The SNP’s Fergus Ewing has claimed his party no longer cares or believes in people and businesses and is out of step with the majority of Scotland.
In an explosive interview with the Sunday Mail, he told how the coalition with the Scottish Greens is leaving thousands of voters believing the SNP are “in office but not in power”.
The the former government minister, 65, who has won six terms as a constituency MSP at Holyrood since 1999, has been angrily attacking his own party.
He has likened the Deposit Return Scheme to the Poll Tax, ripped up a Government consultation on fisheries policy and lamented the Greens as “wine bar revolutionaries”.
The Former Rural Affairs secretary, who held ministerial posts for 14 consecutive years is calling for First Minister Humza Yousaf to change course or risk falling further out of touch on everything from gender policy to North sea oil.
He said: “We focused on the essentials between 2007 and 2014 and having a strong economy is the number one essential. We did a huge amount of work to built up confidence in business and people.
“We cared about people, we wanted them to succeed, we supported business. We supported every walk of life, whether it was industry, rural farming, fishermen, we valued what they did.
“We said ‘you are worth something, you’re worth something to Scotland’ and we seem to have stopped doing that now.
“I’m concerned about the consequences of this deal with the Greens. There is now a very prevalent view, especially in rural Scotland, that the Green tail is wagging the SNP dog.
“Putting it even more bluntly people feel that the SNP may be in office but that the Greens are in power - and that is not a winning formula in politics.”
Ewing said a catalogue of Scottish Government policies being driven by the Greens that he believes are causing the party to fall further out of step with most people.
He sad: “How can we conceivably succeed if we say to oil and gas workers they are not allowed to explore for oil anymore?
“We should be using our own oil and gas. We are going to need it for decades to come and it is less carbon intensive than frack gas from the USA which has been keeping the lights on in Scotland.
“The GRR Bill was passed by a substantial majority of MSPs, but what’s also true is that it was opposed by a substantial majority of the people.
“On the two main provisions - women’s privacy and removing checks and balances down to the age 16, two thirds of the population were opposed to this.
“So we are completely out of step with the people, the GRR was a gigantic mistake and challenging the UK Government in court is doomed to fail.
“On the deposit return scheme, this is the biggest disaster I have seen.
“Again it is doomed to fail, it won’t go ahead in March and we should be sitting down with the UK Government to find a solution.”
Ewing spoke to us at his Holyrood Office on a sunny afternoon last week where he has been struggling, not just with some of the party’s policies but also a recent leg injury.
He is one of Holyrood’s most experienced parliamentarians and his family’s links to the SNP and independence is decades deep.
His mother Winnie Ewing is an SNP legend, having won the 1967 Hamilton by-election for the party and been a leading light ever since, while his sister Annabelle Ewing is also an MSP and deputy presiding officer.
A qualified lawyer, Ewing speaks with the jovial clarity and confidence of a man with no concern for disciplinary action that his party might take against him or recent attacks on his party loyalty.
He said: “I’m not a socialist. I’m not particularly right wing either. I regard myself as middle of the road common sense kind of guy.
“The SNP used to comfortably accommodate people on either side of the aisle. This discipline to party machine is a relatively new thing.
“I do think it’s changed. I can respect the different forms of leadership that Nicola and Humza have had but I don’t agree with an awful lot of the things that they say.
“It is a fair point some make about loyalty but I feel I must have loyalty to fifty years of SNP tradition as well as to the party right now.
“It has changed, that’s just a fact. But I’m not sure that the changes are going to make it more likely that we achieve independence for our country, in fact quite the opposite.
“You can’t determine Scotland’s future constitutional status through a general election, that is not its purpose, so this idea of a defacto referendum is just not going to work.
“I’ve always thought that if we get the level of our support consistently to 60 per cent, then we will get a referendum and win independence that way.”
And he refused to be silenced by rumours - described in some quarters as threats - that the SNP could release a report on allegations of bullying when Fergus was a minister
He said: “I’ve nothing on my conscience so I’m not overly worried about what happens.
“I’m just trying to represent the people that voted me in here on six occasions with a majority going from 400 to 10,000. I take it very seriously.
“I’ve got a great team and we work extremely well together.
“My 14 years as a minister were the most exciting period in my life. I woke up every morning and I thought, What can I do for Scotland today?”
And like the controversial deal struck with billionaire tycoon Sanjeev Gupta to save steel industry jobs but could now result in a huge hit for taxpayers after Gupta’s Liberty Steel became embroiled in scandal, Ewing remains unrepentant.
He said: “We prevented the loss of the last remnants of our steel industry in Scotland. I chaired the task force, I worked with Sanjeev Gupta. If I hadn’t the consequences could have been disastrous and the buck stopped with me.
“I was determined not to let down the highly skilled men and women that worked in central Scotland and in Fort William as they were let down in the 1980s.”
There were reports last week that another SNP stalwart Douglas Chapman MP faces an SNP HQ plot to remove him after he resigned from the SNP’s finance and audit committee over a lack of financial transparency.
Ewing said: “I’ve known Douglas for a long time. I’ve read this story, I don’t know what the facts are but if there are moves to get people out because they’ve spoken against the tide, that’s utterly unacceptable and shouldn’t happen.
“I fear it has happened to colleagues who have spoken out in the past and that has been colleagues that haven’t even spoken out as emphatically as I have.
“There is only one really good poem that has ever been written about the Scottish Parliament and that is Open The Doors by Edward Morgan.
“One of the lines was about what people don’t want, and they didn’t want a ‘nest of fearties’
“The reason I ripped up the fishing consulatation document was I wanted to express as strongly as possible the hot fury of fishermen.”
He said that he’s gotten irate in recent weeks in Holyrood but it shows how passionate he is that the parliament enacts good legislation.
The SNP veteran said: “I think hard about what I say in our national parliament, I want to treat it with respect. That’s my job.
“I think of some of the great orators - Dennis Calvin, George Reed, Alex Neil, even Tommy Sheridan.
“I’m just a journeyman really by comparison but I’d like to see a bit more original thought and a bit less of the party message when people speak.
“I remember I supported my mother Winnie in her campaign to win the Moray and Nairn seat back in 1973.
“You know what the first thing she did was, she knew that she was coming from Glasgow as an outsider, so she bought a wee cottage in the square in Lossiemouth and she immediately made friends with the fishing community and everyone else.
“She fought for them, she stood up for them, and that’s how she won the seat.”
His outbursts saw Ewing also being told off by his sister - deputy presiding officer Annabelle - after his infamous “wine bar revolutionaries” comment in the Holyrood debating chamber.
He said: “It was quite funny. She has been waiting for 60 years to get back at her big brother, and only now is she armed with the power by law, to expel me from the building. We had a good laugh about it afterwards.”
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