Ex-minister Neil is latest SNP veteran to quit Holyrood
● MSP will not fight election next year ‘after much soul-searching’
One of Holyrood’s longest serving MSPS, the SNP’S Alex Neil, has announced he will not stand at next year’s Scottish Parliament elections.
The MSP for Airdrie and Shotts said he had been “tempted” to stand for election again but “after much soul-searching” had decided against committing another five years to politics.
His announcement comes just days after Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham said she was not standing next year, adding to a growing list of SNP veterans who are quitting Holyrood, including Constitution Secretary Michael Russell.
Mr Neil, who is regarded as one of the most independent of the SNP Government’s backbenchers – and the only one to have publicly said he voted for Brexit – said he “owed it to his wife and family to spend more time with them” and that his two granddaughters missed him when he was “away so often on parliamentary and constituency business”.
He said his priorities during his remaining eight months as an MSP would be to “tackle the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic in my constituency and to ensure that the new Monklands Hospital will be located in one of the two shortlisted sites in Airdrie and not at Gartcosh.”
Leaving politics will bring to an end an, at times, controversial career which began when he quit the Labour Party in 1976, along with Jim Sillars and John Robertson, to form the Scottish Labour Party. However, the SLP collapsed after three years and he joined the SNP in 1985.
He served as the party’s publicity director before being put in charge of policy, as well as unsuccessfully standing as a candidate in a variety of general elections from 1989 to 1997.
In 1999 he was elected on Holyrood’s regional list for
Central Scotland, becoming a constituency MSP in the SNP landslide of 2011.
He was made cabinet secretary for infrastructure by Alex Salmond, before moving to become health secretary.
After surviving a vote of no confidence in 2014, after it was alleged he had acted improperly by cancelling changes to mental health provision, he was moved to become secretary for social justice, communities and pensioners’ rights. He resigned from the government in 2016 before a reshuffle.
Yesterday SNP depute leader Keith Brown said his decision to go meant a “huge amount of experience” would be lost to Holyrood and that Mr Neil had a “proud legacy” as a minister.