Salmond was best FM says leading Tory Murdo Fraser
Kevin Mckenna meets another potential leadership hopeful – and hears about his humble origins
WHAT is it with the Scottish Tories and their working-class credentials? Sometimes you feel you’ve stepped into a Scottish version of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch.
Murdo Fraser is one of Scotland’s longest-serving MSPS and currently represents Mid Scotland and Fife. He is the Tories’ Tory, right down to his tartan trews and the sporadic expostulations of ecstasy on social media for King and empire or when Rangers are doing the business. When he’s not doing that, he’s winding up SNP types online with his muscular unionism.
“Ask me about my humble beginnings,” he says. “Not you too,” I reply. During the UK election campaign, I spent a day with the former Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross in his Moray fastness. Mr Ross showed me the tied farm cottage where he’d grown up before his dad, an agricultural worker, had lost his job.
At last year’s Hamilton and Rutherglen West by-election, the young Tory candidate Thomas Kerr had told me about his challenging upbringing in Glasgow’s edgy Cranhill district.
Mr Fraser tells me that his dad had been a car mechanic in Inverness and that he’d been made redundant in the early 1980s. “So, he set himself up as a handyman and worked with his friend and neighbour fixing cars.”
So, I ask him the same question I ask of all these proley Tories: why this party? After all, when their families encountered jeopardy it had been socialism’s welfare state which had come to their aid.
“It was all about values,” he says. “It was about individual responsibility and giving people the opportunity to get on in life and to create equality of opportunity for everyone. That if you had ambition and were prepared to work you could achieve things in life.”
Mr Fraser isn’t afraid to challenge prevailing orthodoxies and shibboleths in his own party either. We’re talking about 25 years of the Scottish Parliament and what it’s achieved. I try to tempt him into trashing it. “Would we have been any worse off if devolution hadn’t happened,” I ask him. His response is a little startling.
“The best administration we had was Alex Salmond’s first one between 2007 and 2011. It was a genuine minority administration which had to do deals – including with us – to get things done, such as cutting business rates and increasing police numbers.
“Also, Salmond was someone you felt was genuinely interested in making Scotland better and doing things to improve the country. I know that many in the business community think this too. I know some in my own party might not want to hear that, but it’s undeniable.”
He believes that Scottish independence is dead for a generation and that this will permit the Scottish Parliament to deliver what it was originally supposed to.
“In the last decade, there’s been so much focus on the constitutional issue that there hasn’t been enough time for debate on other issues. Why are we so bad at attracting immigrants to Scotland – why are the numbers of business start-ups so low compared to the rest of UK? How do we improve the health service?
“What devolution has given us is far better scrutiny of government. Currently, I’m battling with Police Scotland over non-crime hate incidents. You have an opportunity to raise these issues and to shine a light on them.
“In terms of public engagement, the Petitions Committee has been very good. The work they’ve done on the issue of improving the A9 has been excellent. They’re able to call such as Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond to give evidence.
“The way the public engages with the Parliament is much better than at Westminster. But there’s still a lot that needs to change.”
He’s withering about the quality of debate at Holyrood which he believes could improve if members were given more time to speak and take interventions, rather than stick slavishly to a pre-written script from a researcher bearing little relevance to the live debate.
“We’re bad at making laws,” he says. “Even if a bill is well drafted, people put in amendments at stage two and stage three with scant opportunity to debate it or assess its consequences. The classic example was the Wildlife Bill in the last Parliament. A last-minute amendment to protect mountain hares panicked ministers to cave in on it following an orchestrated email campaign by environmentalists. Now, we’re seeing an explosion in the mountain hare population, with many dying of starvation as there’s not enough food.
“I don’t want a second chamber like the House of Lords, but we could create a new committee which might be staffed with respected figures like Adam Tomkins, David Steel and Joanna Cherry. When a bill is passed, their job would be to look at it and refer it back to Parliament if they think there are serious issues in it that still need to be addressed. Parliament would still ultimately decide, of course, but it would at least be a checking mechanism to stop bad law being made.”
This week, it’s expected that he’ll become the sixth person to announce his candidacy for the leadership of the party. When we meet, he says he’s taking soundings, but he still commands significant level of grassroots support within the party.
He effectively launched his campaign last week when he called for the party to set up a commission to examine loosening links with the UK party, thus rekindling his main campaigning message when he last stood for the Scottish leadership.
There’s an emerging strain of opinion within the Scottish Tories that a unique window of opportunity has opened up for them seriously to make a challenge for the government of Scotland. They believe they are more in touch with traditional working-class communities than the SNP who, they feel, are increasingly regarded as a party of self-indulgent dilettantes focusing on fringe issues that have little to do with everyday life in Scotland.
He believes that there’s a prevailing headwind among Scots voters to consider something entirely new and that, if the Tories under the right leadership are nimble and clever, they can make a significant breakthrough in 2026. “That will be a change election,” he says, “and Labour have nothing new to offer, apart from a different view on the constitution. Their policy positions on taxation, education, the NHS, and housing policy differ little from the SNP.
“One of the most disastrous political decisions of the last few years was putting Patrick Harvie in charge of housing. Having an eviction ban and a rent freeze sounds great if you’re a tenant, until you realise you’re destroying the private rental sector as all the landlords sell up. You’ll drive away hundreds of millions in investment by people who were seeking to build houses for rent. Now they’re saying they’d rather build them in England than in Scotland.
“There’s an opportunity in 2026 to say: if you want real change there’s no point in swapping one left-of-centre party for another just because they have a different view on the constitution.”
As he departs, we do the usual diplomatic Celtic and Rangers patter. The SNP would probably record it as a hate incident.
Salmond was genuinely interested in making Scotland better