Douglas Ross is the Leader of the Scottish Conservative Party, the MP for Moray, and an MSP for the Highlands and Islands region.
The Scottish Conservative conference this week is being held in Aberdeen, a city that has even more reason than other parts of Scotland to distrust the SNP, and more incentive than most to see the back of Humza Yousaf and his astonishingly incompetent administration.
But the North East is every bit as wary of Labour, whose plans for the oil and gas industry have been roundly condemned. Kier Starmer and Anas Sarwar, his Scottish lieutenant, want to veto any new development and to increase the windfall tax.
Despite the fact that their policies are almost identical, Humza Yousaf (who also wants no new oil and gas licences granted and whose party was the first to call for a windfall tax) recently attempted to portray himself as a friend of North Sea workers. Predictably, this was met with widespread incredulity.
If it hadn’t involved the potential loss of tens of thousands of jobs and, according to a damning judgment from Offshore Energies UK, a cost to the British economy of around £26bn, it would have been greeted with hilarity, too.
Because, as this week’s Scottish government budget illustrated, Scotland has a government of clownish illiteracy when it comes to economic judgment.
Unfortunately, the SNP’s laughable approach to government has been a tragedy for Scotland’s public services. And the only consistent opposition to that mismanagement has been provided by the Scottish Conservatives, the largest opposition group in the Scottish Parliament.
Yousaf has made a series of increasingly desperate calls for a “Tory-free” Scotland; a fairly offensive position, given that more than 700,000 Scots voted Conservative in the last election and I hope that tens of thousands more will do so at the next opportunity (something they seem eager to do, if it means seeing the back of the Nats).
But the First Minister’s calls are quite in keeping with the SNP’s ‘othering’ agenda, and their mania for manufacturing grievance and division where none exists. I’m also happy to see it as a compliment to the robust way in which my colleagues have stood up to, and called out, the Nationalists’ damaging policies at Holyrood.
Labour, despite the rhetoric they’ve ramped up in the past few months, hasn’t supplied any of that. Quite the reverse: on issue after issue, Sarwar has sent his MSPs in to back SNP/Green policies.
It’s not just their shared desire to kill off the oil and gas sector. Labour also voted with the SNP for higher taxes, the disastrous Gender self-ID Bill and the flawed Hate Crime Bill, to name a few.
And though much of the British media want to focus on Labour’s prospects here, the fact is that in much of Scotland the battleground is between the SNP and the Conservatives. The story in the last few council by-elections, in fact, has been Conservative gains from the SNP.
In huge swathes of the country – the North East, the Highlands and Islands, almost all of the South of Scotland – Labour isn’t even in the game. It’s a straight fight between an SNP government, with more than a decade and a half of failure to its name, and the Scottish Conservatives, who have a programme for taking Scotland forward.
Here, we’re the alternative. The challengers. The brighter future. The only vote that can get shot of the low-grade hacks that have dragged Scotland down: given us poorer growth, higher taxes, and worse public services than the rest of the country, despite record funding well above the national average.
If you haven’t heard much about this, it’s partly down to the easy ride the Nats have had for much of their tenure, not just from parts of the British media (which is at least understandable) but from sections of the press here. That has at last unravelled, and in truly spectacular fashion.
There’s no disguising the abysmal failure of the SNP in government. Their favoured tactic of blaming everything on Westminster wears pretty thin when almost everything is within their own devolved powers, something that most people have now woken up to.
Yousaf, who presented himself as the ‘Continuity Sturgeon’ candidate in the Nationalist leadership contest, has certainly lived down to that record of failure and, if anything, proved even more useless than his own dismal performance in the ministerial posts he previously held.
That’s blazingly apparent to every voter in Scotland. They are now, after the Nats’ terrible record in more than a decade and a half of government, itching to get into the polling booth and give them a terrible election result.
And, just like the referendum the SNP lost by a clear margin but seem hellbent on endlessly re-running, it will unite those who are fed up to the back teeth of essential services collapsing while costs and taxes rise. Who have finally realised that, when almost every element of government is devolved, the Nationalists’ tactic of blaming Westminster for their own failures won’t wash.
That’s why I’m not just confident of taking the fight to the SNP in seats across the country – and believe that the Scottish Conservatives stand poised to make gains at their expense.
