Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie on polls, penny for education and frustrations over parliamentary niceties

Envelopes to his right, letters to his left, the campaigner behind the front desk of the Scottish Liberal Democrat party office in Cupar is making light work of this less than glamorous but vital aspect of electioneering – the mailshot. Each letter is folded twice, placed inside an envelope and perched on top of a precarious looking pile.

“How many more have you got to go,” I ask. Six thousand, he responds. Each one is stamped with the trademark pic of the Willie Rennie grin in one corner and a bar chart of last year’s general election result in North East Fife with the caption, ‘only Willie Rennie can beat the SNP here, Conservatives and Labour can’t win’ in another.

The man himself appears from the back room following an impromptu visit from constituents concerned that a service for terminally ill patients would be axed after the local health board refused to pitch up half the funding (the decision was reversed last week). “You are the master of this domain,” Rennie tells his colleague. “I am the master of this domain,” the busy activist repeats back at the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader.

If the Survation poll splashed on the Daily Record front page this morning is to be believed – the Lib Dems are sitting at six per cent on both the constituency and regional list vote – then the domain does not extend too far.

Still, little seems to crack Rennie’s smile. The week before marked ten years since he swept to victory in the Dunfermline and West Fife by-election, securing a 1,800 majority on a 16.24 per cent swing. “We’d had a series of scandals, as seems to be the case,” he recalls. “So we weren’t expecting to win, but we could feel it moving the final weekend and we just out-campaigned the other parties over that final period.” For Rennie, at least, it shows what can be done, “that what seems insurmountable is not and public opinion can change just like that”, clicking his fingers simultaneously.

The scale of the victory was perhaps best epitomised by the fact a leaked minute of a Scottish Lib Dem team meeting at Westminster a few weeks earlier had suggested that the party should aim to “not slip behind the SNP” in a then Labour-held seat. A series of election results in the decade since suggests such an aspiration is becoming more and more ambitious.

“You go on the positive stuff, eh?” he chuckles at the mention of polls. “Go on, then, talk about the poll ratings.” Does it get him down, I ask. “Nah… look, people switch on to politics every so often, there are moments in time when there are big monumental events. I actually think it’ll come that the decision for us to announce a penny on income tax for education was one of those moments and it will take time to feed through but that was one of the moments.

“A few days before polling day, that’s another one of those moments where people switch on, budget days, the big events are what change politics and sometimes the TV debates have that kind of effect where it ripples out, sometimes the commentary on the back of the TV debates. I know you’re not going to get opinion poll ratings turning round just like that, but you’ve got to focus on the big events to get things to change.

"So no, these poll ratings have been pretty steady over the last period and I’m confident that by the time that polling day comes – because I am confident in the message, just like I was ten years’ ago – that we can turn it around, get an improvement in our standing in Holyrood and that we can have more MSPs. That’s my belief because I think the message is right, the organisation is right, we know what we’re doing, we know how to campaign and how to win.”

Here in North East Fife, the Lib Dems are clearly pitching it as an ‘us versus them’ contest with the SNP in an attempt to draw in voters from the other unionist parties. “People aren’t in the way [of silos] that we politicos often think, but yes, we’re making an appeal to more Conservative-leaning and Labour-leaning people to come with us,” he says, extending a “direct appeal” to so-called “yellow nationalists” contemplating whether to stay with the SNP.

“You would think after 80 years of campaigning for independence and more powers that when they got them they might do something with them, but they’re scared of their own shadow – they don’t do anything, this bunch,” he adds.

“Now, you want leaders. Sometimes they’ll make mistakes but you want leaders in charge of the country. Not people who just constantly campaign for more powers and independence, that’s their objective and it’s clearly showing now with the slipping international standing on education, the fact that we haven’t cracked it on mental health, the fact that we’ve missed climate change targets. All of those things, people should be desperately concerned about.”

