LETTER OF THE WEEK

An open letter to Winnie’s son Fergus

Dear Fergus Ewing MSP.

The Ewing Legacy

As you well know that doughty fechter, Winnie Ewing entered Westminster on November 1967 and famously declared “stop the world, Scotland wants to get on”.

During her time in that place she had first hand experience of the SNP’s 1970s campaign It’s Scotland’s Oil, a campaign that rallied me to the cause and alerted my younger self to the perils of perfidious Albion.

So this week’s news that Crown Estate Scotland has effectively sold Scotland’s renewable wind capacity for a relative pittance is a travesty of inordinate proportions. Remember the McCrone report? The expression fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me was never more appropriate.

In stating the blindingly obvious Winnie Ewing was, for twenty years, a champion of Scotland and her interests and was distinguished with the accolade of Madame Ecosse courtesy of Le Monde in acknowledging the pinnacle of her achievements.
She had become Britain’s longest serving MEP in 1995 and in her day, a former Vice President of the European Radical Alliance. Now that sounds like a doughty fechter’s club if ever there was one. And as the senior MSP, with great dignity opened the Holyrood Parliament in May 1999, with the memorable words “The Scottish Parliament, adjourned on the 25th day of March in the year 1707, is hereby reconvened”
Without doubt a woman with a place in history and in her 94th year a veteran pensioner.

At 74 years I am a mere stripling pensioner but now increasingly despondent about the Scotland of my remaining years.
Given the accelerating cost of living, the highest rate of inflation in 30 years, even in advance of the massive increase in fuel costs coming down the line once the energy price cap is removed, we also need to factor in the real prospect of increased Council Tax bills. Such a veritable tsunami of financial grief will be particularly hard on pensioners on a fixed income in your Inverness & Nairn constituency and indeed elsewhere.
Fifty five years later from that important day in Westminster, we are afflicted with the party of Independence and it’s willshe-wontshe First Minister.

At the SNP conference in Aberdeen in 2017 she promised me and fellow party members that a “publicly owned, not-for-profit energy company” with charges “as close to cost price as possible” would be set up by 2021. That was a party worth voting for. Then it wasn’t because she reneged on her promise. Then it was, when apparently, at last year’s on-line conference, the rank and file insisted on it as Party policy. Then it wasn’t because public owned shareholding didn’t feature in the great licensing giveaway this week. A mere 5% stake in the energy generation would be a very valuable contribution (some estimate £275m annually) to Scottish government revenues. As Iain Lawson writes, “clearly your First Minister prefers “big profits for private companies, especially if they are owned and controlled outside Scotland.”

As a pensioner yourself, it might be argued you could be the Pensioners’ champion, albeit not dependent like lots of us on the poorest state pension in Europe, nevertheless I’d appreciate your view on how much more you could be doing if you had access to enhanced funding.

I would very much appreciate as a constituent, that you honour that great Winnie Ewing legacy by standing up for your pensioner constituents. That you challenge the torpor currently afflicting the alleged party of Independence which is literally spectating as increasing perils to our economy, our standard of living, decency and social democratic outlook are about to overwhelm us, and that’s without factoring in the current Whitehall chaos

What does Madam Ecosse think I wonder, fifty five years later in 2022, that Scotland has yet to get onboard a world that’s declined to hang about for us?
I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely
Iain Bruce

Nairn

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