“It’s time to go” is the call on the rural affairs secretary Richard Lochhead from a senior farming figure as pressure on the SNP is intensifying over its failure to pay thousands of farmers on time.
Former NFUS boss Jim Walker said, despite backing independence, he "could never support a party, a minister or a government who have been quite so incompetent and frankly naïve".
Jamie Greene, Scottish Conservative candidate for Cunninghame North and the West Scotland list said one of the reasons the SNP has been so slow to act on the CAP payments crisis was because it only affected rural Scotland.
He said “Had the IT system failure – which has cost the taxpayer an additional £75 million and left thousands of farmers severely out of pocket – been an urban problem in the central belt, the SNP would be ‘all over it’. The truth is that if this was affecting urban Scotland or the central belt, the SNP would have reacted more quickly. Because it affects rural Scotland and the Borders, it has slipped off the radar. North Ayrshire and Arran farmers that I have spoken to in the past few weeks are really suffering. ”
Delays have plagued the £400 million CAP payment scheme since December, and it was confirmed today that more than half of Scotland's farmers are still waiting on hundreds of millions in CAP payments.
Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson added to the debate by saying that “Our rural economy is currently being starved of nearly half a billion pounds of funding – because this SNP government couldn't organise a payments system on time. It's a complete failure of government, it's damaging people's livelihoods and the problem is still not fixed – two years after ministers were warned about this.