Douglas Ross is the Leader of the Scottish Conservative Party, the MP for Moray, and an MSP for the Highlands and Islands region.
The Scottish Conservative conference this week is being held in Aberdeen, a city that has even more reason than other parts of Scotland to distrust the SNP, and more incentive than most to see the back of Humza Yousaf and his astonishingly incompetent administration.
But the North East is every bit as wary of Labour, whose plans for the oil and gas industry have been roundly condemned. Kier Starmer and Anas Sarwar, his Scottish lieutenant, want to veto any new development and to increase the windfall tax.
Despite the fact that their policies are almost identical, Humza Yousaf (who also wants no new oil and gas licences granted and whose party was the first to call for a windfall tax) recently attempted to portray himself as a friend of North Sea workers. Predictably, this was met with widespread incredulity.
If it hadn’t involved the potential loss of tens of thousands of jobs and, according to a damning judgment from Offshore Energies UK, a cost to the British economy of around £26bn, it would have been greeted with hilarity, too.
Because, as this week’s Scottish government budget illustrated, Scotland has a government of clownish illiteracy when it comes to economic judgment.
Unfortunately, the SNP’s laughable approach to government has been a tragedy for Scotland’s public services. And the only consistent opposition to that mismanagement has been provided by the Scottish Conservatives, the largest opposition group in the Scottish Parliament.
Yousaf has made a series of increasingly desperate calls for a “Tory-free” Scotland; a fairly offensive position, given that more than 700,000 Scots voted Conservative in the last election and I hope that tens of thousands more will do so at the next opportunity (something they seem eager to do, if it means seeing the back of the Nats).
But the First Minister’s calls are quite in keeping with the SNP’s ‘othering’ agenda, and their mania for manufacturing grievance and division where none exists. I’m also happy to see it as a compliment to the robust way in which my colleagues have stood up to, and called out, the Nationalists’ damaging policies at Holyrood.
Labour, despite the rhetoric they’ve ramped up in the past few months, hasn’t supplied any of that. Quite the reverse: on issue after issue, Sarwar has sent his MSPs in to back SNP/Green policies.
It’s not just their shared desire to kill off the oil and gas sector. Labour also voted with the SNP for higher taxes, the disastrous Gender self-ID Bill and the flawed Hate Crime Bill, to name a few.
And though much of the British media want to focus on Labour’s prospects here, the fact is that in much of Scotland the battleground is between the SNP and the Conservatives. The story in the last few council by-elections, in fact, has been Conservative gains from the SNP.
In huge swathes of the country – the North East, the Highlands and Islands, almost all of the South of Scotland – Labour isn’t even in the game. It’s a straight fight between an SNP government, with more than a decade and a half of failure to its name, and the Scottish Conservatives, who have a programme for taking Scotland forward.
Here, we’re the alternative. The challengers. The brighter future. The only vote that can get shot of the low-grade hacks that have dragged Scotland down: given us poorer growth, higher taxes, and worse public services than the rest of the country, despite record funding well above the national average.
If you haven’t heard much about this, it’s partly down to the easy ride the Nats have had for much of their tenure, not just from parts of the British media (which is at least understandable) but from sections of the press here. That has at last unravelled, and in truly spectacular fashion.
There’s no disguising the abysmal failure of the SNP in government. Their favoured tactic of blaming everything on Westminster wears pretty thin when almost everything is within their own devolved powers, something that most people have now woken up to.
Yousaf, who presented himself as the ‘Continuity Sturgeon’ candidate in the Nationalist leadership contest, has certainly lived down to that record of failure and, if anything, proved even more useless than his own dismal performance in the ministerial posts he previously held.
That’s blazingly apparent to every voter in Scotland. They are now, after the Nats’ terrible record in more than a decade and a half of government, itching to get into the polling booth and give them a terrible election result.
And, just like the referendum the SNP lost by a clear margin but seem hellbent on endlessly re-running, it will unite those who are fed up to the back teeth of essential services collapsing while costs and taxes rise. Who have finally realised that, when almost every element of government is devolved, the Nationalists’ tactic of blaming Westminster for their own failures won’t wash.
That’s why I’m not just confident of taking the fight to the SNP in seats across the country – and believe that the Scottish Conservatives stand poised to make gains at their expense.