Jim Fairlie on Brexit, devolution and winning votes for independence

After decades in farming and food, the Farmers4Yes founder is eight months into a radical career change that’s taken him from pasture to parliament. But as one of Scotland’s newest MSPs, he says he’s “never worked harder”.

It was the capacity for graft that helped the city boy enter farming in the first place. He wasn’t born to the fields and managed to enter the sector as a teen after writing letters to everyone he could think of. In later life, he brought European-style food culture to Scotland by starting the country’s first farmers’ market, then formed a catering company feeding crowds at outdoor events.

He’s sold his herds now and his catering firm has cooked its last. But he and wife Anne hung on to some of the meat he’d raised just in case he was unsuccessful last May, when he stood for the Perthshire South and Kinross-shire seat vacated by former environment secretary Roseanna Cunningham. If it hadn’t been an SNP victory, Fairlie would have used the stocks of lamb and beef to rebuild their business. They’ve eaten the lamb now, he tells the Sunday National, but there’s still beef in the freezer. “It’s a total change of lifestyle,” he says.

It’s a change that some have scoffed at – after all, Fairlie’s father Jim is well-kent in Scottish politics and there have been noises made about the boy following the dad. Once the deputy leader and senior vice-chairman of the SNP, Fairlie senior quit the party over its pro-EU stance in the early 90s, shortly after the ascension of Alex Salmond to leadership. Announcing his membership of the eurosceptic Yes party Restore Scotland last year, he described himself as “disillusioned” with his former party. Nevertheless, he voted for his son on May 6. “I’m well chuffed that he voted SNP for the first time in 30 years just on the basis that it was me – that’s one vote I’ve won,” Fairlie jokes.

“People will say ‘he’s his dad’s son, so therefore he must be anti-EU’. The old man summed it up brilliantly – he said, ‘you are confusing the two Jim Fairlies; in our family, we taught our children how to think, not what to think’.

“He didn’t want devolution at all, I think it was a good thing, because it’s got us to the position we’re in just now. We’ve proven we can have a workable government in Scotland, but as far as dad was concerned, devolution was a trap. He says he’s been proven right and I say I have. I’m far more sympathetic to the EU position than dad is.

“Fundamentally, we both want Scotland to be an independent country.”

That pro-EU message is important to Fairlie because of his experience of food and farming, of key markets, logistics and labour. That question of continued EU membership was “the biggest issue” for the farming community in 2014, he says, and one that Farmers4Yes sought to answer. The group made a mark, Fairlie says – even if that didn’t translate at the ballot box. “I don’t think we won the community over – in fact, I can categorically say we didn’t – but we certainly put a lot more thought into people’s heads than would have been there otherwise,” he contends.

Jim Fairlie in 2010. Picture: Mark Mainz

The father-of-two has been thinking about how to approach the matter “next time around”, when the Scottish Government calls – as it has promised to – a new indyref. “We already know Better Together will talk about most of our trade being with the UK,” he says. “Global Britain is not going to want to trade with its nearest neighbour? The argument that we would lose 60% of our trade is just nonsense.

“With independence, we would be able to trade on our own terms. We certainly wouldn’t be chucking our farmers and fishermen under the bus,” he goes on, referencing the UK’s controversial trade deals with Australia and New Zealand.

Boris Johnson’s government, he says, have “done so much damage” – and he feels a shift in opinion in rural Perthshire. “People who never even considered independence as an option are now thinking, ‘is this the best we can do?’”

There’s the Subsidy Control Bill, he says, which is currently entering its report stage in the House of Lords. The legislation seeks to establish a domestic subsidy control regime for the UK outwith the EU and away from its support funds, and aims to provide a legal framework for public authorities to make subsidy decisions. But Holyrood’s Economy and Fair Work Committee has said it risks cutting across the devolution settlement by giving “considerable powers” to UK ministers.

For Fairlie, there’s a direct connection to his hill-farming peers. “We’re farming on marginal ground but we’re really, really good at it. We produce top-quality products but we can’t get the value out of it by selling it in this country because we’ve got a ‘stack it high, sell it low’ strategy. If we want to have a support system in Scotland which is geared towards acknowledging environmental production, making sure we don’t get rural depopulation, we need that to be tailored. The Subsidy Control Bill stops us from doing that.

“We need to have a system where we can make support systems that are tailored.”

There are other issues on Fairlie’s agenda – the lack of seasonal workers that’s leaving fine fruits on the polytunnel floor, the shortage of hotel staff that’s forcing some larger hotels to keep rooms closed for want of housekeepers, the rising cost of living.

That’s something he identifies closely with. As a younger man, renting his land and living in a tied house amid the post-BSE farming crisis of the 1990s, he and wife Anne were “absolutely church-mouse poor”. “I remember that feeling,” he says. “We were in a two-bed farm cottage with the only heating a coal fire and a wee gas stove. That winter my daughter Mhairi was born in ‘93 there was ice on the inside of the windows. We would move the wee gas stove to the bathroom to have a bath and move it around the house to keep the wee one warm.

“Rather than waste the coal from the fire at night, I’d get a metal shovel, take the base of the coal fire from our living room and walk through to the bedroom and put the base into the bedroom with a few sticks in order to heat the room. We were skint.

“People will be feeling that now.”

The worry over the impact on household finances is linked also to the Ovo Energy restructuring plan that will take hundreds of jobs out of Fairlie’s constituency. The company’s Perth offices employ around 700 people but are set to close as part of broader plans to shed 1700 posts. A new hub will open in Glasgow but questions remain over how many Perth staff will keep their jobs and whether or not all losses will be voluntary. Fairlie will bring a members’ debate about the matter to the chamber on Tuesday.

He’d like to see Scotland do more on the economy on several fronts and is “frustrated” by the limits of Holyrood’s powers. “Power devolved is power reserved,” he says. “There are only so many things that the Scottish Government can do. I’m looking for the positives and the realities.

“We’ve got the Labour Party constantly in the chamber demanding that the SNP government pay people more and get wages up to £15 an hour for health workers. Yes, let’s do that, I’d love to do that – but where are you going to cut the money from? Who matters less? We can’t borrow, we can’t quantitative ease, we can’t print money ourselves, we can’t do any of the things that the UK Government can do, but the demands are still put on the Scottish Government to effectively mitigate bad policies put in place at Westminster.”

That administration, he believes, has damaged its own base thanks to partygate and other scandals. Tory voters he knows are joking about it in disbelief, he says. “They cannae believe the Prime Minister is behaving like this. One guy said to me, ‘I cannae believe that Westminster is allowing this kind of leadership from him and his cronies’. That wasn’t my word, that was his word. They have definitely done reputational damage to their real hardcore small-c conservative voter in Scotland.”