Angus MacDonald: We have a very poor level of business start-ups in Scotland and our economy is a mess

Last year the Highland Cinema in Fort William was named Britain’s best cinema at the Big Screen Awards. It’s a striking venue that serves a community that had been without access to a cinema for over 15 years.  

It’s a stylish, modern building that retains some of the traditional architecture of the Highlands. The interior is modern and sleek, with big windows that let lots of light into the bar area. Its two theatres feature top-of-the-range screens while maintaining a boutique cinema style, with the addition of a pair of seats installed in a Lotus Elan car.  
It’s owned by local businessman and new MP for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire, Angus MacDonald. He describes it as his “gift” to the area.  

The cinema is part of his ambition to revitalise Fort William, along with the Highland Bookshop, which he also owns. He tells Holyrood the businesses aren’t set up to make huge profits, but rather to give residents and visitors enriching experiences.  

These entrepreneurial endeavours, along with various social enterprises and non-profit initiatives in the Highlands, have led him to recently be awarded an OBE for his services to the area.  

His vision is partly thanks to his decades of experience owning businesses, which began far away from the Highlands.  

Brought up in Glencoe, MacDonald’s father owned the famed walker’s pub, the Clachaig Inn. But he didn’t stay for long. He left school a year early in pursuit of a girl, which took him to Uruguay. Unsuccessful in his quest, he spent the rest of the year in Peru, which was the beginning of a long career in entrepreneurialism, serving as a middleman, helping mainly American tourists travel to Cusco and Machu Pichu. 

He didn’t hang around for long in Peru; he went on to spend some time as a cowboy in Arizona followed by three years in the military, which he says he was pushed into by his father “to make me grow up”.  

“It’s fair to say my father pushed me into joining after I returned from South America because he couldn’t see where I was going in life, and neither could I. It’s where I grew up and took some responsibility.” 

It was after those years spent in the army that MacDonald began to forge a career. For the next three years he worked as an investment manager in Edinburgh with Martin Currie, doing small company investments.  

“When I was 26, I started my first company, which provided information to the investment world, it was called Edinburgh Financial Publishing. I sold that seven years later to a division of Morgan Stanley. Then I bought a bankrupt newspaper called Financial News, which I then sold to The Wall Street Journal in 2007, and with that was a recruitment website which was very successful and that was sold to private equity.” 

And he’s got experience in sectors beyond finance, having been successful in recycling – selling a company to Biffa – and in training – where he was a major shareholder in a Glasgow-based online education company which was sold to private equity. 

Along with owning the Highland Cinema and Highland Bookshop, MacDonald currently has a significant share in a business that provides spare parts for wind turbines. He tells me, despite the varied sectors he has been involved in, that “an awful lot of businesses have things in common”. “It’s about getting a strategy in place, employing the right people, being very clear on what you want to achieve and being very focused and sales-led. My organisations have always been very sales-led, which is not a typical UK business trait.  

“You shouldn’t hesitate to pick up on other people’s ideas and bring them forward. You don’t have to innovate all the time.” 

He is critical of Scotland’s overall level of business and blames the economy for being too public sector focused.  

“We have a very poor level of business start-ups in Scotland and our economy is a mess. We are a public sector economy. We are the experts at training the professionals of the world – the engineers, accountants, doctors, lawyers – yet we have such a small business base.” 

As of December 2024, Scotland has produced just three unicorn start-ups (companies valued at over $1bn): Skyscanner, FanDuel, and BrewDog.  

The National Innovation Strategy was published last year, aiming to position Scotland as one of the most innovative small nations over the next 10 years by focusing on innovation-led entrepreneurship and effective commercialisation pathways to bring products to market. But MacDonald says because Scotland has “become a public sector economy”, it means “people aren’t seeing business role models in their communities”.

He adds: “Bureaucracy and high taxes are making it so difficult to build businesses. We’ve become a bureaucratic, high-tax nation.” 

I ask him if it is a symptom of a wider European problem, noting business creation seems to significantly lag behind the United States and Asia in terms of scale, valuation, and innovation-driven growth. “It’s become a complete European problem, while the emerging markets have been extraordinary in terms of productivity and their start-up level.  

“While places like Germany were very good, America has just accelerated away. When I was a fund manager, the American Stock Exchange and the UK Stock Exchange were at the same level. They are now four times ours – they’ve created four times the wealth we have. 

“One of the issues is that its energy is 20 per cent the cost of ours. If a hotel in Britain is paying £100,000 for energy, then an American one is paying £20,000. We have priced ourselves out of the market.” 

