour. The Times reported in February 2020 that the investigation had been widened to include a further allegation of a similar nature. In July 2020, Sweeney branded the investigation process "shambolic" and "not fit for purpose". In October 2020, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards ruled that the allegation of sexual assault was not upheld by the available evidence. The Commissioner found there was evidence Thomson put his arms around Sweeney and inappropriately invaded his personal space while drunk but ruled there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that this behaviour was sexual in nature. It has since been reported that Sweeney is appealing the ruling.
In 2019, he was cited as the least expensive MP in Scotland by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, including: constituency office costs and staff salaries, as well as London accommodation rent and travel costs.
2019 election
Sweeney lost his seat to the previous Scottish National Party MP Anne McLaughlin, at the 2019 general election with a marginal majority of 2,458 votes on a 4% swing, the closest result in Glasgow. After losing his seat, he went on to work on Angela Rayner's successful campaign in the 2020 Labour Party deputy leadership election. He described the experience of losing his seat as, “The most spectacular sacking in recent Glasgow history. I was the only scalp in Glasgow that night. It was a fairly unpleasant experience. It's almost like a public execution. It's got a grim voyeurism to it. It's one of the few examples in society where people losing their jobs is treated like a blood sport.”During the campaign, Sweeney was forced to apologise after tweeting about wanting to play a game of "Whac-a-Sturgeon" a remark the then-First Minister tweeted about saying "What a charmer".
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sweeney revealed he had begun applying for Universal Credit in May 2020, saying "The reality is, the majority of Scots are working class – if they stopped earning a salary, within two months they'd be in financial difficulties. However prestigious or seemingly privileged you are in terms of your work or identity, you're never far away from that. If more of us realised how close we are to that peril, maybe the social security system wouldn't be so punitive." He later wrote an article describing his experiences of life on social security in December 2020, stating "I will admit that I’ve occasionally had suicidal thoughts in my darker moments over the last few months." He also called for Universal Credit to be converted into a Universal Basic Income system.
Member of the Scottish Parliament
2021 Scottish Parliament election
Sweeney was third on Scottish Labour's regional list for the Glasgow region in the 2021 Scottish Parliament election. Following the 2021 Scottish Labour leadership election, Anas Sarwar appointed Sweeney as a spokesman for Trade, Investment and Innovation. Sweeney was elected as an MSP for the Glasgow region in the 6th Scottish Parliament on 8 May 2021.MSP for Glasgow Region
He was appointed as Shadow Minister for Employment and Public Finance on 31 May 2021.In May 2022, Mr Sweeney launched a consultation on his proposed bill, the Drugs Death Prevention Bill, in response to drug related deaths in Scotland, aiming to enable the establishment of Overdose Prevention Centres. In November 2022, he won 'Community MSP of the Year' at The Herald's Scottish Politician of the Year awards for his work on the drugs death crisis, including a bill to establish overdose prevention centres.
In February 2024, Sweeney withdrew his sponsorship of a Scottish Parliament reception organised by ADS Group to celebrate Scottish Apprenticeship Week after public allegations that some of their member companies supplied the Israeli military during the ongoing Gaza war and resulting Gaza humanitarian crisis. The following week Sweeney’s constituency office was raided by pro-Palestine protesters.
Sweeney backed the UK Government’s decision to introduce a means test for the Winter Fuel Payment, voting in the Scottish Parliament against calls to keep it a universal payment.