Jenny Butler has been involved in politics since 2009, and is hoping to take a 15-year SNP stronghold for the Scottish Lib Dems in her second swing at Scottish Parliament this May.
The 37-year-old’s opposition in the Midlothian North constituency includes Colin Beattie, who has held the seat since 2011.
However, Butler believes Beattie is on “a shoogly peg”, and remains unconvinced by the SNP’s record both nationally and within her own constituency.
Speaking exclusively to Deadline News, she said: “When I got the SNP election address through, I just thought, ‘you’re promising things that you could have fixed in the last 18 years’.
“There is a lot of upsets about inaction. We’re suffering bus cuts, we’ve got a lot of poorer areas and the cost of living is massive.
“Council tax is going up and people don’t think they’re getting value for money. I think [Beattie] is on a bit of a shoogly peg, but it’s really hard to say.
“Canvassing-wise, it’s really interesting. If people want to vote for you, they’ll tell you, but if they’re not voting for you, they’re not admitting to who they are voting for, which is completely new – and I’ve been doing this since 2009.
“So they either are completely undecided or they don’t want to say, but either way, there is just a lot of unhappiness out there.”
On the single biggest issue facing her constituency, Butler believes: “To be honest, the biggest issue is trust.
“People just say ‘you’re all the same’ – there’s a total lack of belief in the system and [a feeling] that, regardless of which party we represent, we won’t do what we say.
“Now that is a really, really difficult thing to try and overcome. What I’m saying to people is, if you look at where Lib Dems get elected, they tend to win pretty convincingly and that’s because they work really hard and keep in touch all year round.
“What Kemi Badenoch said – ‘if you want your church roof fixed, you go to the Lib Dems’ – that is true, because we care about the mad new bin timetable as much as we care about Scotland’s place in the world.
“I just have to say to people, the proof’s in the pudding, but it’s probably time to take a punt on somebody that you might not have considered before, and I’ll have to prove myself to you.”
When asked what voters might misunderstand about the Scottish Lib Dems, Butler explained: “I think we have been very good at defining ourselves by what we’re not, rather than what we are.
“A lot of that is because of what happened in the [Cameron-Clegg] coalition. I would say that that’s mostly passed now but we haven’t defined who we are and we haven’t sold it well enough.
“Everybody wants to end child poverty and support business and everybody says all of the right things because they are the right things.
“But I’m a liberal because I don’t care where you’re from, the colour of your skin, whether you’re part of the LGBT community – I will fight for you and I think you have the right to all the best opportunities in life.
“And I don’t think we’re very good at saying that. Everybody’s gotten out of the habit of treating people like human beings and the worse the economy gets, the higher immigration gets, people talk about somebody to blame and ‘the other’.
“Being a Lib Dem is being welcoming, internationalist and being here for everyone and we haven’t said that enough.”
With Midlothian recently ranked first in the UK’s fastest-growing housing hotspots, Butler says there is a lot of work to be done for infrastructure to keep pace.
“I live in Eskbank and I work in Corstorphine,” she said. “On Monday to Friday, that will take me an hour. There are certain times of the weekend where, door-to-door from house to work is 22 minutes. Do the math, something’s going wrong.
“You can’t drive up the A7 without seeing a ‘for sale’ sign on the land or the roundabouts. We don’t have the capacity for much more, so we have to find some way of making sure that when these developments go in, whatever they look like, that we bring in the infrastructure to cope with that.
“The planning legislation needs to make sure that when these developments go in, it’s about building communities and not just building houses.
“Transport is also massive. You’ll have seen the bus cuts that we are dealing with – we need much more joined-up thinking.
“Buses don’t match up with the trains and if we need to get people out of cars – which we do – there’s no point in cutting bus routes. It’s absolutely baffling to me. There is a chunk of work that needs to be done and I think most people in Midlothian would say the same.
“We need to give local authorities much more money to make sure that when bus routes are pulled from private companies, we have the capacity to replace them or start new ones.
“We need to be working with our transport partnerships to make sure that happens. Transport for London’s got a really good model where they are completely consultative and the routes and timings are based on what residents say rather than the bus company deciding what they’re going to do.
We need more late night buses as well because when these developments come, we’re potentially just going to be sitting in our cars for hours.
“So more money locally, more decision-making powers for people. I’m a big fan of direct democracy like that.”
If she were to be elected come 8 May, Butler says success for her in her first year would be “as many wins for constituents as possible”.
“[It’s about] Being as noisy as possible about the things that constituents need fixed, using all the levers within Parliament to make changes.
“I’ve been diabetic for 30 years so health and social care is probably my number one concern. I would like some victories in diabetes tech – they’re threatening to pull the funding again so I’d want to reverse that and I’d want to see a marked increase in availability of mental health appointments for young people.
“However those are measurable, they’re the things I’d want to change in my first year.
“I’d be communicating with people regularly – leaflets to the point where it’s annoying – but reporting back and making sure that people know where I am and that I’m there for them.
“That’s just what Lib Dems do, and what – I hope – I will do as well.”
