Aquaculture champion Ewing will not stand for SNP at next election
Scotland’s former aquaculture minister Fergus Ewing has announced that he won’t be submitting his name for nomination as a Scottish National Party candidate in next year’s Scottish Parliament election – but may stand as an independent.
Ewing, who has been SNP MSP for Inverness for 26 years, said in a statement that the principal reason for his decision was the SNP government’s failure to deliver on its long-standing pledges to dual the A9 and A96 trunk roads.
He added that over the past four years the SNP has chosen to self-destruct, "with its damaging deal with the Greens, its obsession over gender recognition, the ill-fated Deposit Return Scheme, and by turning its back on our hard-working oil and gas workers, our thousands of accommodation providers, tourism enterprises, our food and drink producers, farmers, keepers and land managers, and our fishermen and coastal communities".
The MSP was a staunch ally of the salmon farming sector during five years as Cabinet Secretary for Rural Economy and Tourism between 2016 and 2021 but was relegated to the back benches after the 2021 election, when the SNP won fewer seats and agreed to a power sharing deal with the Scottish Greens, whose members Ewing has disparaged as “wine bar revolutionaries”.
Gougeon going too
His announcement comes a week after current aquaculture minister Mairi Gougeon announced she would not stand in next year’s election, for different reasons. The 39-year-old MSP and former councillor said that by 2026, she would have been in an elected position for about half of her life, and she wished to take a step back from frontline politics and pursue new opportunities.
Both Gougeon and Ewing took part in yesterday’s Scottish Parliament debate about a report into Scottish salmon farming by the Rural Affairs and Islands Committee (RAIC) following an inquiry into the sector last year.
In response to RAIC convener Finlay Crason’s comment that “I cannot help but feel a bit dismayed about how few of the committee’s recommendations the Scottish Government has committed to act on”, Gougeon said the government does take the report’s recommendations very seriously, but added: “I hope that members across the chamber agree that it is important that our interventions are evidence based and that they balance proportionate regulatory improvements to protect our natural environment against the impact that regulation could have on the sector’s economic potential.”
£1 billion investment
Ewing asked Carson if he acknowledged the fact that, since 2018, the salmon sector as a whole had invested £1 billion in addressing biological issues and had increased survival rates to a four-year high and had pushed sea lice rates to an historic low.
He also described a claim made by Scottish Greens MSP Ariane Burgess on Tuesday that “only 253 full-time roles have been created over the past 35 years” by the salmon industry as “utter nonsense”.
He said the Greens were “peddling matters that are simply untrue”, and that the party was “talking down Scotland and damaging our most remote communities”.
