Read more
The truth is it actually took 51-year-old Findlay quite a long time to properly become a Tory. Sitting in one of the booths in the Spoons on George Square in Glasgow, he tells me his family wasn’t really political. His great-grandmother’s sisters Margaret and Frances McPhun (great name) were Glasgow suffragettes who were jailed in London for smashing windows and were force-fed in prison, but Findlay only discovered this later in life. “It wasn’t passed down the generations,” he says.
It also took the young Russell quite a while to get round to voting. The first time he could, in 1992, he was having too much fun. He spent the summer in California working in a fairground. He went to see The Happy Mondays (“I was a raver.” Whistles and everything? “There might have been a bit of whistling.”) Turns out he also once climbed the Duke of Wellington statue in Glasgow to put the traffic cone on the ducal head (didn’t end well: jumped off, landed on heels, trip to hospital). Later, he threw himself into his career as a crime reporter, which meant keeping off the voters’ roll so the bad guys couldn’t find him. Turned out the bad guys could find him anyway; in 2015 one of them came to his house and threw acid in his face.
But before we talk more about that – and the attack still affects his life now – I want to know how becoming Scottish Tory leader turned out to be the fate of a guy like Russell. He asks me what I mean. I mean: not posh, went to state school, ordinary job. He says I’m thinking in stereotypes and not all Tories are posh. He also tells me, when I refer to him as a middle-class guy who grew up in Milngavie, that he thinks there’s inverse snobbery in the way Scots look at stuff like this. “The middle-class graft, they’re workers. It’s often used in a derogatory way but middle-class people go out and put a shift in, pay their tax and generally don’t grumble.”
I ask him about the decriminalisation of drugs for example: he’s not a fan. “Look at what’s happened in other parts of the world that have gone down the road of decriminalisation,” he says. “Almost always it’s ended up very badly and they’re looking to reverse it. You end up with people normalising drug addiction.”
What about drug consumption rooms then, where people can take illegal drugs safely (there’s one due to open in the east end of Glasgow soon)? Again: not a fan although he’s happy for it to happen so we can assess the impact. “I have a major problem with a society that’s cutting money for education and sports centres and libraries,” he says, “but finding tens of millions of pounds to say, in a poor part of Glasgow, ‘come along and take drugs’. If this is some amazing transformational thing, I dare say there’ll be widespread buy-in but I have my doubts.”
But come on Russell, I say to him: you and I are the same generation, you must have smoked a joint at university? “Of course yeah,” he says. “But youthful experimentation, that I would argue most people have done, is one thing. I’m talking about when the grip of hard drug addiction starts ruining lives and killing people. It’s not an either or: criminal justice or free-for-all. It’s about tackling the organised crime gangs and their money men in all the accountancy firms and law firms in Glasgow that support them. And dealing with those who need help. The SNP aren’t giving them the help they need.”
The problem, as far as Findlay is concerned, is that the SNP have got the balance wrong on addiction, rehabilitation and prison. “We had one of the drug worthies in parliament recently,” he says, “telling us she didn’t like the way government adverts stigmatised addicts by making them look miserable; they should be positive images. I’m not making this shit up. I don’t want to stigmatise addiction or addicts. But we have to stigmatise drugs.”
Read more
Here’s Findlay’s solution: rather than talk a good talk about stigma, lock up the serious offenders and do proper rehabilitation. “I’m a pragmatist,” he says. “Prison can work but some of the sentences I’ve seen recently for high-end drug dealers have been shocking. With organised crime, I sometimes feel like I’m banging my head against a brick wall. These people contaminate – and that’s the right word for it – mainstream society: the property market in Glasgow, many of the transport businesses, other businesses. Football clubs are being contaminated by drugs money and it’s disgusting.”
A lot of Findlay’s information on this comes from his previous career as a crime reporter. He started out on The Glaswegian newspaper in the 90s and made a name for himself writing about organised crime and gang violence, which came with risks obviously. In 2015, career criminal William Burns turned up on his doorstep in Glasgow disguised as a postman and threw acid in his face. Fortunately, Findlay managed to wrestle Burns to the ground and keep hold of him until the police turned up. Burns was later jailed for ten years.
