David Maddox: Nicol Stephen returns to his political roots

Amid the turmoil of the SNP's volte face on local income tax a small act of defiance by one of Holyrood's more notable MSPs went largely unreported.

Nicol Stephen (pictured), former Deputy First Minister, ex-leader of the Liberal Democrats but still MSP for Aberdeen South, voted against the local government finance motion. He was the only MSP to do so.

The reason for this was not that he wanted councils to be denied their money (which is what would have happened if a majority had done as he did), but because he wanted to register a protest against Aberdeen's continued chronic under-funding at the bottom of the local authority league in terms of cash per head of population.

As he said in his speech yesterday: "If Aberdeen received the Scottish average funding support, it would get more than £60 million extra per year; if it received the same as the city of Dundee, it would get more than £100 million extra; and if it received as much as Glasgow, it would get more than £160 million extra each and every year."

It is interesting that Mr Stephen's political career was originally built on him being a champion of Aberdeen and the North East of Scotland. This is how he won the Kincardine and Deeside by-election for Westminster in 1991.

But in Holyrood many of his colleagues in the North East felt that he had forgotten what made him. As Deputy First Minister he seemed to do nothing to deal with the imbalance of funds for Aberdeen allowed the Labour dominated Scottish Executive to continue to divert money to the West of Scotland.

There are some who still blame him as Enterprise Minister for failing to make sure the bid for the multi-billion pound Energy Technology Institute was not based in Aberdeen. Eventually the open competition he allowed meant that Glasgow was chosen under an SNP government to lead the ultimately failed Scottish bid instead of the Granite City, the UK's energy capital.

In the last election Mr Stephen's majority was slashed from 8,016 to 2,732 by the SNP's Maureen Watt, even though she spent much of her time helping Alex Salmond win Gordon.

But now free of the fetters of power Mr Stephen is back as a local champion. Yesterday's small act of diefiance may be the first of many and should also confirm that, contrary to rumour, he intends to fight his seat again.

But the question remains - one that may be asked of SNP Environment Secretary Richard Lochhead about Elgin bypass in his Moray constituency - is that why does power obscure an MSP or MP's need to fight for their constituents?