Cole-Hamilton stands for First Minister 

Speaking in the Scottish Parliament as he stood for the office of First Minister, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP said: 

“Elections are a time of choosing. 

“The Scottish election last week represented a massive leap forward for the Scottish Liberal Democrats. 

“When looking at the constituency map of Scotland, we are the second party of Scotland. We’ve won in places that we have never, ever won before. It was the best result for my party in nearly 20 years. 

“As much as I respect John Swinney, he has also known regression in his time as party leader of the SNP. He has only gone backwards in his efforts and experienced electoral decline. 

“And as the old parliament rose and we were gavelled out of session, he could not have been clearer. He stated, the whole country to hear, that if he was to achieve the mandate necessary to go about calling for a second independence referendum, then he needed the public at large to award his party with an overall majority. 

“He fell well short of that, and in large part it was because of Liberal Democrat gains in the villages and towns of this country that he was rendered unable to deliver what he asked the people to give him. 

“As such, I ask that we as a parliament now lay those divisive issues aside and instead, focus on the instructions that the people who sent us to this place have been manifestly clear that they want us to focus on. 

“Whether that is the crisis in our health service, which is not a crisis in our hospitals but actually borne of the fact that there is such a paucity of social care in our communities that on any given night, 2,000 of our fellow Scots are stuck in hospital. 

“We want to focus on lifting up Scottish education. Far too many of our teachers, primary and secondary level, are assaulted on a daily basis in their place of work. We want to support them by taking mobile phones out of classrooms and putting 2,000 pupil support assistants in. 

“We want to drive down the cost of living by instructing an immediate programme of emergency home insulation to make sure that the coldest homes in Scotland, those most at risk of fuel poverty, are ready for that increase in the fuel price cap. 

“And we need to get Scotland moving again. The early days of this election campaign were bedevilled by a ferries crisis that brought our island and our coastal communities to their knees. 

“For all of these reasons, elections are about choosing. We offer a vision of hope and of change with fairness at its heart, and I humbly submit my candidacy for First Minister.”