I’VE REACHED that point in my interview with Jeane Freeman where I think it’s time to ask the radical independence question.

This is when Scottish Nationalists start to roll their eyes and give you that look of rebuke you for not yet having memorised their election manifesto.

“So, Jeane, by the end of the next session of Parliament the SNP will have been in power for 14 years; isn’t it about time that you started, you know, taking a few more risks; being a bit more radical?”

“Yes.”

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“I mean you don’t want to squander three terms like Tony Blair did in equivocation and… I beg your pardon, did you just say Yes?”

If the polls predicting another SNP walkover have been accurate then Jeane Freeman is another of that small band of people who will take their seat at Holyrood with a long and demonstrable track record of achievement outside of parliament at their tail. She is standing for the Nationalists in Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley.

So, back to the radical independence question; I’m listening. “Yes,” she says, “I do think we can be more radical, but this follows a natural progression. We first had to show people that we were capable of solid government, of running the country capably. In our second term it was about targeting our priorities for change and about beginning to deliver improvements… and I think we did that.

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“But yes, I think for the next five years we need to be bolder in reforming our economy, health and education – especially education – to open doors for more people to participate in the wealth of this country. We have significant new powers to give people confidence in the integrity of what we are doing and this also implies a better way of doing politics throughout the next session.”

So what made her stand for Holyrood 2016? She ought to know more than most how professional party politics can shrivel a person; can make them curl into themselves despite possessing the best of intentions; suspicious and paranoid about all that is said and written within and without.

She was a senior advisor in Jack McConnell’s Labour administration before being drawn to the independence movement and co-founding Women for Independence. She is a member of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland. She was awarded an OBE for services to the rehabilitation of offenders in her role with Apex Scotland, the criminal justice employment programme. Hell, she doesn’t need this, does she? What’s it all about, Jeane?

“Look, I love political campaigning and all that went on during the independence referendum. I’ve always had a strong set of political beliefs; of the things that I think really matter and then I got this chance to represent the community where I’m from and which made me.

“Being brought up in South Ayrshire gave me a real sense of hard work and fairness. This was expressed to me best by my dad who told me: ‘Achieving success is meaningless unless others have it too.’ “

Some Tories I know would say that achieving success is meaningless IF others have it too, but I keep this to myself for the time-being.

If there’s all this work to do, carving a sense of fairness and equal opportunity into Scottish society, is there not a danger, from a Nationalist perspective, of being side-tracked by talk of another referendum? Some people might reasonably claim that when they voted in the referendum they didn’t realise it was a two-part process.

“Politics is a dynamic process,” she says. “Almost immediately following the referendum in which 45% of our people voted Yes we got a Tory government, and not just any Tory government. This was an administration driven by an ideological impulse to clear a deficit at the expense of the most vulnerable people in our society and then going further in trying to create a surplus while protecting the interests of the very rich. You can’t expect us just to walk away in the face of all that. But achieving independence is not what the SNP is all about, not by a long way. And we have a chance to prove that in the next five years if we’re elected.”

But does she not fear a descent into tribalism with battle lines being drawn in the sand and over which you must not step. Was that not, as some have claimed, a wretched legacy of the independence referendum and all that has happened since? She has spent most of her professional career outside of parliament working with people across all the colours of the political spectrum. Doesn’t she now risk narrowing her focus?

“No,” she says, “absolutely not. I learned during the referendum and while participating in hustings events during this campaign and on the doorsteps that some of the more unpleasant things that are said in social media are not reflected in real life. I’ve been campaigning for the last six months and have only encountered respectful debate and conversations with my political opponents who believe in their causes just as passionately as I do in mine.

“Scotland has a complex set of deep-rooted problems that we need to solve. We need to be mature enough to take good ideas, no matter their source, and work with them. We can no longer think that just because we might passionately disagree with another person’s analysis that there is no goodness in them or that they can never have good ideas.”

There will be an early cabinet re-shuffle when Holyrood re-convenes. Expect the name of Jeane Freeman to figure prominently in it.