SOCIALIST MSP Richard Leonard has announced he will stand down at next year’s Holyrood elections, but vowed: “I will not be standing down from the causes I believe in.”

Mr Leonard was elected to the Scottish Parliament on the Central Scotland list in 2016, after a journey that took him from aide to left-wing MEP Alex Falconer, to the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC), and on to more than two decades as an industrial organiser at the GMB.

Just one year later he won the Scottish Labour Party leadership, taking it on a leftward shift until he was deposed by disgruntled party rightwingers in 2021.