Michael Russell has served as secretary for education and lifelong learning since 2009, and is standing as the SNP candidate for Argyll and Bute on 5 May.The strangest question I was ever asked on a doorstep was on the last Saturday of the 1987 election campaign, which was my first parliamentary outing. In torrential rain I knocked on a door in Stonehouse in Lanarkshire, about the most distant town from the sea in Scotland and nestling within the old Clydesdale constituency which was totally landlocked. The voter, however, wanted to know the SNP position on lighthouse dues – and specifically to whom they should be paid. Playing for time, I parried with remarks about the weather, the campaign and lots of other things until I dredged from my memory something I had read somewhere about the issue. Amazingly, my response seemed to satisfy him. This election has produced no such surprises as yet – though, having just looked it up, I am now adequately if not fully prepared to discuss the General Lighthouse Fund and the levying of 38p per net registered ton for up to nine voyages a year with a tonnage cap set at 35,000.
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Fortunately most of the questions relate so far to the SNP government’s council tax freeze, to the state of the roads, to education (and particularly student fees) and – in Argyll at least – to the strong disregard in which voters now hold Nick Clegg in particular and the Liberal Democrats in general. Politicians do evince powerful reactions. Over the years, I have heard astonishing vitriol about friends of mine and fawning appreciation of others with whom I refuse even to spend the time of day. But there seems at present to be a special circle of electoral hell reserved for the man who only 12 months ago former and future prime ministers were clamouring – on live television – to agree with. In the Highlands, what is openly talked about as the Liberal betrayal is felt especially keenly. A prominent Shetland crofter, explaining the Liberals' historic hold on whole swathes of the north and west, once said to me that his grandfather had told him that the Liberals were the party that had saved crofting and given the islanders a future, victories they had won by by standing up to the lairds. Now – to men like him – it seems as if that history has been turned on its head. The crofters' party is doing the lairds' dirty work and slashing the services on which rural areas depend. Promises made just a year ago – such as the promise not to raise VAT – are being broken, and claims trumpeted from the rooftops – like an unshakable commitment to reduce rural petrol prices – are turning out to be hollow indeed. Liberalism in the Highlands and Islands has always been based on the strength of the candidate as well as the cause. Men such as Inverness MP Charles Fraser-Mackintosh – known in the 1880s as “the Member for the Highlands” as a result of his advocacy of land reform and Gaelic – embraced both Land League and Liberal principles, and the open preference expressed this week by John Farquhar Munro for Alex Salmond as first minister reflects that tradition. JF was the co-sponsor of my Gaelic Bill in the first parliament and he is the best type of old-style Highland Liberal – determined to say what he believes to be true, no matter what his party or his opponents think. I have experienced both sides of that determination, as his dogged (and successful) resistance to many of the changes proposed by the Shucksmith Commission on crofting made my work as environment minister particularly difficult for a while. The SNP’s natural embrace of a strong localism – ensuring that decisions are made as close to communities as possible – and our radical approach to land reform, including our determination to repatriate the earnings of the Crown Estate, give a message to Highland communities that is in keeping with their traditions as well as their present need. A commitment to the language (I was particularly proud to be the first-ever government minister to speak in Gaelic at a European Council of Ministers) and a passion for education (including ensuring the protection of rural schools) strike a chord as well. Richard Lochhead and Roseanna Cunningham have also demonstrated a practical approach to supporting rural industries and rural employment that is producing results, though there is much still to do. With four weeks to go in this campaign – it has been a long one – it is more than likely that there will be more surprise questions in store for me and for every other candidate. But I think the real surprise of this election would be if the new-style Liberal Democrat candidates in the Highlands and Islands did not find themselves paying a very heavy electoral price for their party’s decision to sell its political soul for a share of power in London.Donate to us: support independent, intelligent, in-depth Scottish journalism from just 3p a day
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