Findlay recovered physically – he’s pretty stoical on the whole – but he still feels the effects in how he lives his life. To this day he doesn’t know exactly how his attacker found him – might have been a tracker on his phone, maybe his car – so he asks me not to publish where he lives. He also tells me he had to think carefully about the raised profile that comes with being an MSP when he was thinking of standing and is reluctant to talk about his parents or his daughter for similar reasons. He does talk a bit about what it was like being a single dad and you can see it affects him, that he gets emotional. “Nothing comes close,” he says.
As for the decision to become an MSP, that came about when he expressed an interest in standing while Ruth Davidson was leader and she asked him to come and work in her PR and communications department. He was then elected as a list MSP for the West of Scotland in 2021, meaning the elevation to leader has been swift. Some people wonder where this apparently sudden interest in politics has come from and Findlay admits he was never party-political. But he’s deadly serious about the job, he says: “I believe in it.”
I point out to Findlay that he hasn’t yet said what the Tory mistakes actually were. So what were they? “Obviously I wouldn’t want to dwell on them,” he says. “But if you look at 14 years of government, some of them are pretty obvious around Covid.” And Truss! I say. “Yeah, the way in which the financial episode was very badly dealt with.” I tell him that calling it a ‘financial episode’ sounds like he’s minimising it: what about the effect on mortgages? “Completely, I get it, I’ve got a mortgage. But I just wish the left-wing parties would get quite so animated about protecting people’s incomes and money when it comes to taxation. Where’s the gnashing of teeth and fury in respect of taxing people to the hilt?”
We then get into the nitty-gritty on some of his policy ideas. Universal benefits for example. I’m confused by the fact that he says he’s opposed to them but criticised the UK Government’s decision to restrict the winter fuel payment. He says what he was criticising was the way Labour did it – the “cliff edge” that means people who just miss out lose support completely – and insists his bigger point still stands that we should question universal benefits.
“I know people that use the winter fuel payment for holidays abroad or bottles of fine wine or new clothes. And there’s a cohort who spend the winter in Spain or wherever who are still in receipt of them. It’s clearly not right and it’s clearly not common sense.”
OK, so let’s start to wind things up on the policies by talking about a couple of other issues. First: independence. Findlay says it’s dead, but is that right? Isn’t it more like sleeping? “Yes, probably,” he says. He chooses a tidal metaphor and says the tide is currently far, far out, with Alex Salmond having died, Nicola Sturgeon dealing with her own problems and “caretaker” John Swinney “minding the shop”. “I’m sick of hearing about it,” he says, “It’s boring.”
Secondly, the other i-word: immigration. Findlay says there doesn’t seem to be concern from the left-wing parties about the scale of people trafficking into the UK, the people who are dying and the organised crime that’s profiting. What’s needed, he says, is a meaningful deterrent. But what could that be? “A more effective way of removing those who it’s been proven shouldn’t be here.” So a quick process and then returned? “A very quick process or perhaps some form of third-country scheme.”
So a Rwanda-style scheme? “Yes, I don’t see why not. It’s interesting to see other European countries, apparently progressive left-leaning countries, all looking to find something that will make a difference and provide a deterrent. Every country needs to control its own borders. That shouldn’t be a controversial viewpoint.”
And finally, we return to Findlay’s top subject, crime and justice, for another of his ideas: sobriety tags. The tags, which monitor offenders’ sweat for alcohol, have been used in England for years and Findlay wants to know why the Scottish Government still hasn’t introduced them here. “The cops like it, the courts like it, the criminals themselves like it because it removes the peer pressure to drink and over many years the Scottish Government has said ‘we’re looking at it’. But nothing happens. They haven’t done it because they’re not pragmatists. The Conservatives are pragmatists.”
I have a couple of final questions. Has he spoken to Kemi Badenoch yet? He says they’ve messaged and are speaking later in the week.
Is he worried about her tendency to say apparently extreme things that she then has to “clarify” later? “No,” he says, “Politicians like her should be able to have a free and frank conversation without everything being interpreted in a bad faith way or ideas being presented as fixed positions.”
And finally, does he ever think there’ll be a Conservative government in Scotland one day? Pause. Smile. “Who knows. I’m an optimist.”
