Life after Holyrood for Andy Wightman: Chopping up wood and drawing up laws

Tucked away in a house in the Highlands, the former Greens MSP – who resigned from the party in 2020 – has been managing a small woodland near Roybridge, chopping up wood and drafting legislation.

His DIY approach to politics saw him campaign doggedly for land reform in Scotland decades before he was elected to parliament.

To settle “unfinished business”, Wightman, 58, is drafting a bill he hopes will get the ball moving on a project to which he has dedicated most of his working life.

READ MORE: Andy Wightman, Land Detective: Former MSP to launch regular National column

Many of his former colleagues would not be surprised with his industriousness. But they were shocked that a man who spent much of his time in Holyrood forensically analysing the nitty-gritty of complex and often quite dull pieces of legislation could find himself struggling to find paid work following his failure to be re-elected to parliament.

Out of the blue, on January 5, he told his Twitter followers: “New Year challenge – to find more paid work. Having had only four days paid work since May 2021, I’d be grateful for any opportunities folk might know about.”

Wightman has managed to keep himself busy enough but says he doesn’t miss the “tensions” of parliament and the frustrations of Scottish civic life.

“I miss some of it but there is a lot of it I don’t miss,” said Wightman.

“This parliament isn’t going to be that pleasant. I don’t mean it’s going to be nasty, but there are tough economic circumstances, post-Covid, post-Brexit, indyref, so there are a lot of tensions and difficulties lying in the background.

“It’s going to be tough for everyone.”

Wightman – a staunch believer in democracy and giving power to people – thinks that Scotland has become vastly more centralised since devolution. While he said he would “defy anyone” who thought it had not been a great success – among its achievements he lists its greater accessibility and transparency than Westminster – he also worries power has become too concentrated in too few hands to do anyone any good. Among these few hands are the powerful ones of the charitable sector.

The third sector – encompassing pressure groups, charities and think tanks – play a big role in Scottish politics, informing policy and bending the ears of ministers and committees about their concerns. But they are too beholden to what the government is doing, Wightman thinks. Rather than following the direction of the government’s priorities, waiting for ministers to make the first move, he urges them to take matters into their own hands and build power and momentum outside parliament.

A RELUCTANCE to do so stems from a lack of “political literacy”. They lack “an understanding, familiarity and a working, practical knowledge about how politics works and how power works”, says Wightman.

“Not just elected politics, but politics in general. Who runs the country, who are the various institutions that make decisions, what local government does, how to participate effectively, what does political change look like?

“The coming of the Scottish Parliament did bring the legislature closer to the people and it has been very positive – I would defy anyone who says it hasn’t been a great success. People have greater access and there is far greater transparency.

“But I don’t think people, broadly speaking, have risen to it. Even in full-time parliamentary affairs, people would often have a very poor understanding of how parliament really works. That worried me.

“The example I always use is quite a substantial mental health charity which I met soon after I was elected.

“I asked them what their main priorities were, and they said they were waiting on the government to publish its mental health strategy in six months.

“I asked what they were doing in the meantime, and they rattled off various things.

“But I said what do you want to see in this strategy. They didn’t know, they were still waiting.

“I asked, why don’t you draft one? Why don’t you sit down with other organisations and draft what to you looks like a mental health strategy?

“Don’t wait for the government to produce a strategy or legislation – begin drafting it yourself.

“Be on the front foot and see parliaments and local government as your servants, not your masters – something to be harnessed and worked with, not deferred to.

“There is a lack of vim, creativity and imagination, it could do with more.”

The other illnesses in the body politic, as Wightman sees them, are weak local government and the division caused by the dominance of the constitutional question.

“We are struggling to map a way forward because the country is, broadly speaking, split down the middle,” he says.

“Mainstream politics, elected politics has got a limited bandwidth. Until the constitutional question is resolved, progress on quite a lot of stuff is – I wouldn’t say stalled – but not as decisive as it could be.

“But that is one of the characteristics of the SNP. Regardless of how you viewed Thatcher’s government, there was no doubt about the direction she wished to take and the kind of politics that appealed to her.

“But because the SNP encompasses a broad range of political views, it tends to get pulled in very different directions.

“The binary nature of modern politics around the constitution means that sentiment that you’re looking for people to represent your interests has been substantially, if not completely, eclipsed by people’s position on the constitution.

“Parties are now that much stronger. It’s the constitutional question – it has polarised politics and until that has been resolved, there isn’t going to be much scope for people thinking freely about where their vote goes.”

Wightman is a “lukewarm” supporter of independence and has no idea how he would vote in a second referendum.

In the run-up to the 2014 referendum, people on the Yes side were energised by the promise of possibility, which had felt so absent from politics for too long. According to Wightman, this was because its limits and methods were clearly defined, tangible; they felt real to people.

“But a more interesting campaign would have been afterwards, had there been a Yes vote, how do you build the institutions of a modern state,” he says.

“That would have been where the creativity and imagination would have actually come in.”

This feeds into his preoccupation with local government – something he tried to reform during his time as an MSP with the European Charter of Local Self-Government (Incorporation) (Scotland) Bill. The UK government successfully challenged the bill – a “perverse” move – but Wightman is confident it will become law with a few changes.

Recalling Scotland before Edward Heath’s local government reforms, Kinross town council was relevant to a seven-year-old Wightman in a way that seems alien now. The son of an architect who did work around the town, he played games with the children of the burgh surveyor.

He said: “You were aware of a sense that people in the town were making decisions that really mattered to people. That’s vitally important.”

FOR a man who has devoted the bulk of his working life to researching and pursuing land reform, his time close to power frustratingly bore little fruit in that regard.

“The unfinished business for me is land reform,” says Wightman.

“I still don’t think we’ve properly got to grips with that. I’m drafting a comprehensive land reform bill – it won’t be a complete bill with every section outlined but there will be sufficient detail in there to understand the policy intentions.”

Will he be more useful outside

Holyrood than inside?

“On some issues I felt I’d have been more effective outside than inside.

“In parliament about 80% of the time you were dealing with things that were interesting, certainly, but they didn’t really get you fired up.

“You had to do it, it was really important stuff, it mattered to people and you had to be diligent but for the 10 or 20% of the time you were dealing with things that really did interest you, I tended to find you didn’t have the time to devote to that and that was quite frustrating.

“Even if I were a Greens MSP now in coalition with the SNP, your influence is still fairly modest. Even if you’re a minister you have to get things past cabinet, and there are lots of hugely competing interests in cabinet. You can move faster, do more thinking and build a broader coalition of support outside of parliament and then basically just present it and say, ‘This is what we think should be done’.

“Organisations outside parliament need to be more proactive. Don’t wait on the government to consult on a land reform bill, draft your own one now. You can’t get it through parliament, but what you can do is build a broad coalition of support.”