Scottish Tory Leader Douglas Ross has a side hustle as an assistant referee for the Scottish Football Association. Now, Scotland’s opposition parties are showing him the red card for his last minute decision to stand as parliamentary candidate for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East constituency.
It’s a ‘stitch up,’ says the SNP. Ross is being cast as ‘shameful’, ‘nasty’ and the leader of a ‘morally bankrupt’ party for apparently elbowing aside former Tory minister, David Duguid, who’d said he was expecting to stand in the seat. Duguid has been in hospital with a spinal illness. But last night the Scottish Conservative Party Management Board announced that his ‘recovery would be put at risk if he stood in this election’.
It’s a ‘stitch up,’ says the SNP
The former Scottish Office minister had been the MP for Banff and Buchan since 2017, but that seat has been collapsed into Aberdeenshire and Moray East as result of boundary changes. Ross has tossed his hat in the ring hours before nominations close for the 4 July general election.
Whether this is or is not a ‘stitch up’ it is certainly a screeching u-turn. Ross is also an MSP and happens to lead the Conservatives in the Scottish parliament. In 2021, he promised to stand down as an MP at this election so that he could concentrate on fronting his party in Holyrood where they are currently the official opposition.
What does it say for the party’s prospects in the 2026 Scottish parliamentary elections that their leader is seeking to jump ship back to Westminster? Ross was a junior minister in Boris Johnson’s government until he resigned over Dominic Cummings’s trip to Barnard Castle during Covid. He told BBC Scotland that his ‘heart is absolutely in Holyrood’ but that ‘circumstances change’.
They certainly do. With the opinion polls recording a dramatic Labour revival in Scotland, pundits are expecting Anas Sarwar’s Scottish Labour Party to replace the Conservatives as the lead opposition in Holyrood after 2026. By restanding as an MP, Ross is not breaking any rules. But he’s pretty blatantly hedging his bets and breaking his promise to his party and Scottish voters. Yet this is not just a story about a cynical politician going back on his word. It also tells us something about the realignment of Scottish politics.
The SNP has undergone a remarkable ideological shift since the departure of the ‘First Activist’ Humza Yousaf and the Scottish Green Party in April. This change was embodied today by the ‘socially conservative’ MSP Kate Forbes standing in for John Swinney at First Minister’s Question Time. Her presence as deputy First Minister is something few on the progressive left of the SNP ever expected to see.
A Highland MSP, Forbes has been highly critical in the past of the SNP’s energy policies and she seems to be rewriting them as she goes along. Earlier this week, she declared that the SNP ‘had never said no’ to new exploration licences in the North Sea. That’s not how many people remember it. Only last year, Humza Yousaf accused Rishi Sunak of ‘climate changed denial’ when the PM announced 100 new drilling licences in the North Sea.
SNP ministers are no longer repeating Nicola Sturgeon’s ‘presumption against new exploration’ in the North Sea and have dropped her hostility to developing the Cambo and Rosewell oil and gas fields.
In this election campaign, the SNP is even opposing the windfall tax on oil and gas majors that Labour wants to increase and extend. In Monday’s Scottish leader’s debate, John Swinney said that Labour’s ‘Thatcherite’ policies would cost tens of thousand of jobs and leave the North East of Scotland ‘an industrial wasteland’.
So, the nationalists have come a long way since Nicola Sturgeon announced that ‘climate emergency’ before the Cop26 summit. The Scottish government has also quietly ditched its recycling and marine conservation policies, as well as the ban on wood burning stoves in new build homes and their plan to replace a million gas central heating boilers by 2030. Indeed, with its new enthusiasm for business and economic growth, and with the sidelining of LGBT policies, the Scottish National Party is – independence aside – almost taking on the mantle of an alternative party of the centre right in Scotland.
It could be that it is not just David Duguid who is being elbowed aside in the North East. There may soon be no place there for the Scottish Conservatives.
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