Alex Cole-Hamilton believes his party can win seats directly from the SNP at the Holyrood election.
Speaking on the Scotland Tonight: Meet the Leaders series, he said the Scottish Liberal Democrats had the beating of the SNP in ten constituencies.
Cole-Hamilton said the Lib Dems’ pitch to voters was built around a sense that Scotland’s potential was going unfulfilled.
“Scotland’s got so much going for it, but right now it just feels like nothing’s working,” he said.
“People are tired and frustrated, they’ve been let down by the other parties, and we think they deserve better than that. But it needs to be a vision with change, with fairness in its heart.”
The party won just four seats at the last Holyrood election – its worst ever result – and current polling has it in sixth place.
Cole-Hamilton pointed to the UK general election as evidence that polls could be wrong, noting that the Liberal Democrats won 72 MPs across the UK, trebled their seats in Scotland and overtook the Scottish Conservatives.
“The polls during the general election didn’t point to us having the best night in 100 years for Liberals, which we did,” he said.
He also pointed to the defection of former Conservative MSP Jamie Greene to the Liberal Democrats as a signal of momentum. “It was the only defection of a political party to another political party in the parliament this term,” he said. “It shows that we’re back.”
Healthcare
Cole-Hamilton said the NHS crisis could be unlocked by investing in social care.
“On any given night, 2,000 Scots are stuck in our hospitals well enough to go home, but too frail to do so without a care package.
“That is causing a care bottleneck which sees cancelled operations, ambulances stacking up outside A&E, not because of a deficiency of care in our hospitals, but there is just no capacity, no free beds to receive these people.”
He argued the policy would ultimately save money rather than cost it.
“It costs the NHS £1.3m a day to keep those 2,000 Scots in hospital when they don’t need or want to be there. It costs half as much to put them in a care home.”
When pressed on what the upfront cost would be, Cole-Hamilton said it was a “spend to save” agenda focused on increasing carer wages and reserving key worker housing for social care staff.
He also said 800,000 Scots currently on NHS waiting lists were holding the economy back. “Many of them can’t work at the moment. So all of this actually is a massive investment agenda, it’s how we pay for a lot of the other things we want to do.”
The economy
On the projected £5bn budget black hole facing Scotland by the end of the decade, Cole-Hamilton said he did not believe cuts would be necessary.
“If there are three words that represent the economic drag in Scotland right now, they are these, planning, skills and housing,” he said, arguing that streamlining planning approvals, improving skills provision, and building more homes would drive growth.
He also called for Scotland to “fix our broken relationship with Europe” through bespoke customs union and youth mobility agreements.
Welfare
Responding to a viewer question about welfare spending, Cole-Hamilton said the projected rise to one million disability benefit claimants by the end of the next parliament was not sustainable but argued that many people on benefits wanted to work.
“I don’t think a lot of those people want to be on welfare. A lot of them want to be supported, whether that’s through access to childcare so they can take up training opportunities, or whether that’s working with people with disabilities to mitigate working environments.”
He drew on his background as a youth worker to make the case.
“I was a youth worker for 19 years, and I used to work with lots of people, particularly facing disability or other life challenges, who desperately want to be supported back into training, back into employment. That’s what welfare should be all about.”
Energy
On North Sea oil and gas, Cole-Hamilton said each case for new extraction should be assessed individually against a climate change test.
“If it makes more environmental sense to use the oil that’s in the North Sea, and remember just transition is happening, but if it makes more sense to do it and meet our net zero targets as opposed to importing oil, then we need to look at each of them on its merits,” he said.
He also said Scotland was currently paying wind farms £2bn a year not to put power into the grid and argued the electricity grid needed to be made ready to make better use of renewable energy.
Profile
Cole-Hamilton was also asked about a recent Ipsos poll, which found 36% of people did not know who he was, making him the least recognised of the six party leaders.
He said he was “not concerned in the slightest,” adding: “I want to get to know the voters, and I do that more than any other political leader in this country, door by door and street by street. I knock thousands of doors every month.”
He declined to put a number on how many seats the party would win, saying: “I’m not going to put a ceiling on our ambition.”
He added that wherever voters were in Scotland, a vote for the Liberal Democrats on the regional ballot paper would elect an MSP who would “fight for you and your community.”
Scotland Tonight: Meet the Leaders continues next Thursday, April 9.
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