Citizen Freeman’s red shift: From communism to nationalism via a stint as a Labour special adviser
JEANE Freeman’s rise to become a junior Government minister last year was as remarkable as it was meteoric. The 63-year-old had barely been an SNP member for a year, but she was elected as an MSP and handed a job shaping a new social security system. But she is also the latest senior politician, joining John Reid and Peter Mandelson, to have entered Government after starting out as a communist in the 1970s.
Reid was famously dismissive of his hard-left past – “I used to believe in Santa Claus” – but Freeman says the Communist Party taught her two lessons.
“One was the importance of understanding what had gone before and how political movements had developed,” she says, sitting in her ministerial office at Holyrood.
“The second was the importance of rigorous thought. It was all very well to have a gut reaction to something, but did you have an intellectual case behind it?”
In the early 1980s she ditched the Communist Party. “Eventually it felt indulgent to me. The point of politics is to effect change ... The point is not just to be self-satisfied about your clever political thoughts.”
I correctly assume Freeman – whose view of politics is premised on changing things, not just protesting about them – is no fan of Jeremy Corbyn. “Corbyn, for me, is indulgent middle-class student politics that serves no-one particularly well,” she says. “It may work well in metropolitan London, but it is of little resonance to people elsewhere.”
Freeman joined Labour in 1987 when she moved to Edinburgh and rose to become the chief policy special adviser in Jack McConnell’s coalition administration. She left amid a row over the departure of her partner from a diplomatic post in the US.
In retrospect, she says her time as a Labour adviser sowed the seeds of her eventual support for independence: “There were some decisions that were made that were more about how they would be received in Downing Street, as opposed to whether they were the right things to do. And that just didn’t feel right.”
She adds: “I didn’t leave being convinced of independence, but it did begin the thinking about ‘well, why not?’.”
Asked whether she keeps in touch with her former boss, she replies: “No.”
After leaving the Scottish Executive, she started her own consultancy, joined various public bodies and made a decent living offering the sort of advice she was renowned for providing.
She resurfaced as a senior figure in the Women for Independence campaign group, joined the SNP after the referendum and entered Holy- rood as MSP for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley. Although her social security brief is a junior post, I put it to her that she is being tipped for the Cabinet.
“I didn’t think I was going to be a minister,” she says. “I just don’t think about it.”
Would you take a Cabinet position if asked to serve? “If the First Minister asks you to do a job, you do a job.”
Her current job is politically tricky. Rather than just complain about Westminster cuts, the Scottish Government now has the power to increase tax to help top up benefits for the poor. However, despite cross-party calls, the SNP refuses to put up either the basic, higher or additional rates of taxation.
Is she in favour of a 50p rate of tax? “I think it is something we will have to look at seriously in the next few years,” she says.
Asked if she – Freeman earns around £90,000 a year – should pay more in tax? “Yes, I do,” comes the reply.
She is sceptical of Labour and Green proposals to use the Parliament’s new powers to top up child benefit by £5 a week:
“In that plan, for every £10 that is spent, £7 is going to kids who aren’t in poverty. I think it is, from an opposition party, a neat soundbite that won’t actually deliver .”
Freeman is also “hugely sympathetic” to the principle of a Universal Basic Income – which pays everyone, regardless of whether they work, a guaranteed sum – but issues a warning: “What I am not prepared to do, though, is give people the unrealistic expectation that it is something the current Scottish Government could do in the current devolution settlement.”
Despite switching from Labour to the SNP, she admits to feeling a “bit sad” about the demise of her previous party.
“I do think about my dad and how much all that meant to him, and people like him, and how badly let down he would feel by what has happened to the Labour Party.”
Freeman also agrees that she looks at policy from the perspective of someone who was steeped in the Labour movement: “My politics are left of centre.”
A thread ties her early left-wing activism to her status as a Cabinet minister-in-waiting: her career began, and will end, in movements with revolutionary intentions for the UK.