Tory MSP Defiant Over Breakaway Bid

A Tory politician who announced plans for a breakaway party in Scotland without consulting Prime Minister David Cameron insists he has the political and financial support for a "new dawn" despite being rejected by the party's biggest Scottish donor.











Murdo Fraser launched his bid to lead the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party (SCUP) in Scotland on Monday with a pledge to disband it and create a new centre-right party north of the border.

The Mid-Scotland and Fife MSP has been accused of "dividing the party" and sparking a "civil war" by opponents within and outside the Conservative Party.

Mr Fraser said he has not discussed his plans with Mr Cameron as it would be "inappropriate" for the leader of the UK Conservative Party to take a position in a Scottish leadership election.

He also dismissed claims by his main leadership rival, West of Scotland MSP Jackson Carlaw, that a rejection by the party's biggest Scottish donor was "a fatal blow" to his leadership campaign.

Sir Jack Harvie, the transport tycoon and philanthropist, said Focus on Scotland, the vehicle which currently provides the majority funding for the SCUP, would not extend its funding arrangement to Mr Fraser's party

Speaking at the launch, Mr Fraser expressed disappointment with Mr Harvie's comments but said he has received support from others in the business community.

He said: "I can tell you that among existing donors to the party there is a deep sense of disillusionment, that the money that they have given to the party in recent years has not been well spent.

"They have been paying for successive campaigns with absolutely no political progress and there is a great deal of appetite for a new centre-right force in Scotland amongst people in the business community."

Mr Fraser has already gained the support of airport car park magnate John McGlynn, engineering tycoon Jim McColl and property developer Robert Kilgour for his plans.

'We Can Kill Independence And Break The SNP' — Murdo Fraser To Launch Leadership Bid With Bold Message

Mid Scotland and Fife MSP Murdo Fraser has promised to "kill independence" and "break the SNP" if elected new Scottish Conservative leader.










The Perthshire politician, who is favourite to succeed Annabel Goldie, will outline his vision of a "new unionism" when he officially announces his leadership bid on Monday.

He will tell supporters the UK faces a "serious threat" and that the SNP's promised independence referendum will be the "central issue" of Scottish politics in the next few years.

Mr Fraser will use the speech to outline his vision of how the Tories can make their mark in Scotland against a background of an SNP majority at Holyrood and the looming independence referendum.

"Strengthening the union will be at the centre of everything I will do," he will say. "If Alex Salmond really believed in his own message, he would put his money where his mouth is and have a single-question referendum. No second question. No Salmond cop-out. Separation — yes or no.

"Then we can move on. We can be positive about Scotland and positive about the United Kingdom. We can kill independence and break the SNP."

Significantly, Mr Fraser will also reject full Scottish fiscal autonomy, under which all taxes would be set by Holyrood, describing it as "independence in disguise."

It had previously been thought he was open-minded about such a possibility, a view that could have put him at odds with Prime Minister David Cameron.

But he will say: "I support a new form of unionism. A new unionism that will give the people of Scotland the ability to shape their own future.

'New unionism'

"A new unionism that will provide financial devolution to the Scottish Parliament, because with power will come responsibility.

"A new unionism that calls for a more decentralised United Kingdom, at ease with itself, knowing that the whole will always be greater than the sum of the parts."

He will reiterate support for the extra powers for the Scottish Parliament set out in the Scotland Bill but reject other measures wanted by the SNP such as control of corporation tax.

"But I strongly support the principles of financial devolution, where the Scottish Parliament is more responsible for the money it spends."

But SNP MSP Stewart Maxwell attacked Mr Fraser's comments.

"Before he continues with his campaign Mr Fraser might want to reconsider his language," he said. "The last politician to threaten to 'kill nationalism' saw his party lose at this year's elections and the public back a majority SNP Government.

"Scotland wants a parliament that is working hard to build a better future, to create jobs and grow the economy. Whilst opposition parties spend their time in internal leadership wrangles the SNP will next week set out a positive programme for government that will address the concerns of voters across Scotland and take this country forward."

Cameron Still Lacks A Foreign Policy Vision

What kind of a power do we want to be? How do we achieve that ambition? Cameron is unsure.












David Cameron greets troops after making a speech to British and American troops at Camp Leatherneck military base on July 4, 2011 in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

Nato's mission in Libya looks like a foreign policy success for David Cameron, but that is not the same thing as having a successful foreign policy.

First, the obvious caveats: it is early days; the battle is not over, let alone the war. There are easily enough military and diplomatic traps ahead for the Libyan intervention to become a failure. The prime minister, the deputy prime minister, the foreign secretary and the defence secretary have all said as much. But for now, the politics of the situation are favouring Cameron. He took a big decision under considerable pressure and, after some nerve-wracking months, it appears to have paid off. "He definitely leapt before he looked," was how one senior Ministry of Defence official put it too me early on in the campaign. (The same source also said of the anti-Gaddafi rebels "the only good fighters among them are the al-Qaeda ones", a slightly wild allegation which should nonetheless be reason enough to put blind optimism for the future on hold.)

Libyans will decide whether they are better off in the long run for the UK's military partisanship in their insurrection-cum-civil war. The point is that, in the eyes of the British public, Cameron has effectively led a short war. There are usually political dividends to be drawn from that position.

But I suspect they will be limited in this case because, as with so much of Cameron's leadership, the good news story doesn't slot into a wider strategic narrative. It is worth remembering that the Conservatives came into power signalling reluctance to reshape the world - a la Blair - by military excursion. The new doctrine, as spelled out by William Hague in a series of speeches in July 2010, was a kind of bilateral mercantilism. The UK would continue to promote freedom and democracy around the globe, the foreign secretary said, but the main tool would be aggressive pursuit of trade interests. Overseas embassies would be reconfigured as pushy chambers of commerce.

Barely weeks before taking action in Libya, Cameron declared: "I am not a naive neocon who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000ft." The fact that Cameron then decided to use British military assets against Gaddafi doesn't signal some visionary conversion to fanatical interventionism. Libya might be a one-off; Gaddafi might just have been low-hanging despotic fruit.

To get the maximum political advantage from the intervention, Cameron has to frame the episode in terms of his vision of Britain's role in the world - and it isn't clear that he has one. The project of expanding our national influence by trade is looking trickier as the global economy falters. As an ambition it is of a pair with George Osborne's hope of rebalancing the economy and driving growth through exports - which relies on a level of overseas demand for UK goods that has not yet materialised.

A big gap in Cameron's world view (at least the publicly known portion of it) is his sense of how Britain's position in the European Union will evolve as the single currency lurches ever onward in financial and institutional crisis. As I mentioned in my column this week, this omission is stirring dissent in the party. A lot of Tories see the eurozone crisis as an opportunity to start a wholesale renegotiation of Britain's EU deal, but there isn't much appetite for that at the top of the party. (This is partly because the leadership's view of all matters EU is coloured by their "modernising" crusade in opposition, so there is an association between public expressions of fierce euroscepticism and unelectability. Then, of course, there is the problem of the stubbornly Europhile Lib Dems.)

The Arab Spring; global economic turbulence; structural crisis at the heart of the European Union - three giant themes that raise profound questions about Britain's position in the world. What kind of a power do we want to be? How do we achieve that ambition? I don't get the impression that Cameron is any closer to having persuasive answers to those questions than he was when he moved into Downing Street last year.