We grilled every Scottish party leader on their election policies

Scotland is heading to the polls on 7 May, and
ITV News has spent time on the campaign trail with all six of Scotland’s party leaders to hear their big pitches for power.

The last Holyrood elections were held in 2021. In the time since, Scotland has had three First Ministers and the UK has had three Prime Ministers. To say it has been a rocky period is putting it lightly.

The SNP, in particular, has suffered serious turbulence.

Facing questions about scandals and transparency, particularly the much publicised ferries fiasco, have all taken their toll.

John Swinney is the party’s third leader in three years but his pitch now is about stability.

“I am a dependable person. I am someone to rely upon,” he told ITV News.

But he’s defending a record of the SNP in government for almost 20 years now.

For example, at the last election his party promised every child in Scotland a free laptop with internet access. It didn’t happen.
Swinney pointed to global events, citing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the inflation that followed as factors beyond the Scottish Government’s control.

But he mocks the idea other parties can deliver a fresh start or ‘change.’

“My goodness, what a joke. Parties offering change,” he said, pointing to Labour’s decision to cut winter fuel payments shortly after winning the UK general election.

“The first thing they did was come in and take away winter fuel payments from pensioners.”

And on independence, the issue that defines his party above all else, Swinney shows no sign of stopping the push, even after the SNP’s 2024 election setback when Sturgeon had billed the vote as a ‘de facto referendum’ on the issue and the party subsequently suffered a humiliating defeat.

“I believe fundamentally in the democratic right of the people of Scotland to decide their own future,” he said.

Reform are the new kids on the block.

If the SNP represent continuity, Reform UK Scotland represent the insurgency, or, as they describe themselves, “the disrupters.”

Their Scottish leader Malcolm Offord is trying to build a distinctly Scottish version of the Farage brand.

But ITV News found some notable daylight between Offord and his London leadership on their flagship issue - immigration.

Offord isn’t the only one going off message from the boss: Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar kicked off his campaign calling for Keir Starmer to go.

The Scottish Conservatives have a similar Westminster problem after a decade of unexpected success in Scotland.

The unionist vote that consolidated around them during the independence debates is now diluted and the polls are less kind.

Leader Russell Findlay, who has served as an MSP for five years, is trying to create distance between himself and the UK Conservative government’s record.

“I’m not responsible for what the UK Government did,” he said. “But ‘Tory’ to a lot of people in Scotland has bad associations. It’s associated with things that didn’t go right for us in government.” He acknowledged it would be a problem at the doorstep.

The Scottish Greens are the only party contesting this election with co-leaders, Gillian Mackay and Ross Greer.

They were previously in a power-sharing arrangement with Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP, and are open to another such deal to push green policies into law.

Their platform includes banning horse racing, legalising and regulating drugs, and, in a break with the current direction of SNP foreign policy, refusing any cooperation with Donald Trump’s administration.

“There are other markets we should be looking at,” said Mackay, when asked about voters whose jobs depend on a good relationship with the US president. “We should be making stronger alliances with Europe.”

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton is positioning his party as a partner for coalition government but with significant caveats.

He has ruled out working with the SNP, Reform, and the Conservatives, which, as ITV News pointed out, rather narrowly leaves Labour.

“We’ll look at the arithmetic,” Cole-Hamilton said. “It would need to work for our values. But I think this country is crying out for change.”

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