Scots Tory leadership candidate Michelle Ballantyne on Boris, Brexit and a 'blue collar revolution'

Scottish Tory leadership contender Michelle Ballantyne has revealed that she entered the race to prevent a “coronation” of her competitor Jackson Carlaw, she now wants to win to revolutionise her party and Scottish politics.

Michelle Ballantyne is challenging Jackson Carlaw to be the new leader of the Scottish Conservatives.

Ballantyne, who has been an MSP for two and a half years, said she wants to galvanise her party’s membership to create a “blue collar revolution” in Scottish voters.

She said the Scottish Government was too focused on “quick wins” and as a result had too many failing policies, that “politician on politician” attacks were a smokescreen to avoid scrutiny, and that Holyrood needed to be “braver in doing the right thing, rather than the immediately popular thing.”

Ballantyne, who was criticised for her support of Boris Johnson in last year’s UK Tory leadership contest - which put her at odds with Ruth Davidson - also said she still believed he was “the right man at the right time”, and that Brexit would be a success and deliver for Scotland.

“I never came into this thinking I’m definitely going to win - it’s borne out of frustration and a belief things should be done properly. Leaders need to have mandates - either because you’re a natural leader and everyone follows or you go through the process.

“It really was about not having a coronation - I was just trying to spur debate and to stop people just rolling over and doing nothing. There’s a lot of things that need to change - not just how the party needs to change, but how in Scotland we deal with social services, the health service, the police... so we need to develop our policies within the party, and as leader you need to set the scene and frame the issues.”

She added: “I do want us to behave differently, to engage differently. If you get the process right you get really good decisions, decisions which are sense-checked - that’s one of the problems with a lot of stuff that’s done here [Holyrood], it’s not properly sense-checked so when someone tries to deliver it on the ground it doesn’t stack up.

“In my time here nearly every major decision made by this government doesn’t sense-check well on the ground, so I think I can bring something very different and that is making sure decision-making is of a high quality and that the policy base that we put out is one that anybody, regardless of political affiliations, will say ‘I understand how that will make a difference to me, to my clients, to my family’s life’.”

“I came to give evidence to a committee on drug and alcohol problems and I came out of here [Holyrood] bouncing that they were really going to tackle the problems, but they didn’t do the big things, didn’t take it head on and deal with it.

“I was also on the GIRFEC implementation team in the Borders when Named Person came through and we had given clear evidence and commentary that the principle was good, but we clearly told them not to legislate because it wouldn’t work, but they ignored us. They took a good idea and destroyed it and effected a movement against it which subsequently I found myself on the side of.”

She’s traditionally Conservative on tax - “tax take tends to go up if you have a lower tax regime” and on public spending “there’s an assumption that you have to pour money into something to make it better - that’s fundamentally not true”. She said her background in public, private and voluntary sectors had proved that to her.

But she’s further to the right than Carlaw on Brexit. He was a Remainer, she a Boris-backing Leaver. Is she concerned that her support for the PM will be used against her should she win?

“I’ve always considered myself a good judge of character and I believe in being honest, for me it’s a tenet of the kind of person you are, so I wasn’t going to hide from the fact I thought Boris would be the best leader.”

Asked if she thinks he’s an honest person of good character, she added: “I may not agree with some of his personal choices but does that make him not the right person? If I sat here and said people should not have sex before marriage, they should get married and keep the family unit together for the rest of their lives, I would be accused of being a Victorian moraliser, and be told that’s not the way the world works now and if marriage doesn’t work out you move on - but Boris appears in that and everyone screams outrage.

So what about the proroguing of Parliament? “We can debate that til we’re blue in the face, but to me it doesn’t say anything about whether he’s the right person to be PM. And he has the mandate - he went to the country and asked the electorate and they made the decision.”

