Surprise appointment to a ‘dream’ portfolio

Feb 13 2009 by Our Correspondent, Perthshire Advertiser Friday

IT was Harold Wilson who first declared that “a week is a long time in politics”. And, boy, was he right. The speed at which change can be wrought in attitudes, people and even jobs, can be baffling, bemusing and frankly, downright exciting...writes Roseanna Cunningham.

Although I hope I am never as bewildered as the former SDP MP Rosie Barnes who added her own spin to it, declaring that three weeks was twice as long!

Look at the high drama of the passage of the Budget Bill in Parliament last week. Previous areas of huge concern for some of those who had voted against became minor details, easily dealt with and the result was an almost unanimous vote in favour.

First of all, without borrowing powers, the amount of money which the Scottish government has at its disposal is not elastic.

That’s an important point because it means that any changes that are proposed will have to have an impact elsewhere.

Any increase in one area means a decrease somewhere else. So the decisions about where the money goes are important decisions. There will not always be agreement about the details.

As you might have read elsewhere, there were some rapid changes to my plans for this week.

I set off for Parliament this Tuesday ready for a fairly ‘normal’ week as a back bencher. As Convener of the Rural Affairs and Environment Committee I would be leading the questioning of the Environment Minister on the Scottish Government’s plans for Forestry and I intended to use my colleague Alasdair Morgan’s Member’s Debate on long distance paths to highlight my campaign for the Pilgrim Way, a walking route from Iona to St Andrew’s which I hope will bring in visitors to South Perthshire along the way.

By lunchtime, it had been announced that there had been a Ministerial re-shuffle, I was to be the new Minister for the Environment, taking over for Mike Russell.

I have been involved in environmental politics for a very long time and this is in many ways my dream job in Government. I am extremely excited by the challenges that are to come and honoured by the trust that has been placed in me.

The winds of change have blown hard in others’ lives too over the last week. I have lost one colleague and gained another with the sudden and very sad death of Bashir Ahmad, Scotland’s first ethnic minority MSP and a lovely man. His family will be wondering how their lives could have been turned so upside down so suddenly.

Meanwhile the rules governing list MSPs means that Bashir’s place in the parliament has been almost instantly filled with Anne MacLaughlin being sworn in this week, something she couldn’t possibly have imagined a week ago.

While it can sometimes be incremental and sometimes cataclysmic, change is constant. We adapt, we learn and we grow. It is part of what makes us human.