STEPHEN DAISLEY: Scotland doesnt need independence... but we DO need MSPs who can think for themselves

If there’s anything Scottish politics could do with more of, it’s troublemakers. 

Bolshy mavericks, radical dissenters, and cussed curmudgeons - the sorts of free-spirited characters who give heartburn to the whips and background to the hacks. 

The ones who insist not only on thinking - a novel activity in itself at Holyrood - but on thinking for themselves.

So Fergus Ewing’s decision not to stand for the SNP at next year’s election would be a matter of real regret if not for his hint that he might contest the poll as an independent. 

Ewing is Old SNP royalty, the Old SNP being the era in which the party was distracted by the fringe issue of Scottish independence and had yet to embrace its destiny as the party of shutting up women and shutting down refineries.

Following in the footsteps of his mother Winnie, and in the good company of his sister Annabelle and his late wife Margaret, for a quarter-century he has been the sonorous-voiced, prickly-mannered, ruddy-jowled face of Ewingism, that alliance of nationalism to business, rural interests and social conservatism.

For many years, Ewing was tolerated by a left-leaning hierarchy that didn’t particularly like him but understood instinctively that a national party had to be a big-tent party. 

Then, during the Nicola Sturgeon years, the hierarchy came under the control of a pseudo-left whose chief priorities were identity, intersectionality and illiberalism - all the ‘i’ words bar a somewhat important one.

The broad tent narrowed to fit the circus of an SNP government that talked self-determination but legislated self-identification, that saw Scotland’s oil as a source of shame. 

Fergus Ewing has been a critic of the SNP Government and will not stand for the party during next years Holyrood election

Fergus Ewing, his mother Winnie (left) and late wife Margaret were of Old SNP royalty

A carnival of luxury opinions in which Sturgeon presided as ringmaster, her MSPs trapezed from one modish policy to the next, and Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater were ably cast as the clowns.

There was no place for Fergus Ewing in the New SNP, whose ideological Torquemadas prided themselves on the enforcement of total conformity. He was denounced and briefed against. 

When Slater’s deposit return scheme collapsed spectacularly, she wasn’t fired, he was suspended for failing to back her in a confidence motion.

As I write this column, his Wikipedia page has been altered to describe him as ‘a Tartan Tory’.

Ewing’s colleagues rankled at his dismissal of the Greens as ‘wine bar revolutionaries’ and shifted uncomfortably every time he urged the SNP to keep its many promises to upgrade the A9 and A96, fatal accident blackspots that have claimed many lives in his patch, including friends of his.

Political turncoats often claim their party left them rather than the other way around, but in Ewing’s case this is plainly what has happened. 

His every policy position that puts him on the fringes of the SNP today was thoroughly mainstream ten years ago. He’s not a turncoat, he’s a rebel on behalf of decades of Nationalist orthodoxy.

The Scottish Parliament has no glory days to hark back to, but things were less worse when there were still a few troublemakers sleeking through its Robert Delaunay corridors, on their way to plot, gossip, settle scores and forge alliances.

Women like Margo MacDonald, Margo the Untameable, the most independent mind ever to set foot in the place, with a personality as sincere as it was mercurial.

Men of conscience like Dennis Canavan.

I doubt there are as many as three issues on which he and I would agree, but his integrity was unimpeachable and his personal fortitude unfathomable.

What MacDonald and Canavan had in common was that, having been trouble-makers one too many times, they found themselves out on their ears with their respective parties and forced to stand as independents.

Going independent in British politics usually means you’re never heard from again, but not with MacDonald and Canavan.

The voters liked their bloodymindedness and their principles and opted to be represented by them rather than their former parties’ approved candidates.

A parliament worth the name needs its independent minds, unbought and unbowed, mouthing off here and getting it wrong there, but driven by a democratic spirit and the instincts of an individual. 

People who don’t just trouser the salary, say the line, and vote the way they’re told, but follow their conscience and let the electorate judge the wisdom of their course.

Parliamentarians whose only business managers are their constituents.

Fergus Ewing already has one foot in this tradition. 

He should go all the way and put his case to the people as an independent, a single-issue candidate who compels the Scottish Government to put road safety and human life in the driving seat and finally fulfil its pledges on A9/A96 upgrading.

Some centre-left folk I otherwise agree with might scold me that Ewing is - horror of horrors - ‘right wing’.

For one, if Fergus Ewing is your idea of a right-winger, never, ever meet the voters. I regularly encounter sweetly smiling grandmothers who express more enthusiasm for hanging and flogging than Albert Pierrepoint and the Marquis de Sade.

For another, Holyrood is a left-liberal monoculture in which former public sector staffers nod along to former NGO staffers. A bit of viewpoint diversity wouldn’t go amiss.

Some Unionists would object that Ewing is still a separatist.

To which I say: so what?

Half the population supports independence. I’d rather the case be made by a person of intelligence and integrity than by yet another careerist Natborg.

Scotland shouldn’t go independent, but Fergus Ewing should.

A £23 PRESCRIPTION FOR A HEALTHIER NHS 

The doctor, it seems, will not see you now. GP representatives say practices across Scotland can no longer afford to recruit medics.

Dr Iain Morrison, who chairs BMA Scotland’s GP committee, says Scotland is in the ‘perverse situation’ of training doctors who then go ‘looking for alternative work or emigrating to work in other countries’ because there are no jobs here.

I don’t blame the doctors. 

Medicine is their vocation and if their own country won’t give them jobs, it’s only natural that they’d go overseas looking for work. 

But what a lamentable, ludicrous state of affairs. Pay your taxes in Addiewell to send a GP to Adelaide.

The Scottish Government spends £1.3billion annually on general medical services, but that falls far short of what is required. 

If we want good quality GP care available when we need it, we will have to fund it properly.

We could try hiking taxes, but they’re already the highest in the UK, and hike them to what exactly? 

At some point, returns will only diminish. 

Besides, raising the money from general taxation means people who seldom trouble their GP foot the bill for frequent flyers.

No one wants to hear it but the only way forward is to start charging for GP appointments.

It’s a common practice around the world, even in the social democratic Nordic countries. 

In Sweden, patients pay up to 300 krona (roughly £23) per visit, which seems like a reasonable baseline.

Obviously there would have to be exemptions, as there currently are with dentist fees, but the principle stands. 

Charging would allow GP practices to hire more doctors and offer more consultations, while discouraging missed appointments and ending the dreaded 8am dash.

GP fees wouldn’t be popular, but they’d be more popular than allowing the primary care system to collapse, and that’s the direction in which we’re heading.