‘This time round we want to run the country’
SCOTTISH Conservatives must widen their appeal if they want to give Scotland ‘a break from nationalism’ and defeat the SNP, Ruth Davidson said yesterday.
She told conference that the party needs to ‘look and sound more like the Scotland we want to represent’ if she is to defeat the SNP in 2021 and become First Minister.
Miss Davidson said the Scottish Conservatives must attract people from minority groups and younger people who are at present underrepresented in the party.
And she insisted the Tories can win the next Holyrood election, pointing out that her party now has more MSPs than the SNP before it came to power in 2007, and adding that she would be happy to run a minority government. She told a fringe event: ‘Last time around we went to the electorate with the very simple message: “Vote us for us for a strong opposition.” This time we’ll be asking them to allow us the chance to serve as Scotland’s government.’
While admitting the party still has a long way to go to convince enough voters that the Tories can be a ‘credible’ government, she maintained it could provide the ‘proper, probusiness, champion of educational excellence our country needs’.
Miss Davidson added: ‘We’re a government that puts all it energies, all its resources into Scotland’s services, economy, schools – not an administration with a weather eye on the constitution instead.
But she admitted that ‘if the
‘A break from nationalism’
Scottish Conservatives are going to govern Scotland, we need to look and sound more like the Scotland we seek to represent’. She said: ‘And that means more candidates from BME backgrounds.’
Miss Davidson’s call for more black and minority ethnicity candidates was echoed by Tory MEP for Scotland Nosheena Mobarik, who said when the Scottish Tories met in Perth in May ‘the only non-white person in the audience was my husband’.
She added: ‘For all our continuing success, you can’t claim to be a party of the whole of Scotland if our membership doesn’t reflect the community we serve. So what are we going to do about it? Ruth has asked to me to chair a commission which will begin a dialogue to make a series of recommendations for change.’
Andrew Bowie, the youngest Scottish Tory MP, said the party must make itself appeal to younger voters, saying Miss Davidson can’t ‘fight this fight alone’.
Meanwhile, Miss Davidson pledged her party will always oppose demands for another independence referendum. She told the BBC’s Sunday Politics Scotland show: ‘The Prime Minister has already said no to Nicola Sturgeon when she asked for another referendum in March last year.
‘I spoke with the Prime Minister last night and we are committed to making sure that doesn’t happen.
‘The people of Scotland were promised this would be a once in a generation event and I will be going into the next election with a manifesto commitment to say we wouldn’t have one.’