by Robbie Dinwoodie
JEANE FREEMAN only joined the SNP in 2015, but within a year had been selected as a Holyrood candidate, won her Ayrshire seat, and promptly been appointed Minister for Social Security, charged with the daunting task of setting up a new agency to handle eleven benefits paying out £2.7 billion a year to 1.4 million Scots.
Let the scale of that task sink in and then ask yourself, why on earth would it be handed to a rookie MSP? And then you look into her background and you see that she probably had more political experience than most of the rest of the new 2016 intake combined, having been senior policy adviser to Labour First Minister Jack McConnell and before that a top civil servant charged with negotiating the McCrone Agreement on teachers’ pay and conditions.
Nor was she a Civil Service career plodder. She came to that role late, having spent more than a decade founding and building up Apex Scotland which looks to find work for ex-offenders, an achievement which saw her honoured with an OBE. From that flowed roles with the Parole Board, the Scottish Police Authority, the Judicial Appointments Board and the National Waiting Times Centre.
Labour for Independence Conference, Glasgow, November 2012
Before founding Apex, in her student days, studying towards her honours degree in sociology and politics at Glasgow College of Technology, she was the first female chair of the NUS in Scotland and a senior figure in the Communist Party. Oh, by the way, before that she had spent four years as a nurse. So you could say Freeman is not afraid of getting her hands dirty. Born in Ayr in 1953, she was the daughter of a panel beater and a nurse, her family resolute trade unionists, so her political journey to Ministerial office in an SNP Government is fascinating.
We meet in her Ministerial office at Holyrood and she talks about the principles that will guide the creation of Scotland’s new benefits agency, and of the victories and set-backs so far in the negotiations with Westminster over the benefits transition which flows from the Smith Commission and “The Vow” which followed the 2014 independence referendum.