Alex Cole-Hamilton’s bid to become Scotland’s First Minister was never going to end in success, unfortunately. It was important that he did it though. The MSPs in the Chamber were not his audience. That snippet on Reporting Scotland where he got the chance to be on the record, speaking to the people of Scotland, was an important part in Liberal Democrats setting out our stall.  Hope, he said, was at the heart of everything the Scottish Liberal Democrats stood for as he outlined our vision for better healthcare, education and giving power back to communities.

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I offer my candidacy for the office of First Minister of Scotland. I do so because, although the governing party might have elected to forgo any democratic process to test the ideas or motivations of its candidate, I do not think that Parliament should.

I do this more in hope than in expectation, but that hope among Liberal Democrats is growing. That hope has been self-evident in last week’s English local election results, which saw us overhaul the Conservative Party for the first time in a generation; in Scottish opinion polls, which consistently show that support for us is growing significantly and that Parliament is set to receive many more Liberal MSPs; and in council election results the length and breadth of Scotland. The Liberal revival is well and truly under way.

As the outgoing First Minister just said, this week we commemorate a quarter century of our reconvened Scottish Parliament. In the weeks following his installation as Deputy First Minister in 1999, my predecessor as leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats at that time, Jim Wallace, said:

“Government involves hard choices, and broad responsibilities, and there are inevitably times when the comfort zone of easy opposition beckons.”

I have spent enough time in opposition watching Government ministers make poor decisions that make the lives of our constituents poorer still, and so I stand today.

Those were simpler times. People could see their general practitioner at the first time of asking, and their dentist still offered national health service care. Scottish education was among the best in the world, and all the ferries worked. It was so much easier to rent somewhere to live or to buy a first home. Our economy was growing, and business thrived. However, for nearly 20 years, the Scottish National Party has been ignoring the people who do most of the heavy lifting in our society. People are working harder, but they feel as if they are falling further behind and are being taken for granted.

We need ministers who will not make empty promises, but who will get the basics right. We need new hope in our politics, and hope is at the heart of everything that the Scottish Liberal Democrats stand for. We want to create world-class mental health services by taxing the social media giants that cause so much of the problem. That will also help to get people faster access to their GP, and we will make sure that people can see an NHS dentist, too.

We will lift up Scottish education again by tackling the violence in our schools, with more teachers and more in-class support. We will reduce bills and tackle climate change by rolling out a national insulation programme, and we will get the Government-owned water company to clean up its act and stop filling our rivers and beaches with sewage.

We want to offer a fair deal for our communities by actually giving power away from politicians and back to local people. We want to answer the housing emergency by building more homes, encouraging investor confidence and answering the needs of tenants and homeowners alike, and we want to connect our communities with trains, buses and ferries that people can depend on.

When this Parliament was reconvened, some of the challenges that we now face would have seemed almost inconceivable—the climate emergency, the war in continental Europe, long Covid, cyberattacks on our health service and the insidious reach of abused technology. Those challenges require a response that is rooted not in the divisions of the past 17 years but in co-operation here and beyond our borders. That is why Liberal Democrats want to put Scotland at the heart of a reformed Britain and to fix our broken relationship with Europe.

The outcome of this election is already decided—I understand that—but if our relatively new democracy is about anything, it is about the exchange of ideas and competing visions of what our country can become. I humbly submit my candidacy for First Minister and, with it, a Liberal vision for the future of Scotland.