Politics needs more women like the late, great Margo – and Ash Regan

But such was her popular appeal that she subsequently won three elections in a row as an independent candidate. Her untimely death in 2014 robbed Holyrood, the country and our city of one of our finest politicians.

Ash Regan MSP, right, has unveiled a private members’ bill in the Scottish Parliament that would make buying sex a criminal offence (Picture: Andrew Milligan)

And just as she wasn’t afraid to challenge the male leaders of her party – she wasn’t best friends with either Alex Salmond or John Swinney – she didn’t shy away from controversial issues. As she struggled with Parkinson’s – the debilitating disease that eventually killed her – she introduced a bill to legalise assisted dying. She died before it reached its first stage in the parliament, where it failed.

And she twice introduced a bill on street prostitution in an effort to allow councils to set up "tolerance zones” before dropping her measure in favour of the government’s 2007 Prostitution (Public Places) (Scotland) Act 2007, which made kerb-crawling a criminal offence.

I thought about Margo a lot this week when Edinburgh Eastern MSP Ash Regan introduced “Unbuyable” – her private members bill on prostitution which aims to make it an offence for a man to pay for sex acts. I used to enjoy sparring with Margo over independence – she was of course a fervent supporter of Scotland leaving the UK, while I wanted – and still do – us to stay.

But we used to agree on prostitution. As a young councillor on the city’s Licensing Committee in the 1990s, I regularly voted to grant "entertainment” licenses to saunas, in the full knowledge that they were brothels. Like Margo, I thought the right thing to do was to manage prostitution, to provide women with a safe environment, whether indoors or on the streets.

I once agreed with Margo’s assertion: “Few cities in the world have ever managed prostitution better than here in Edinburgh.” But I was wrong. Prostitution is nothing more than the violent sexual exploitation of vulnerable women and girls. Marginalised women, some struggling with drug addiction, and often survivors of childhood sexual abuse, are persuaded that a life in prostitution is a job like any other. And our city has become a magnet for sex traffickers who bring women from across the world to effectively imprison them in brothels.

I have no idea if Margo would support Ash Regan’s bill if she were still with us, but I do know that she would applaud her courage and determination in bringing the legislation forward. Our parliament is full of time-servers – back-benchers and ministers who get by simply by parroting their party’s message of the day. Ash Regan is different. She resigned her government job on a matter of principle over the SNP’s gender reforms, and she left the party to join Alba because it had “lost its focus on independence”. Like Margo, she is not afraid to stand up for what she believes in, even if it makes her unpopular in some quarters. Politics needs more women like them.