Mother's pride

Leader, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
MY MOTHER Margaret died in June 1999. She knew that I had been elected to the Scottish Parliament. If she wondered about the wisdom of such an ambition, she hid it well.

Her unvarying attitude in life was one of tolerance.
She was gentle and considerate, yet determined and tough in the face of adversity. She was the product of a different age.

Born in 1912 as the only child of affluent middle-class parents, her emerging artistic talent should have promised much. But not when studying at art school in the 1930s was believed by her parents to be a guaranteed route to promiscuity and mixing with a "rackety bunch". Instead, competent piano-playing, flower-arranging and being a lady at home were the order of the day.

Meeting my father was the start of a new and exciting era for my mother. Although he died when I was 17, he was a colourful character, and life was never uneventful when he was around. Twenty years older than my mother, he gave her confidence and introduced her to activities such as fishing and to a large Goldie clan that for an only child was a source of great support and pleasure.

Their union also produced me and my brother.
Growing up in a caring family was the best start in life I could have had. As for my mother, she was warm, loving and understanding of childhood misdemeanours, but she was also wise and forgiving.

And then there are glorious little snippets of memory. The occasion when, exasperated by my brother and me, she threw a bag of mint imperials at the ceiling while we watched in amazement as they all rained down on us. Or when she and my father appeared dressed for a ball - he in full evening dress, she in a floor-length grey silk gown with pearls down the front and long evening gloves.

I thought she was a princess.
But there was also a tough fibre and inner courage. She found herself a widow with two dependent youngsters and very little financial security, but tirelessly committed herself to ensuring we both got a secure start in life.

She worked long hours to do that, never complaining. It is only now that I really understand the extent of her self-sacrifice. And yet she always remained gentle and tolerant.

Indeed, when people described her they referred to her as such a lady. And she was.
She nurtured us, protected us and befriended us, and I hope more often than not rejoiced in us.

She was a great mum.
I DIDN'T notice or appreciate it at the time, but when I look back I can see that my mother Sheila was absolutely committed to me and my sister. We were her life, her absolute focus.

She put our happiness ahead of her own. And it was hard work - probably to the point where it affected her health.
She was a teacher, and our education was a priority.

When I was eight, she would spend endless hours helping me to produce the most amazing projects. She wanted us to do well, to have opportunities - but she hated pushy parents who tried to hothouse their kids. If we showed interest or ability in anything, she would always encourage it.

So, on top of all my school activities, she took me to swimming club, to athletics, to golf, to the cubs and later the scouts. She arranged piano lessons and drumming lessons. She made costumes for school plays.

She was always there, always supportive. When I got home from school, homework came first. She pushed us both to study hard and it became part of life, almost automatic.

I think she found it hard when we grew up. The love is in the letting go, they say. For many mothers this is tough.

For many fathers too - my oldest is 11 and I can sense already that it won't be easy.
My mother was so involved and proud of everything my sister and I achieved. When I was elected to the House of Commons, she came down with the rest of my family to see me taking the oath.

And then she came back again - with two of her friends - to watch my maiden speech. She carried on taking press cuttings of everything I did in politics until I was well into my 30s. In every campaign she rolled up her sleeves and got involved.

She was a great organiser. I know that she would have been so proud that I have become leader of the Liberal Democrats in Scotland and Deputy First Minister.
But sadly she now has Alzheimer's, and is looked after in a tremendous care home close to where my father lives.

So Mother's Day for me is now a bittersweet time, with my memories of what once was. Hers have gone.
Of course, it is also a frantically busy time, making sure that my four kids get their acts together with cards and presents for their mother.

And I am pleased to say that they do it fantastically well. My mum would be proud of them all.
WHEN I was back in Arran recently for my mother Elizabeth's birthday, I was reminded of the many special memories I have of growing up on a sheep farm deep in the hills there.

It must have been hard - even for a farmer's daughter - to raise a family of four in such an isolated spot, but I have happy memories. Mum has a special place in those memories.
Like my father, my mother is not a political person.

