Election / Constitutional reform key for election says outlier Tait
PETER Tait – in election terms at least – is a man on a mission.
The Westside crofter is the outlier in the list of eight Shetland candidates, given that he is the only independent and the lone voice campaigning on a single issue.
He is focusing in again on his view that the monarchy should be relocated to Scotland.
“It’s got nothing specially to do with Shetland,” he says, “but if you want to do something, you’ve got to start somewhere.
“I suppose the local election is as good a place as any.”
His election leaflets have begun landing on Shetland doormats and through the letterbox, and it proclaims that a vote for Tait is a vote for constitutional reform.
He believes the monarchy being located elsewhere has been a “serious handicap” for centuries.
“I think it’s an important issue both nationally and internationally because our world is getting smaller all the time, and it’s getting more dangerous all the time too,” Tait tells Shetland News.
“I think underlying everything there is a basic hierarchal structure which is topped by our monarchy. It’s out of focus because the monarchy is off centre, so if we get the monarchy back on centre it will come into a clearer focus.”
He previously said the monarchy is “constitutionally in England, and it is bound to be constitutionally Protestant – and I think that is wrong”.
Tait had added that “tensions we have in this country between Catholics and Protestants is simply due to the fact that the monarchy is off centre”.
While Tait – who has previously worked in plant and machinery, and salmon and mussel farming – is keen to see the monarchy relocated to Scotland, he is not keen on Scottish independence as we know it.
“If we get the monarchy back to Scotland, it all changes anyway,” he added.
“It would be up to the other states in the union to take their independence from Scotland. Because Scotland would become the central state then, which I believe it is basically anyway.
“So independence would be a question for other states, not Scotland, if we get the monarchy back.”
To the lay person Tait’s leaflet and election statement may be a little bit of a tough read at times, not least due to a number of biblical references and weighty prose.
But having pushed the issue before in previous elections, there is no doubting the Walls man’s enthusiasm and passion for the topic.
His first foray was in the 2019 Scottish Parliament by-election, campaigning on the same issue and picking up 31 votes.
Tait ran again in the Holyrood vote in 2021, but hit the headlines for reported comments he made criticising same-sex marriage, while also alleging that “Covid is possibly related to it”.
Tait said that he was still campaigning on the constitutional reform in 2021, “but the media sort of ran off with one of my side issues”.
In that election Tait picked up 116 votes – coming fifth out of six candidates ahead of Restore Scotland’s Brian Nugent.
He points out that his votes rose by 300 per cent between those two elections. “But the figures are very small, so it would be irrelevant,” the candidate adds.
“But I’m just going again and see what happens.”
There are seven more candidates contesting the Shetland seat. They are in alphabetical order: Alex Armitage (Greens), Douglas Barnett (Conservatives), Vic Currie (Reform UK), John Erskine (Labour), Hannah Mary Goodlad (SNP), Emma Macdonald (Liberal Democrats) and Brian Nugent (Alliance to Liberate Scotland).
Shetland News intends to run features on each candidate in the run up to the vote on 7 May.
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