Despite being hammered with it week in week out at FMQs, Rennie believes the so-called coalition effect is “fading” as the party attempts to associate itself with the battleground of education for reasons other than that pledge. “We’re not going to make the tuition fees mistake again, that’s not going to happen,” he says.

The Lib Dems were first out of the blocks this year with their proposal to raise income tax rates by 1p to generate £475m for education. Labour made a similar call a week later, albeit pitched more towards reversing cuts to local government budgets. “It’s good to be right,” laughs Rennie.

Unlike Labour’s rebate scheme, the Lib Dems are relying on an increase in the personal allowance to try and deflect claims that those on the standard rate would suffer. “We’re saying it is a penny for education – what we would call hypothecated – so people know what they’re getting for their money: a modest increase in tax for a big return.

"We think that’s the right thing to do and because of the tax thresholds being raised at Westminster, you’d have to earn over £19,000 before you’d pay any more tax next year compared with this year. That seems pretty progressive to me.” 

Of course, no one particularly likes paying tax. Sure enough, an Ipsos MORI poll out a week earlier put support for a 1p rise at 30 per cent compared to 54 per cent who advocated it staying static. “Thirty per cent is more than seven per cent, I know it’s an obvious statement to make but even if it wasn’t more than seven per cent then I would still do it, I would still say it because it’s the right thing,” says Rennie. Where does the seven per cent come from? “Because that’s our opinion poll rating,” he adds. I’m left feeling almost guilty telling him it’s six in this morning’s Daily Record.

“OK, I overstated… I exaggerated,” he guffaws. “But it’s still more than six, you make my point for me. You still knew it was the right thing. You say it in politics because you believe it, you don’t just chase opinion polls.” Whenever asked to forecast their fortunes this time last year, Rennie repeatedly fell back on his “route to victory” refrain in each of their 11 Westminster seats. In all but one – Alistair Carmichael’s Orkney and Shetland seat – that route veered off course.

“I am not going to get into predictions, we are not going to go there,” he insists, only going so far as to say the current rump of five will increase. That is likely to largely depend upon their performance on the second vote given only two – Liam McArthur and Tavish Scott in Orkney and Shetland respectively – are currently constituency MSPs. Indeed, the lead Lib Dem list candidate for west Scotland declared the week before that “our best chance of winning here in west Scotland is through the regional list”.

Is there an acceptance, then, that expecting to pick up constituency seats in some parts simply won’t happen? “I never concede [defeat],” he says. “If people believe in Liberal Democrat policies they should vote for us and the voters will take care of the rest of it. I am not getting into predictions about where we can win and where we can’t. I have got a platform, I believe in that platform and if people want to, they should vote for it.”

The fact that others, Labour in particular, have all of a sudden become wise to the list – especially given the SNP’s dominance under first past the post last May – does not make much difference, he says.

Rennie and health spokesman Jim Hume top the lists in their regions, though Alison McInnes, justice spokesperson and party business manager, has dropped to second in the north east behind former MSP Mike Rumbles. Ex-army major Rumbles is a Holyrood veteran, having served as the MSP for west Aberdeenshire and Kincardine from the parliament’s inception through to 2011. However, the turn of events poses a potential difficulty for Rennie on two fronts.

One, McInnes has proven herself as one of the most authoritative figures within justice, especially on policing, and in so doing, has often kept government and the new single police service on the back foot. Second, the fact a sitting female MSP – the Lib Dems’ only one at Holyrood – has fallen down the list does not necessarily help Rennie at a time when he has been pushing for greater diversity within the parliamentary pool.

Nine days later, the party backed plans that will mean candidates in the top five Westminster target seats where there is no sitting Lib Dem MP and five of the top 10 most winnable Holyrood seats will be women going into the next round of elections.

“We’ve had three MSPs in the north east before so she’s got a very good chance [of getting back in] and I think people will recognise the work that she has done,” says the former party chief executive. Rumbles is a “pretty brutal campaigner” and strong in terms of holding the SNP to account on investment in the north east, adds Rennie.