I know she sometimes wonders how her son became Scotland's First Minister. With typical generosity, she imagines that others were the defining influences, but she underestimates the enormous impact she had on me and the values that she instilled in me, which have driven me ever since.
While my brother would from an early age be determined to follow our father into farming, I was somehow closer to Mum.

While he trained dogs and herded sheep, I was reading and studying. Mum taught me that education was essential to get on in life, and when I was very young she was constantly encouraging me to do well at school and to go to university.
One truly remarkable thing about my mother, which has always made me very proud, was the fact that she set up her own business when I was 11.

She always had a real talent for home-baking, and so she decided to use it to make life on the farm a little more viable. The tearoom she started from the farm kitchen became a thriving business. It grew into a restaurant and won national awards.

Her pancakes are still legendary, and one of the treats of a visit to the family in Arran is the certain knowledge that Mum will always have something freshly baked.
It was hard work helping out as a teenager, but tremendous fun. And Mum had high standards - "The customer is always right!

" she would tell us. I suspect I cope with the long hours and demands of being First Minister and constantly dealing with so many different people partly because of my training in that busy tearoom back in the 1970s.
Mum has always been welcoming, and our home was somewhere I could bring friends.

She values family, and I'm certain that my belief in family came from her, my aunts and her cousins. I know that the warmth and support she gave us drove me to do my best to create a strong, supportive and loving family for my own children.
Away from the farm, Mum was president of the Women's Rural, she helped run the local badminton club and was a regular churchgoer.

Her sense of community instilled in me a commitment to volunteering and a strong belief in the importance of community - which are at the heart of my political beliefs.
Good manners and showing respect to others are very important to Mum - which I often learned to my cost. But if my mother has a fault, it would be that her instinct to see the good side in every person leaves her vulnerable to disappointment.

That soft side just gives all of us another reason to love her dearly and to be very grateful for all she has done.
Leader, Scottish Green Party
MY MUM Jessica was born in 1911. An only child, brought up by her father and a stepmother, she was bright and impulsive and a bit of a loner.

She loved walking alone in the Lake District, even knocking on cottage doors looking for a bed in the days when there were few official B Bs. She was musical and quite capable of getting to university, but being headstrong she fell out with the school authorities in her exam year and left to make her own way as a secretary in London. It was there that she met my father, and married him in 1939.

She had to be resourceful during the war. With my father being away much of the time (he was a naval officer), she moved from friend to friend - we had no permanent home until 1947. On very little money, she created homes wherever we had our own quarters.

Up until settling in London, when my father became naval attaché to Emmanuel Shinwell, I remember little of Mum - other than that I gave her a hard time. She was appalled to find me bailing out the toilet one day with a soap dish, to find out where the water went (spirit of scientific enquiry). My brother Euan was better-behaved.

Euan and I were split up during bombing raids - I would sleep under the stairs, next to my gas mask, and he would sleep in the Anderson shelter, on the basis that one of us might survive if a bomb hit. A bomb did land near us once, and the blast sucked all the windows and the front door into the street. I had a row with Mum round about this time, and tore up her ration book.

She was very upset.
In London, where we moved when Pa was posted to the Admiralty, Mum set about bringing some colour into our rather drab surroundings. All the brown lino was painted greens, blues, vivid tile-reds.

Carpets were laid, a piano was installed, the stove in the living-room was painted silver. She made all the curtains herself. She had great taste in decoration.

She also made all her own clothes all her life - she liked to dress in the latest fashion, and this was the only way she could afford it. The results were stunning.
She had a deep love of poetry, especially Wordsworth, and of Dickens.

We always looked forward to bedtime. A hot bath, pyjamas warmed at the gas fire in winter, and then cuddling up either side of Mum while she read to us. A weekly trip to the library inculcated a love of books that has never left me.

I can still remember the smell of our local library, and even where the children's book section was.
At home, I also learnt the piano - Mum played very well, especially Scarlatti sonatas. Oddly, having two parents who were very talented pianists seemed to engender a sense of hopelessness in me and I gave up after two years.

