{"id":361181,"date":"2026-01-09T16:35:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T16:35:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/361181\/"},"modified":"2026-01-09T16:35:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T16:35:09","slug":"ministers-concealed-they-had-no-money-to-build-bypass-msp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/361181\/","title":{"rendered":"Ministers ‘concealed’ they had no money to build bypass – MSP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fergus Ewing was so angry about this his raised voice turned heads in the Garden Lobby at Holyrood during our interview.<\/p>\n

This story is a heady mix of a powerful local issue, secret documents and an upcoming election battle.<\/p>\n

Warning lights flash as we plough through this – there’s a lot of politics around.<\/p>\n

Ewing was SNP royalty; a scion of the Ewing clan and a long-serving government minister.<\/p>\n

He’s had a specular falling out with his party colleagues over oil and gas, gender and, notably, roads.<\/p>\n

The now independent Inverness & Nairn MSP feels progress on the A96 (and A9) has been at a snail’s pace.<\/p>\n

He’s gunning for the government and all this is grist to his mill as he seeks re-election<\/a> in that constituency.<\/p>\n

Ewing views this as promise after promise from ministers with the document suggesting they cynically sit there with an empty purse.<\/p>\n

Transport Scotland tell us any claim that they’re not committed to the bypass is “simply, factually, wrong.”<\/p>\n

The first minister echoes that commitment and has also sign-posted to the government’s budget on Tuesday which will give more details about the infrastructure investment pipeline.<\/p>\n

In fairness, their hands are tied about what more they can say ahead of that – but the patient people of Nairn may want things to get moving.<\/p>\n

Expensive promises do ultimately have to be delivered – if they don’t, there’s a political cost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fergus Ewing was so angry about this his raised voice turned heads in the Garden Lobby at Holyrood…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-361181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}