Articles by Mandy Rhodes
Once dubbed ‘Minister for Newsnight’ for his ubiquitous and sometimes fairly pugnacious appearances on the late night politics programme, the Cabinet Secretary for Investment and Capital Infrastructure is on a mission to build a better Scotland
It’s 8am and Alex Neil immediately, is talking nineteen to the dozen about everything from dualling Scotland’s roads, to improving the housing stock, to the ‘intellectual deficit’ of the opposition. As the Cabinet Secretary responsible for a rich and varied portfolio including Scottish Water, procurement, European funding, the Scottish Futures Trust, transport, housing and communities, Neil has his hands on many of the available levers of Scotland’s economic future.
Sipping from a big mug of tea with the words ‘Cabinet Secretary’ emblazoned on the front and with that face-splitting smile never far away, Neil is a man proud to be part of an SNP Government that he believes will deliver independence in 2016. And with that argument resting firmly on how the economy performs, Neil, along with John Swinney, the man he once stood against as leader of the party and now the Finance Secretary, is pivotal to whether or not this government will successfully deliver the SNP goal.
Neil graduated from Dundee University with an MA Honours in Economics but many believe it is not just his clear and focused understanding of the financial workings of a country that led to his fairly unexpected promotion within Alex Salmond’s majority government, but his left-wing credentials that offered the party the USP that helped it to steal Labour’s clothes and its voter...
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Confidence is not something that fledgling Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, is short of, which is just as well given that on the eve of the Scottish Conservative Party spring conference, it is revealed that her personal popularity rating is desperately low. With the party conference in just a matter of days, the influential Conservative blog, toryhoose, reports that her approval ratings have plummeted by over 75 points to a lowly 4.8 per cent, making her now one of the most unpopular Tory MSPs in Holyrood. And just to twist the knife that bit deeper, the same poll indicates, ironically, a clear reversal of fortunes for Murdo Fraser, whom she narrowly beat in the leadership contest last year when Fraser stood on a controversial, some said suicidal, ticket of tearing up [...]
Scotland, it is argued, is the home of the vested interest. And with a web of personal interconnections and professional interests criss-crossing our nation’s institutions, radical change is often frustrated by a lack of courage to think out of the box. It is too easy to blame everything on Westminster instead of looking to ourselves. We tend to wait to be told what to do despite a clear thirst for more power to enable us to be all we can be. So it is with some courage then that the Scottish Parliament took the unprecedented step of voting against a Westminster ‘consent’ motion in relation to the UK Government’s Welfare Reform Bill and set up a committee to investigate truly Scottish solutions to Scottish problems. There is no doubt, indeed [...]
Exclusive interview with Finance Secretary John Swinney In 2007 when the SNP decided to go it alone and run Scotland as a minority Government, people said it would never last. The Labour Party, smug despite its defeat, hung on to the belief that John Swinney, the newly installed Finance Secretary, would not get his first budget passed and that that humiliation would lead to the inevitable fall of Scotland’s first SNP administration, with Labour undoubtedly poised to take its place. In the event, the budget did pass, the SNP continued in office and Labour smarted. But despite that early victory, few people will ever forget the undignified and last-minute negotiations that went on in the chamber with the FM passing notes offering deals to the Green’s Patrick Harvie in full [...]
This time last year, following poll after poll showing Labour well ahead of the electoral game – one had them at 49 per cent of the vote – the SNP seemed destined for the political dustbin. One term of SNP minority government, with little to show for it, other than a place in history as having released the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing and having implemented a long list of populist policies: the abolition of bridge tolls, the ending of the graduate endowment, free prescriptions, a council tax freeze and the small business bonus scheme, to name but a few. Their never-ending generosity, it seemed, was about to be rewarded by a simple reversal of electoral fortunes. Labour may have been booted out of government at Westminster but [...]