Mum was an excellent cook and an avid collector of recipes. I do the same, cutting interesting recipes out of magazines, then sticking them into my day books - but these days I rarely find time to try them out.
We were brought up in the days when children were expected to be disciplined and respectful.

We were often dressed as if we were twins, in the same blue shorts, white shirts and Clarks brown sandals, then trotted off to church or to visit people. On one such visit to 'important' people - they had a garden that seemed as big as Kew - it was summer and there was fruit growing everywhere. The temptation was too much.

A few berries found their way into our mouths, but they left telltale signs staining our naughty chops. Our poor distraught mother marched us up to our hosts to confess our appalling crime. I couldn't say who was most embarrassed - me, head hung in abject shame, our host, or our mother!

Honesty was at a premium as a value.
I cannot say that I inherited my mother's dress sense or neatness, but her passion for books, colour and ancient buildings are still with me. As is her love of music - I am patron of two Gilbert and Sullivan opera companies in Scotland now, and took up the guitar instead of the piano.

I have enjoyed the outdoors all my life, and this is something of a campaigning issue for me in parliament. Mum was a very pious and regular attendee at church until her death, in 1992. I remain a member of the Episcopal Church - although, I regret to say, an occasional attendee.

I can still hear Mum's voice on occasion - sometimes when I've got something right, but quite often when I am about to commit a minor social solecism of which she would disapprove. Luckily, if I don't hear her, my dear wife will step in and make up for it.
Leader, Scottish Socialist Party
OSCAR WILDE once observed that "All women become like their mothers; that is their tragedy.

No man does; that is his." Despite this, I feel I am like my mother Agnes in many ways, and I consciously seek to emulate many of her attributes.
She managed to raise two kids while she and my dad worked full time.

This may be common now, but in the 1960s and 1970s it was not. She was a nurse at Law Hospital in Carluke. As a child I saw her nurture her family while climbing the nursing career ladder, working night shifts to boot, and on occasion facing criticism for not being at home with her children.

That taught me that if you believed in what you were doing, you could overcome the odds.
Another lesson she taught me was the importance of honesty (neither I nor my sister Carol ever got away with telling lies), love and hard work, comfort for the sick and compassion for the despairing. She has a strong sense of humour too - once, as a child, when I was reluctant to wash my hands, face and neck, she offered me the compromise of just washing my face and neck.

I fell for it.
People tell me I have the same warm, gregarious nature as my mum - she likes company, especially that of close friends and family. She taught me about equality, taught me that women can do anything men can - and vice versa.

I, too, can do the ironing, cooking and cleaning. I also saw that, despite working in a hierarchy, she always treated people as her equals. She taught me tolerance and respect.

Her unconditional love for me as a child has grown over the years into the practical support she provides today. I couldn't do half the things I do without her. If Zillah, my partner, is working (she's a midwife) and parliament is sitting, we know we can count on Mum to pick up the kids from school and take care of them.

Evening meetings are a fact of political life, and with the family-unfriendly shifts in the NHS I simply couldn't be the SSP national convener without her support. My dad was in tears with me at the count at Meadowbank in 2003, when I was elected, while my mum was at home getting the children ready for school. She quietly takes care of the important things.

Whenever I've invited her to the parliament or my constituency office, friends and colleagues comment on her youthful outlook, appearance and spirit and her openness to new experiences. In that respect she's like her own mother, who was in her 80s the first time she flew.
When she is not at home in Motherwell or in Edinburgh looking after her grandchildren, Mum is at her happiest in her holiday flat in Millport.

I think it reminds her of happy times in her own childhood.
Her love for both her children now extends to her three grandchildren. As the eldest of five in Catholic Lanarkshire, born in the 1930s, she maintains strong family bonds.

But she is a big softie too. She lets the grandchildren away with murder, and in that regard, for all she dearly loved my Nana Mackin, I'm not sure she'd welcome Oscar Wilde's conclusion - she would probably say she was more like my grandpa!
Deputy leader, SNP
WHAT my mum Joan means to me can't really be expressed in words.

It's not possible to overestimate the help and support she has given me over the years. I know I take it for granted a lot, but I simply can't imagine what I'd do without her. We are physically very alike, and she loves it when people mistake her for my sister - though I always have to remind her that they aren't serious.

