STEPHEN DAISLEY: Scotland doesn't need independence...
but we DO need MSPs who can think for themselves Click here to visit the Scotland home page for the latest news and sport By STEPHEN DAISLEY FOR THE SCOTTISH DAILY MAIL Published: 15:45 EDT, 23 March 2025 | Updated: 15:45 EDT, 23 March 2025 e-mail View comments 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.