She is also robust in her defence of Brexit. “I don’t think it will be a disaster - we will make the right decisions for the country and it will be a success. I own a manufacturing company and we do export and deal with people all over the world, so I’m not just talking about it in a vague sense, I’m coming at it with a degree of knowledge and I spent a long time looking at the implications.

“I’ve noticed that south of the border people are moving on, but here, because the SNP are so bogged down in it because they see it as a way to gain leverage over independence - nobody is moving on. The circumstances at the time of the vote were that all the leaders at the time supported Remain - had half the leaders supported the other position I suspect the vote in Scotland would have changed.”

She added: “Nobody looked at rest of EU and where it was going. The EU has its own huge troubles and we were going to get caught up in that down the line. The only way it can survive is through full political and financial integration and my personal view is being forced to be in a monetary system run by somebody else is not the best idea.”

Ballantyne feels she’s been “pigeon-holed” for not only her Johnson support, but for a lack of empathy. “Your opponents think if they can get you pigeon-holed they can create an image and then nothing you say will be listened to afterwards, and the problem with that is it makes for very poor politics and decision making,” she said.

“This week in Parliament we were talking about the stigmatisation of gypsies and travellers, and they [the SNP} say let’s not stigmatise people, and it’s such hypocrisy as it’s done all the time, this politician on politician stuff and it degrades politicians and people switch off.

“Take social security, it’s incredibly complex but if you can’t be bothered reading and understanding it how do you challenge the person? Well you call them names and try and eradicate anything they say through insults.

“I also think Scotland has become quite divided. The issue around independence has played into this because there’s a need from the independence side to vilify the opposition because they need to be the enemy in order to further a split - the old divide and conquer rule. If we hadn’t had that we’d have more consensual politics than we do.”

Consensus doesn’t work at First Minister’s Questions however. If she became leader how would she approach that differently?

“Everybody has their own style - you should say when something’s right or if not explore what’s wrong with it but I don’t get into a slanging match. So it’s less likely I’d be throwing insults back and forth but I have no problem calling someone out if their behaviour is unacceptable or facts are incorrect.

“The First Minister, by nature, likes that kind of attack - if you want a head-on stooshie she’s good at that. Where she’s less good is when you’re dealing with the facts. And you see that. The hits are landed when it’s about the detail. It’s so important to be well prepared you can’t go into these things when you’ve not checked your facts, you’re blown out the water and made to look stupid.”

Ballantyne believes that her background in the third sector may surprise some, given she’s now a Conservative politician - but that is a strength.

“The third sector does tend to be more left of centre and yes I had some interesting discussions with people - but when you’re on the frontline you want solutions,” she said. “When I stood for the Scottish Borders Council there were people saying ‘oh my god I’m going to have to vote Conservative - it’s sticking in my craw.’ It was difficult. But as a result a lot of people who support me who are not Conservative supporters.”

“I think people know I’m here to try and make sure that my colleagues on the frontline, whether it’s the NHS, the third sector or business, get the leadership, support, packages, funding streams that actually allow them to do the jobs they want to get on with doing.”

She points to the NHS as an example of where more consensual, long-term policies need to be developed.

She added: “But policy is really difficult because while it may work for some people, for others it will cause problems. So the first thing is to make it robust and understand the context in which it will work. You have to understand systems, and deploy a huge amount of empathy to dissect the impact of a policy. But you also need a calmness - if you’re going to be wholly emotive about everything you’re never going to create good policy or figure out how to amend it.

“If you throw the baby out with the bathwater every time and start again you’re just on a hamster wheel - it’s about having the skills, empathy calmness and intellect to dissect that and do that analysis.”

Ballantyne says her political mantra is “prevention is better than cure” but that does not lead to “an overnight fix”. As a result, “the government doesn’t do it is because they’re looking for a quick win before the next election. Instead of planting trees they do a quick mow over the lawn and say isn’t the garden nice?

“We as politicians have a duty to be much braver about making decisions which won’t necessarily come to fruition in time to be elected; to be braver to do the right thing rather than the immediately popular thing.”