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Post by timrollpickering on Oct 30, 2016 20:42:13 GMT
Does anyone know which and how many SNP parliamentarians (at both Westminster and Holyrood) have been in the Conservatives at some stage in their career? Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh is the most obvious current example, the current Lord Belhaven & Stenton was another but ISTR there were several others as well.
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The Bishop
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Post by The Bishop on Oct 31, 2016 11:56:05 GMT
Iain Lawson was a notable one from the 1980s/90s.
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spqr
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Post by spqr on Nov 2, 2016 22:09:16 GMT
Probably the most notable example in the Scottish Parliament is Paul Wheelhouse, the current Minister for Community Safety and Legal Affairs. He had been a rather strident Conservative whilst a student at Aberdeen University.
Further back in the mists of time, Hamish Watt, SNP MP for Banffshire from Feb. 1974 to 1979, had previously been a Conservative candidate for the Caithness and Sutherland constituency (where he was beaten by the future Labour-SDP defector Bob Maclennan). Watt was a 'gradualist' in the 1970s party, known to favour Home Rule rather than outright independence. His daughter and grandson are both SNP parliamentarians.
If one considers the term 'Tory Nationalist' more broadly (i.e. outwith the narrow confines of the SNP parliamentary cohort, past or present), one could also include the historian Michael Fry, who has long argued for an independent Scotland on the basis - rather erroneously, in my view - that it would allow the nation to detach itself from the teat of centralized, bureaucratic State-Socialism. Fry's counter-intuitive provocation once won him considerable publicity, but his star has waned in recent years (although he does now write columns for the National).
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Nov 3, 2016 0:01:23 GMT
To be fair to Iain Lawson, he really appears to have undergone a conversion to left of centre politics. Yasmin, on the other hand, appears to have undergone an unelectable to electable conversion.
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spqr
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Post by spqr on Nov 3, 2016 2:43:42 GMT
To be fair to Iain Lawson, he really appears to have undergone a conversion to left of centre politics. Yasmin, on the other hand, appears to have undergone an unelectable to electable conversion. I remember a lot of people once saying that about Alan Amos... |
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The Bishop
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Post by The Bishop on Nov 3, 2016 10:58:15 GMT
He just genuinely "un-converted" as well. Honest  |
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Nov 3, 2016 11:03:36 GMT
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