Eleanor Ryan-Saha is the Scottish Labour candidate in Edinburgh Northern.
As a former primary school teacher she is well aware of child poverty statistics and has dealt with the consequences of one in four of the capital’s children living below the poverty line. This forms a central pillar of her campaign.
She said: “Personally, I’m hugely motivated by the outrageous fact that there are still, within this constituency of Edinburgh Northern and our great city of Edinburgh, children that are hungry.
“And as a primary school teacher, I’ve experienced teaching hungry children and sending them back to homes when you know dinner’s not going be on the table. It’s 2026 and the SNP have had 19 years to deal with this meaningfully. So I think it’s a platform of outrage. It’s a platform that cannot accept that we have these levels, one in four, in terms of child poverty in a very affluent city where we actually do have enough to go around.
“In terms of drivers, I think because I’ve worked with young people and because I’ve also volunteered with girls and women in Granton for the past seven years, I can’t sit back and continue to watch that be an accepted reality of our lives here.
“And I know there’s brilliant work going on in the constituency in terms of our community food growing, we’ve got agroecology here. So there are huge community resources to address this problem. But when more is happening at constituency level than a national level to address things like child hunger, especially holiday hunger, it’s the responsibility of those who can to stand up and say no, enough.”
She says she is “proud to be” standing in the constituency. Although this is he first time she has ever stood as a political candidate, this is the area where she has lived for the past ten years after moving north from Grimsby.
Ms Ryan-Saha said: “I’m a brand new candidate in a brand new constituency, which is very exciting, but I’m standing as a long-term Scottish Labour member who cares about where I stay and has really deep roots in the community. This may be a new constituency, but it’s very much my old familiar turf and I’m really proud to be representing it.”
And she has a personal reason for standing for political office – to try to improve public services. Eleanor explained that one of her children was born with a disability and is also neurodivergent. While she said they are thriving, her child will need extra support while they are young and they will need a lot in terms of social care as they grow into adulthood.
Eleanor said: “So this is really a lot of the reasons that I’m standing. This is something that a lot of folks on the doors are echoing back to me – that whilst Edinburgh is a great place to stay, we know that the public services that we all rely on when things are hard, when we have challenges, they’re not in the state they need to be in.
“We moved up here over a decade ago and we’re raising our children here and we’ve had a fantastic experience living in Edinburgh, it’s a fantastic place to raise kids. But what we’ve found is in terms of public services, things are not quite where they should be. So we have had the experience as a family.
“But we’ve got that feeling of uncertainty and insecurity and we don’t feel that the services that we rely on will be there in those times of need. So I’m talking about education, but also the NHS and police. A lot of my journey has been initially learning how to be the parent and carer to a disabled young person, which is a journey and I learn things every day.
“But I am also learning how to navigate those systems. And professionally that’s changed me as well. I was trained – in the constituency actually – to be a primary school teacher and I enjoyed teaching immensely.
“But I’ve transferred in my career and now I work for a child disability charity and my main role is to support families in the challenges they’re facing, to work within systems and to try and get the most out of a public service that is not where it should be.”
When asked for her suggestion about what could be done to improve matters for those who need to use social or other services, Eleanor said that while everyone knows that these services have to be paid for somehow – and that “traditionally Scottish Labour has maybe been the party of social policy” – the party is also strong on business and economic policy in the manifesto.
She said: “We know that we need good green sustainable growth in order to fund these public services. But it’s true we have huge devolved powers here.
“We’ve got a lot of say in how the NHS runs here and how schools run and how policing happens. And those are the three key areas that folks are reporting day in and day out that they feel they’ve been let down in and these services are not where they should be. So, our vision for change focuses hugely on getting the NHS to where it should be and education and policing.”
As to the specifics of how that would happen Ms Ryan said it is about making better choices in terms of things like workforce management. and to embrace technology.
She said: “I think the NHS is a great example of that. There’s an app in England that health boards have been using for a long time that would help patients like my daughter in her care because it will allow the patient to have their records all in one place.
“People using the NHS for medical reasons are dealing with lots of specialists and have lots of information flowing about. And in Scotland, this is an absolute nightmare. This is getting in the way of people receiving life-saving care.
“We would immediately be looking at procuring an app that would work in a similar way within the NHS and deliver it straight away. The SNP are committed to developing a type of technology that would achieve similar goals, but they want to buy the app that’s already in existence, and as a result they’re looking at a turnaround that will be more like 2030. It’s not acceptable.”
While talking about apps and technology the conversation naturally turned to data centres. She agreed that this is “potentially the biggest challenge that we’re facing in government and out of government”.
She continued: “It’s going to be the defining technology for our generation. What Scottish Labour will commit to do is take this seriously and work hard within the Scottish AI strategy to make sure that we’re making the right choices for Scotland. And these are choices that have energy implications, moral implications.
“It’s a really wide ranging and important topic and we would absolutely prioritise making the right decisions for Scotland as far as possible.”
Eleanor Ryan-Saha, Scottish Labour candidate in Edinburgh Northern
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