First Minister John Swinney needs to answer some awkward questions

My invitation to speak at the Edinburgh book festival seems, unaccountably, to have gone missing in the post.

So I thought I would make up my own mini-festival especially for Strathy readers.

A summer festival of awkward questions.

• How can our First Minister be ‘100% behind Ukraine’ in their war of survival against the Russian dictatorship, when he won’t support in any way the supply of arms ammunition of weaponry? Pea shooters won’t deter Putin.

• How can we keep the lights on when the Scottish Government opposes base load and back up from both gas and nuclear, necessary for stability and ‘inertia’ on the grid? And when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine how will we avoid disastrous blackouts seen in Spain also reliant almost entirely on renewable energy?

• How can borrowing more and more money by Government ever be the answer to any political question when the National Debt has trebled in about 15 years, and is now £41,000 per citizen?

The annual interest repayments alone are over five times the total amount spent in the UK on policing. How can we leave that legacy for our children and grandchildren?

• How can any civil servants union keep a straight face when demanding their members’ ‘rights’ to spend only two days a week in the office, when our farmers and rural workers get up at 5am and then work all day every day to put food on our table and get no holidays or gold plated pensions?

And why does the First Minister not require his Permanent Secretary to order his civil servants to put in a proper shift at their expensive, centrally heated workplaces.

Strathy readers may by now be saying to themselves: “Okay he asks questions but where are his answers?”

Fair point. Maybe the wider solution is to try something completely different in Holyrood. What I hear more and more from people is that they are pretty fed up with both Holyrood and Westminster.

That ‘something different’ is that the main four parties work together and a cabinet is selected with the best from each. To concentrate on growing the economy, reforming our NHS, and focussing on schools housing and police.

There should be less tribalism, more joint hard work on delivery. Let’s roll up our sleeves together to make Scotland a better place by our parliament growing up.

That may sound unlikely, naive and fanciful even. But that perspective would surely change if Mr Farage’s Reform was to gain as many as 20 or 30 MSPs, and the Greens hold on to their MSPs next session.

That would indeed be completely different.

Both in Germany and Ireland, lifelong party political enemies have formed a so- called ‘firewall’ against extremes - AFD in Germany and Sinn Feinn in Ireland. So there are precedents.

It’s happening in other countries. Furthermore, the rest of the public must cooperate at their places of work - and operate as a team. Why are politicians any different?

Summer school time

When schools go on holiday, MSPs go to ‘school.’ By that I mean that over the summer is a time to get out and about and learn more about what is actually happening in the real world beyond the Holyrood bubble.

In the last few weeks, I have attended Scone Game Fair, the Inverness Highland Games, and worked with local keepers and others on working to force the powers that be to recognise the glaring defects in their approach to tackling wild fires.

Every day is, as they say, a school day. Any MSP who thinks he knows it all is a deluded fool.

Fergus Ewing is Independent MSP for Inverness Nairn and Strathspey.

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