YES, MINISTER
Alex Massie profiles cabinet secretary for the rural economy Fergus Ewing
It is sometimes suggested that modern Scottish politics began in November 1967. That was the moment Winnie Ewing won a by-election in Hamilton in stunning style; that was the day the modern incarnation of the Scottish National Party was born; the date from which its long, slow, rise to prominence began. Half a century later, the SNP’s dominance of Scotland’s political landscape is such that it can now claim, with little hint of exaggeration, to be the country’s natural party of government. It may not win 50% of the vote again, as it did in the 2015 general election, but its position as the largest single party seems secure for years to come.
Winnie Ewing’s first spell in parliament was short-lived (she lost her seat in 1970) but she established herself, thanks to a second spell at Westminster and a period in the European Parliament where she delighted in the sobriquet ‘Madame Ecosse’, as the SNP’s matriarch. She spawned a political dynasty, too. The Ewings were, for a long time, the first family of Scottish nationalism and it was Winnie who presided over the first meeting of the ‘reconvened’ Scottish Parliament in 1999.
Her daughter Annabel was MP for Perth from 2001-2005 and now represents the constituency of Cowdenbeath in the Scottish Parliament, and her son Fergus has been a member of the Holyrood Parliament since 1999.
Fergus Ewing has been a minister continuously since the SNP came to power more than a decade ago, serving as minister for community safety and then as the minister responsible for business, energy and tourism before his appointment as cabinet secretary for the rural economy in May 2016.
Despite this ‘royal’ lineage, Ewing, whose wife Margaret was, until her death in 2006, an SNP MP and MSP too, is a figure out of step with the SNP’s vision of itself as a centreleft, ‘progressive’ party. He is, for one thing, a rare example of the public school educated nationalist. Before studying law at Glasgow University, Ewing attended Loretto school in Musselburgh, alma mater of Norman Lamont, Alastair Darling and Andrew Marr, amongst others.
The old jibe, much cherished by Scottish Labour in the far-off days when the erstwhile people’s party dominated Scottish politics, that the SNP are little more than ‘Tartan Tories’ is actually appropriate in Ewing’s case. He may share a belief in independence with Mhairi Black, the Paisley Pasionara, but they have little else in common.
Viewed from one perspective, this is evidence the SNP really is a broad and national church. It is open to everyone provided one simple test is passed: you must believe in independence. After that, everything is a matter of negotiation. That visions of a low-tax, highenterprise Scotland must necessarily clash with the alternative – and dominant – view of Scotland as a left-wing country thirsting for higher tax and greater regulation, matters little. These are details to be fixed once the country has completed its journey to independence.
The ‘Tartan Tory’ tag was not entirely inappropriate, however. Until last year, the SNP held a seemingly iron grip on constituencies in Moray, Aberdeenshire and Perthshire, none of which have ever previously been considered hotbeds of socialist insurrection. Tellingly, too,
these are counties outwith the central belt, where voters have often looked askance at the perceived domination of Scottish politics by central belt issues.
Now, perhaps, what the SNP gain on the swings in Glasgow and Lanarkshire, they lose on the roundabouts of Angus, Moray and Aberdeenshire. It is difficult to be a party for Aberdeenshire farmers and a party for Lanarkshire social workers. Nor, in terms of his voting record, is Ewing entirely on the same page as some of his colleagues. Like his mother, he abstained in the vote on the repeal of Section 2A (Section 28 in England) which outlawed the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools and, years later, he voted against recognising and legalising same-sex marriage.
He is on the socially conservative wing of the SNP and on these matters lies closer to ‘traditional’ Tory views than to the ‘progressive’ SNP mainstream. Equally, Ewing was generally thought to be unhappy with the SNP’s ambivalent attitude towards fracking. When he served as energy minister before he was moved to the rural affairs portfolio, it was claimed he was ‘on the brink of resigning’ in protest against the government’s plans to announce a moratorium on the so-called ‘unconventional’ means of extracting gas from beneath the central belt.
Ewing promised that the government would take an ‘evidence-based’ approach to the issue and that this evidence would be the ‘central foundation’ for the government’s eventual decision. This proved inconvenient, given that the government’s own expert, independent panel reported that subject to proper regulatory supervision, there were no significant environmental reasons to support a ban.
Anti-fracking campaigners celebrated when Ewing was quietly moved from the energy portfolio to rural affairs. Fracking was not the only issue in which he was out of step with his party. In general, the SNP takes a sceptical view of field sports but for Ewing they are an important part of country life. He was the rare SNP politician who opposed an outright ban on fox hunting.
More recently in 2015, he welcomed a report highlighting the economic impact of sporting estates, and claimed – with an impressively straight face – that ‘the Scottish Government is committed to maximising tourism growth and to supporting field sports’. Scotland, he said, ‘offers the complete package of sport: a warm welcome, good food and drink and unrivalled landscapes’. Shooting, he added, ‘makes a valuable contribution to the rural economy’. To put it no more than mildly, that is not how the SNP generally refers to Scotland’s landed and tweeded classes.
That in turn might make some country folk wonder about the extent to which Ewing is the chief impediment blocking the way towards a much more radical approach to land and rural issues in Scotland. Farmers and other rural interests might have reason to be dissatisfied with the SNP’s stewardship of countryside issues; it might still be the case that in Fergus Ewing they have the most sympathetic SNP minister they could hope for. Not enough, perhaps, but also possibly as good as it will ever get.
Ewing inherited a department in a state of something close to crisis. Scotland’s farmers were let down by a farm support payments system that was badly broken. Thousands of farmers waited months, and sometimes even more than a year, for vital subsidies to be paid. Planning and investment becomes nigh-on impossible in such circumstances, adding to the woes of a sector that has rarely needed to search for its troubles.