Asked if he was OK with the order, he seems lukewarm. “Well, you know, the members decide these things and I’ve got huge confidence in Mike and huge confidence in Alison. That’s why I want them both back and I have set the task for the north east to make sure that that happens.”

The “unpredictable” nature of the list, as Rennie puts it, could well see him sitting next to Ukip in the next parliamentary session after the party similarly chalked up six per cent in the same Survation poll. “That tells you all you need to know about opinion polls, doesn’t it?” he says, adding that there is no evidence of it out on the doorsteps throughout the region.

Could Scotland’s only Ukip MEP, David Coburn, not bring something to Holyrood? “He would bring something, I am sure,” he chuckles. “I don’t know what it is, but yeah, it would insult lots of people, I’m sure. I don’t think he’ll be there but who knows.”

As one campaign comes to an end, another will pick up pace. Voters will return to polling stations seven weeks on from the election to decide Britain’s fate within the European Union. Asked whether this might, as has been claimed in some quarters, interfere with the Scottish Parliament campaign, Rennie says: “I think people can think about more than one thing at a time, can’t they? I think voters are capable of doing that. They can, of course they can.

"They can talk about lots of different things at the one time, so it’s fine. Anything for a grievance, I think, is the approach that Nicola [Sturgeon] and others are taking. There is nothing to be offended [by] about a seven-week gap – it’s quite logical. If it was the next day, you could maybe understand but it’s not. There is a decent gap and there will be a decent campaign.”

If the rest of the UK votes to leave and Scotland opts to stay, is it the ‘material change in circumstances’ that Sturgeon has claimed could trigger a second independence referendum? “Let me just break that assumption [down]. There is a sloppy assumption in political thinking that Scotland, first of all, is way more pro-European and it’s not necessarily, it’s a bit more in the balance than most of us would like, there is quite a lot of anti-European views and sentiment out there.

“But the second thing is, after we had just wrenched ourselves out of our second biggest market, Scotland’s second biggest market, the European Union, we would then subsequently decide for some logic to pull ourselves out of our biggest market i.e. the rest of the United Kingdom? It’s not automatic [that we would get back in to the EU], is it – it is all going to take time. Why would you wrench yourself out of your first to possibly go back into your second? It’s turmoil upon turmoil.”

I begin to ask whether he would be more comfortable in a Scotland within the Union that was out of the EU than an independent Scotland... Rennie cuts me off before I can add ‘in the EU’. “I want to win, I want to keep Scotland and Britain in the European Union, that’s the top priority,” he says.

“All the other hypotheticals are really unhelpful… the First Minister of this country has got a responsibility to stand up and make a really positive case for Scotland and Britain being in the European Union rather than levering it to be some proxy debate for independence. It’s not, it’s got far more merit than that.”

Rennie draws parallels with unrelenting questions over David Cameron’s future in Downing Street should Britain vote to leave – “who bloody cares, we’ll have other problems to deal with whoever is Prime Minister, that is not the big issue”. From ‘Project Fear’ to ‘Project Cheer’, the Lib Dem leader – who has previously expressed his frustrations over how the campaign for staying in the UK was run – considers arguments over what is positive and negative “overblown”, such that they deflect attention from a “bloody proper debate about the issues”.

“It’s like when you get answers in parliament, ‘I’m grateful for the member’s positive tone of his question’. Just answer the bloody thing, I do not care if you approve of the tone of the question, just answer it, but so often we love to talk about all the fluffy stuff round the edge rather than the meat of the question.”

In that vein, can the Lib Dems still be trusted? The leadership’s subsequent U-turn on fracking within a week of party members voting to lift a moratorium certainly served to feed a long-running narrative. “I think [with] any politician there is a question of trust, I don’t think it’s necessarily Liberal Democrat politicians,” counters Rennie. “I think there is a suspicion all round, and that is something we have all got to battle to make sure that we follow through.”