He tells Holyrood the UK is anti-business, and he is very critical of the current UK Cabinet, none of whom have business backgrounds, while very few of Scottish Government ministers have a business background either.  

MacDonald argues one way you change that anti-business mindset is by taking the VAT base from £90,000 to £250,000. “It’s not Liberal Democrat policy yet, but it will be if I get my way. 

“Let’s say you’re a plumber. You’ll get to that £90,000 quite quickly, and what happens is towards the back end of the year you stop working Fridays, you might take March off in the fight to stay below £90,000. If you increase that to £250,000 that plumber would employ a couple of extra apprentices, building up a reservoir of youngsters in the sector, and you are working a lot harder.  

“Your tax take wouldn’t go down because you would have more people paying income tax and corporation tax. The Treasury may say ‘we need that 20 per cent of VAT’. Well, they’re not getting anything at the moment because people are staying under £90,000.” 
MacDonald has big ideas and he’s not afraid to share them. Yet he hasn’t been in elected politics for very long. He stood to be the Liberal Democrats candidate for the Highland Council election in 2022 for the Fort William and Ardnamurchan ward, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who had also been an independent member of the council decades earlier.  

He tells me he chose to stand for the council because of frustrations in Fort William as well as a “centralisation of powers to Inverness”.  

Last month, a vote to break up the Highland Council was brought forward by Andrew Baxter, the man who replaced MacDonald as the ward’s councillor. Baxter, along with other councillors, argued for a review of the governance of Scotland’s largest local authority by area. They said its communities could be better served by a smaller number of new authorities. Ultimately the vote was unsuccessful.  

MacDonald says he would have voted for the breakup. “I would like to see a move to the old county councils, councils like Skye and Raasay, Lochaber, Caithness and Sutherland, and Inverness City. It could be done with a centralised service of HR, finance, etc, but then the money would be divvied out.  

“The Highland Council’s budget is £650m, so if, for talking sake, Lochaber has 10 per cent of the population it would have £65m, as a generalisation.”  

It seems much of MacDonald’s reasoning for getting into elected politics has been to challenge the SNP’s dominance in the Highlands in the last decade. “I stood for Westminster because I wanted to have a crack at getting rid of [former Ross, Skye and Lochaber MP] Ian Blackford, and when the election was called, I put my hand up, but there was a boundary change, and I was up against Drew Hendry.”  

As well as his short career in politics, he tells me he has not exclusively supported the Lib Dems in the last decade. “Between 2014 and 2015 I gave money to parties and organisations which included the Conservatives, the Lib Dems and Better Together, which was run by Labour. This was really to hold the SNP to account because they were so dominant.” 

Reflecting on the Scottish Budget, he says he’s “over the moon” for the allocation of money to build a replacement hospital for Fort William and is “very grateful” to Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes, who was campaigning alongside him. However, he says he is concerned that the SNP will not deliver on it, and he projects “it will be over budget, over-spec, and delayed”. “The SNP have a great tradition of talking, consulting, and reviewing, but not delivering.” 

And while the issue of health in the area has had some positive news, MacDonald tells me one of the areas that his constituents desperately need to be improved is social care.

“My biggest concern is the care sector. We have massive depopulation on the west coast and a very elderly population, a poor population, and people are being moved in some cases 100 miles away from their loved ones. Smaller care homes are closing, and I think we need 60-bed care homes paid for by the Scottish Government in Ullapool, Portree, Fort Augustus and Fort William, with staff accommodation to future-proof our care sector. 

“The Highland Council can’t pay for it, NHS Highland can’t pay for it, and the only people who could are the Scottish Government.  

“It is my biggest concern. These vulnerable people don’t have a voice.” 

Another area that he sees as crucial for the next few decades to ensure prosperity for the Highlands is securing community energy benefits from the vast levels of renewable projects being set up in his constituency.  

MacDonald points to Norway’s national wealth fund, which sits around $1.7tn as a result of taking a percentage of oil and gas profits. “Britain has saved nothing [from oil and gas] and it would be awful if the next 10 years, using overseas-manufactured wind turbines, generating profits for overseas utilities, didn’t make good money for the people who are suffering the negative side of industrialisation of their countryside,” he says. 

“In a nutshell, what I am proposing is that five per cent of all revenue from all renewable energy is paid as community benefit and that money should be spent on three things: fuel vouchers, affordable housing, and the care sector. 

“There’s an amendment for the GB Energy Bill on 13 January on this from the energy minister and the Secretary of State for Scotland. However, nobody seems to be brave enough to say to the utilities it’s five per cent or you can’t build it. 

“Ultimately, if the community benefit is left up to the utility from a foreign country, they will fight to get away with paying as little as they can.”