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Derek Brownlee joined the Conservative party through frequenting
the Tory club in Selkirk where he grew up, partly because it was
one of the best places to go for drinks and socialising. His family
wasn't political and "certainly wasn't Conservative" and although
he makes clear he didn't fall into politics, his was perhaps a
rather nonchalant stroll into political life, "it's one of those
funny things that seems to happen to people." When he first stood
in 2003 he didn't expect to get elected; and if it hadn't been for
David Mundell's resignation in 2005 it is doubtful that he would
have stood in 2007. He explains, "I didn't stand in a seat [in
2003] where I thought I was going to get in, I ranked in lists in a
position which I didn't think would get me elected and then someone
resigns and it's all big changes. I was in a very odd position,
effectively, someone phones you up and says "Would you like to be
an MSP?" - you've got 24 hours to decide. In some sense I thought
if I said no I would always wonder what would have happened, so go
for it."
Brownlee may have moved from his previous career as an
accountant into politics but he has found himself immersed again in
figures as his party's spokesperson on finance. This was no
accident, however, as his greatest interest is in the financing of
the Parliament, "how we decide what we spend and how we spend it"
particularly at this time of tighter purse strings. He believes the
generous size of the block allocation for the last 8 years "has
stopped us having to make difficult choices", quite easily
introducing new schemes like free personal care and concessionary
travel but that in the "environment we are in now, we wont be able
to do these new things, we might not be able to do some of the
things we're still doing without stopping other things". This he
hopes, will lead to more of an informed debate about what the
Parliament should be focusing on, a debate that he believes will be
set and settled by the public taking a view on what it wants the
politicians to prioritise, "because at the end of the day
politicians generally fall into line with what the public think. I
don't think it's the other way round like a lot of people seem to
think it is."
Questions on the financing of the Parliament also have
implications for the devolution settlement as he goes on: "there is
a lot of unfinished business around the way the Parliament
operates, in terms of the way it looks at how it spends money it's
got, the priorities it chooses and the way it's funded. People talk
about the devolution settlement, but if it was a settlement then we
wouldn't have every party agreeing that it needed to change, so I
think there's some fundamental issues there." This leads us nicely
into constitutional arrangements and society's involvement in this
debate.
Of course the devolution settlement isn't just about money and
Brownlee is anxious that the Calman Commission "gets it right":
"The SNP are very clear on what they want the future to look like
and I think we need a clear view on what staying part of the union
looks like, so I think the Calman Commission needs to be pretty
thorough; it needs to look at all the issues and engage with
Scottish society. Looking back, the Constitutional Convention tried
to, and to be fair to it a lot of Scottish society didn't engage
back, the business community wasn't good at engaging with it, the
Conservative Party certainly wasn't good, it didn't want to know.
So I think everyone just has to try and get involved in discussion
about what we want the country to look like. If we get it right
then I think there is no reason why we shouldn't have a stable
system of government where you have a Scottish Parliament, a
Scottish Government with a huge amount of autonomy, but still have
all the benefits of working together with the rest of the UK".
Putting the constitutional differences with the SNP to one side
is an approach which he argues is possible and pragmatic: "on
day-to-day issues, on a lot of things, we actually agree, on some
things we don't, but on a lot of things we do." His party's
relationship with the SNP has been a lot more open than with the
previous administration, partly because the SNP "always has to work
with other parties to get anything through"; and he argues that
this situation leaves the Tories holding the balance of power.
"Typically if we support the SNP they tend to win, if we oppose
them, it's a generalisation but if we oppose them they tend to
lose. If the Conservatives win the next general election, not only
would they be less hostile to the Scottish Government than Labour
has been since the SNP came to power but you would also have an
interesting scenario where effectively the Conservatives are in
power at Holyrood and at Westminster at some level and then it's
just a question of what you do with that power."
Taking a more combative approach to the SNP at Holyrood would
also "play in to the worst stereotypes that people in Scotland have
of the Conservative Party which is the party that says no to
everything". He is clearly proud of the co-operative spirit that
his party has taken since May 2007 and, although he cites Margaret
Thatcher as his most influential individual, he acknowledges that
she was a rare character, far more divisive and polarising in her
approach than most: "in the Scottish context the most successful
politicians are the ones who try and get people to work with them
rather than to divide. I guess that is partly to do with the
different system as well, you don't win in a PR system by being the
most popular minority, you win by carving out a majority in
whatever way you can do it."
Polarising is what he see the churches doing in US politics -
"not necessarily through their own fault" - but, he thinks the
relationship here is far healthier and, with the caveat that you
need to be careful about mixing religion and politics, he is
positive about the role the churches can play. "Every church deals
with many of the consequences of policy failure. I think churches
see social trends at the coalface, possibly before we see them and
of course you see a cross section of society." This is valuable to
MSPs because, "we are probably in quite a bubble, we have our own
families and friends dictated by our previous backgrounds and we
have those we mix with in politics, that's not a cross section of
society by any means."
So churches can bring stories and experiences to politicians
about people's lives and also about the services that they provide
in their communities. "We've tended to think the answer to
providing services is the same throughout the country, to do a
nationalised system, and I think some of the lessons we can learn
is how a localised service run by different people in different
places is sometimes better." As long as churches are seen as
apolitical in the party sense they can actually be quite political
in the non party sense, "you can take a stand on particular issues
and we won't necessarily thank you for that but it's actually quite
helpful to have a range of views. None of us should be afraid of a
debate on these kind of things."
We turn to poverty as an issue that the churches are deeply
concerned about, and he argues that the key to tackling poverty is
dealing with worklessness. "There are some pretty horrendous
statistics about the proportion of the working age population in
some parts of the country who are not working; there must be some
families where you go through a couple of generations of nobody
really having had sustained work. It's not good, it dampens
people's aspirations; if they don't see people around them working
that just feeds into a culture that there is no point in trying, or
they can't. You still need government to pick up the people who
fall through the net; we probably haven't been sensitive enough to
the need to ensure that as many people as possible are actually in
meaningful work".
The worst thing about his job, he finds, is when he is faced
with a problems from constituents which he can't actually do
anything about. "A lot of people think their last option is to come
to a politician and if we can't sort it who can and that's really
depressing. The negative side if you focus on it too much
could actually quite depress you". However, he finds being "inside"
(with the qualification "we think we're the centre of things and of
course we're not") to be "absolutely fascinating".