At this year’s Royal Highland Show, Ewing suggested the worst problems with the government’s farm-support IT systems were over. ‘We are experiencing far fewer problems now with the system and making substantial progress’. However ‘I will not be happy until every farmer gets the money that they are entitled to and I won’t be satisfied until it is working properly’. In other words, it is still not quite working properly.
Meanwhile, some environmental lobby groups in Scotland view Ewing with suspicion. They suspect he is too much in hock to business interests and draw what they deem a distinction between what they consider Ewing’s disappointingly pro-farmer, pro-agribusiness stance and the more ‘balanced’ approach taken by Roseanna Cunningham. Indeed they go further, suggesting that Michael Gove, Ewing’s counterpart at UK Government level, has a more ambitious, more environmentally sustainable, vision for the countryside’s future than anything yet produced by the Scottish Government.
They approve of the emphasis Gove has placed on moving towards a farm support system in which farmers are paid as much for their stewardship of the countryside as for their production of food. Under this vision, farmers will be rewarded for improving biodiversity – creating new woodlands, meadows and the like – and for doing more to ‘open’ the countryside to visitors. This is badged as a ‘Health and Harmony’ plan for rural England.
By contrast, Ewing takes a different view. ‘Health and Harmony isn’t a plan of action but more like a direction of travel. It doesn’t set out for production as a primary aim of farming. I have made it clear that farmers are custodians of the countryside, but their primary job is to produce food for the nation.’ And, he might have added, for export. Much to the dismay of some campaigners, Ewing opposes any ban on the export of live animals.
In place of ‘Health and Harmony’, the Scottish Government proposes a programme of what it calls ‘Stability and Simplicity’. The government wishes to maintain Common Agricultural Policy
‘Much to the dismay of campaigners, Ewing opposes any ban on the export of live animals’
‘pillar one funding’ while gradually, over a period of five years, implementing a cap on the payments available to individual farmers. The detail of this has not yet been shared but it is likely that no individual claimant will be able to tap more than £200,000 in funds each year and the final figure may yet be significantly lower than that.
Political fights lie ahead, however. Like his counterparts in Wales, Ewing is painfully aware that agriculture is, roughly speaking, twice as important to the Scottish economy as it is to the UK’s economic wellbeing as a whole. Hitherto the administration of agricultural policy has been left to the devolved administrations in their territories but, broadly speaking, policy has been set in Brussels.
Scottish farmers receive approximately 16% of all UK farm subsidies. Maintaining that share of funding will not be easy post-Brexit. The Scottish Government insists funding should be drawn from a UK-wide pool of cash but persuading English taxpayers they should, in effect, subsidise Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish farmers more generously than they subsidise English ones is likely to prove a troublesome sticking point for the future of agricultural policy across the UK.
Then there is the question of trade deals with other countries in a post-Brexit world. You do not require a crystal ball to predict this will be a fresh problem for British farming. Countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and the United States are likely to demand a lowering of agricultural tariffs ‘Agriculture is twice as important to the Scottish economy as it is to the UK’s economic wellbeing’ as part of their price for trade deals with the UK. Given the scale and economy of agriculture in these countries, that spells difficulties for UK farmers, especially those in relatively unproductive upland areas.
The complexity of avoiding a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, however, has pushed the UK towards accepting that following a common rulebook for all goods including agri-food with the EU is a necessary price for achieving Brexit. That in turn means it would be difficult, leaked cabinet papers say, for the UK to accommodate a likely pre-requisite from the US in a future trade deal as the UK would find itself unable to recognise the Americans’ array of standards in food production. That means, among other things, hormone-fed beef and the infamous chlorinated chicken.
It would also require the UK to break a promise made by George Eustice, the farming minister in England, who told the most recent NFU conference that ‘we won’t be signing trade deals that will allow any British produce to be undercut
on animal welfare standards’. For his part, Ewing’s support for live animal exports continues to anger and appal animal welfare groups lobbying for a ban on exports on which much of the Scottish meat industry – particularly lamb – depends.
For all that the SNP likes to position itself as a national party governing in the national interest, low politics is never far away. On fishing, for instance, the SNP insists it stands up for fishermen in contrast to a Conservative party that has ‘sold out’ Scotland’s fishermen before and will, in the post-Brexit environment, do so again. How this is squared with the party’s continued enthusiasm for EU membership is something of a mystery. The SNP says it wants a reformed Common Fisheries Policy but, for good reason, has given precisely no indication of how it might achieve such a thing.
The party still believes Brexit will benefit the SNP in the longer term. Once Brexit is understood – and experienced – as a disaster, independence will seem more attractive than ever. What’s more, if Brexit proves a calamity, those ‘Tory-voting farmers’ will have signed up for their own destruction, notes one SNP figure close to Ewing. Farmers, like the rest of the rural economy, do not enjoy universal sympathy in SNP quarters.
Invidious as it may seem, the jazz-loving, sports-car driving Fergus Ewing may yet be the rural economy’s best – and perhaps only – friend in government. That comes with the territory of his portfolio, of course, but Ewing’s instincts remain more attuned to those of rural Scotland than is the case for many of his colleagues.
When push comes to shove, however, independence comes first. Ewing was born into the nationalist movement and has never questioned his place there. It was part of his birthright. If the Ewings are not the force they once were in the nationalist movement, that is to some degree because they are a smaller part of it. The first family of nationalism has many more colleagues now than once they did.
That too does not seem likely to change at any point in the near or foreseeable future.
‘Fergus Ewing may be the rural economy’s best friend in government’