For half a century the SNP has been a huge part of life.
Leafleting for my Dad, who was a councillor for Summerston in Glasgow.
Canvassing for my mother Winnie, in her four successful European campaigns in Highlands and Islands and supporting my late wife Margaret as MP for Moray.
I even sang Scots What Hae at the close of each annual conference.
That was how short of talent they were in the old days when few candidates ever honestly expected to win – outside my family that is!
So the decision that I could not stand for the seventh time as SNP candidate for Inverness – having served the people there for 26 years since 1999 – was tough.
But it has been a long time coming.
The serious self inflicted damage to the party began with the obsession on gender matters.
But it became deadly serious that fatal day we tied ourselves to the Green Party in the so called ‘cooperation pact.’
At the key SNP MSP Group meeting where Nicola Sturgeon forced this through, I was the sole and lone voice arguing that associating with them would tarnish us.
They would shut down the North Sea, our chemical industry, prevent our farmers from producing food and ban our fishermen from the sea, with their Highly Protected Marine Area policy.
The low point was however the bottle return scheme. It was so ill thought out that an unprecedented 600 businesses signed a letter to the FM calling for it to be binned.
Much earlier on I had warned several Ministers it was a disaster and to implement it would be a catastrophe.
It would put shop prices up and put businesses under.
But they knew better. Well – guess what.
Now it’s ended up in the Law Courts with BIFFA suing the Scottish Government for £160 million, in a case to be heard in June.
The hapless Minister Lorna Slater was put in charge of a multi billion pound scheme despite being a rookie MSP and Minister.
Last week in Holyrood the Ministers were forced to admit to me in the Chamber, that they now have to make a provision in the Government accounts for the possible eye watering losses.
If so, that’s less to pay teachers nurses and so on.
Meanwhile, the other Green minister, Patrick Harvie said we must install heat pumps in one million homes by 2030.
Since 2019, only 9,000 have been put in: I’m told there are only about 200 suitably qualified engineers in Scotland and it takes two four days to put one in.
Do the maths. Half baked pie in the Sky. Utter tosh. Dud policy eventually put into the policy recycling bin only weeks ago. What were they thinking of?
And the civil service: Not so much missing in action as missing in IN-action.
Not that there are days any single senior person in the public sector – most pocketing over a hundred grand a year – ever carries the can.
Instead it’s been kicked longer and further down the road, than any in the history of can-kicking.
In rural Scotland during power cuts many like us rely on our wood fire or stove for heat .
Patrick Harvie wanted to ban them. In Sweden they are compulsory to provide back up. Another one in the policy recycling bin.
These few examples of lunacy – I could fill the Daily Record with shocking examples – have troubled me greatly over the past four years.
I watched Humza Yousaf declare the deal with the Greens was “worth its weight in gold” and then shortly after, scrap it.
In the Middle Ages, it was the alchemists that changed base metal into Gold.
The SNP have been the alchemists of our political times.
Despite that one happy day when the Greens got their jotters, the electoral damage was already done.
Last year, three quarters of our MPs lost;, 65,000 members quit the party, and about 15 or 20 per cent polling points lost.
Whilst the main reason I cannot stand for the party again, is the breach of promise in the failure to deliver the long promised dualled A9 and A96, the damage done to the SNP by cosying up to a small group of extremists namely the Greens, has been incalculable.
My dear friend Alex Salmond, would never ever have gone near any of these absurd policies, yet they were brought in by our current First Minister who, let us not forget, was the architect of the Bute House Agreement.
I remain still in the party I have served all my life. But change it must, and radically.
People want to see a successful Scotland which means a pro-business growth plan as the key aim, and reform of health and education which are now creaking under the weight of gargantuan bureaucracies.
We can do better in an independent Scotland. I strongly believe that. It is not a lost cause but a cause not yet won.
But for enough to join me in that belief we must to govern well, and with a good dose of common sense.
So winning Independence means earning trust, and that takes decades to build up, but months to destroy. As, sadly, over the past four years we have proven.
The party I joined was a broad kirk and must again be so.
Otherwise we are not the national party, but a sect whose disdain for many who hold different views – on matters like gender, oil and gas, the economy – has alienated former supporters.
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