No matter where I am or how busy I am, speaking to my mum on the phone is the one thing I do every day without fail. Sometimes it will just be for a couple of minutes to say hello, but that ritual of touching base with her is one of the constants in my life.
I didn't grow up in a party-political household, but both parents have had a big influence on my politics.

They instilled in me the values of fairness, equality and respect for others that took me into politics in the first place. Probably the most important thing I got from my mum was self-belief. Both my parents taught me that I could do whatever I wanted as long as I was prepared to work hard enough.

When my sister and I were younger, we were encouraged to discuss and debate with our parents and to develop our own ideas. That was important, and could also make teatime quite lively. It wasn't all politics and discussion, though.

Shopping is another passion I share with my mum. My big weakness is shoes and hers is handbags. She has literally hundreds of handbags.

It's great for me, though, because I fall heir to quite a lot of them. In fact, I can't remember the last time I actually had to buy a handbag.
Nowadays my mum is involved in the SNP, and I still lean on her for a lot of support and advice.

I think it is fair to say that we share each other's politics, but that doesn't stop us from disagreeing at times. She will always give me her opinions clearly, openly and honestly. I think you need someone like that, who knows you and knows your views, and on whom you can always rely to tell it as it is, with your best interests at heart.

Politics apart, I love going back home and spending time with her and my dad. My sister has two kids now, so the house is always bustling. There's nothing quite like the antics of a nine-year-old nephew and an eight-month-old niece to make you forget the stresses of politics.

Mother's Day is traditionally an opportunity for family reunions. I think spending time with family is hugely important, and I try to do as much of it as I can - though with an election in the offing it's not as easy just now as I'd like it to be.
This year, Mother's Day coincides with the SNP's spring conference -but luckily both she and my dad will be there.

I WAS only eight years old, but to console me at not being able to play with my assembled platoon of plastic soldiers because the lights were off, my mum Alice sat me on her knee and explained, as best she could to a snivelling child, what the miners did to produce light and why they were forced to strike.
It was the power cuts of 1972, and our fourth-storey tenement flat was plunged into darkness alongside all the other homes on Pollok's Linthaugh Road. It was an interesting wee story, but the candles we were forced to use provided nowhere near enough light for me to set up the tank scene from The Battle of the Bulge, so I was not terribly satisfied.

That was just one of the many occasions my mother comforted me, educated me and ultimately inspired me. She worked in pubs as a barmaid during my teenage years. I used to meet her from school outside the Argosy or the Bay Horse.

The smokey-bacon crisps she rewarded me with were always worth the wait.
Then she got involved in the trade-union movement, organising the isolated and often transitory bar workers into the TGWU. The big breweries were having none of it.

Proper breaks, overtime payment, late-night taxis? No chance! My mum organised a strike for union recognition.

Many laughed. A strike in a pub? Useless!

Punters would just drink elsewhere. Tennent Caledonian didn't reckon on my wee maw's ingenuity. She picketed the brewery, not the pub.

Within days, the strike was won.
Back then, lorry drivers were in the TGWU and solidarity was second nature among workers. My mum went on to become a full-time official before discovering further education - studying for a degree in social work, and then securing a pivotal position in the RSPCC.

She pioneered incest-survival groups among adults and managed to save many kids from a lifetime of abuse.
Am I proud of my mum? You bet I am.

She would face Goliath without a sling. She is principled to the point of annoyance (wouldn't buy or drink Wiseman's milk for years because of the company's low pay, and the Sunday Post was banished from the house because of its no-trade-union policy).
Sure, my mum can be a pain, and her stubbornness is legendary.

But she is the kindest, most compassionate and thoroughly honest human being I know. She is a constant source of strength, hope and inspiration to me. She is not just my mum, she is my friend and political comrade as well.

She taught me the meaning of human solidarity, and I could never repay her for all she has done for me.
On this Mother's Day, as on every other before it, I pay tribute to my mum as a very proud and very lucky son. Happy Mother's Day, Mum.