A huge thank you to everyone across the Highlands who supported or volunteered in the campaigns, as well as our excellent candidates who fought so hard to ensure we enjoyed electoral success on Thursday. You did an excellent job.
Against all expectations and the pundits’ predictions, we achieved the best ever Scottish Conservative and Unionist result in a Scottish Parliamentary election, winning over 100,000 more votes across Scotland from our previous best result in 2016. This was in stark contrast to both Labour and the Liberal Democrats, who plummeted to their worst ever results, their reward for failing to take on the SNP over its 15 years of failure.
In the Highlands and Islands Regional List we secured four MSPs, a fantastic result which underlines the reality that over 50% of those who voted in this election supported Unionist parties rather than the destructive separatism that the SNP is fixated upon. The stand-out result locally was the 68% increase in the total vote for the Scottish Conservatives in Inverness and Nairn, which saw Edward Mountain achieve a tally of 12,679 votes, a swing of 7.7% away from the SNP.
Sturgeon did not get the SNP majority that the nationalists had arrogantly assumed was theirs, and the Scottish people have once again demonstrated that the majority is against separation and the destruction of the Union. It is now time for Sturgeon to drop the constitutional obsession that is causing so much harm to Scotland, and time to actually get on with the day job of COVID recovery, and undoing the fifteen years of failure that the SNP has been responsible for. Scotland must rebuild and not be distracted.
