Your Labour candidate for Argyll & Bute

I’m hugely appreciative of the Scottish Labour leadership and local members for selecting me to stand in next year’s Scottish Parliament elections to represent the constituency of Argyll & Bute.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a resident doctor living, working and training across north Argyll, based in Oban – and I’ve loved our corner of the country for many years, having visited from a young age from where I grew up in Ayrshire. I spent a good chunk of the later part of my medical training based in Campbeltown, which is where I made my decision to move to Argyll as soon as I had the opportunity.

I previously lived in Dumfries, working there as a junior doctor, and before that, studied medicine at both St Andrews and Dundee, with time as a medical student also spent in Fort William, Inverness & Fife. Aside from my medical degree, I have qualifications in the biomedical sciences from the University of Aberdeen and University of Glasgow. Before returning to study medicine as a mature student, I previously had a career in transport and operations management in the security and logistics sectors, based at the Glasgow hub of a major multinational.

I’ve always been in close alignment with the ideals of democratic socialism, co-operation, progressive reform and feel strongly about the importance of evidence-based policy, with a particular interest in people power, grounded in local community and common sense.

It’s clear to me that Scotland desperately needs a change of direction. We’ve now seen years of managed decline, dead-ends and unfulfilled promises from the SNP, perhaps unsurprising given that they originally existed as a single-issue fringe pressure group and were never intended or set up to govern. Even longstanding SNP voters and supporters are abandoning the party in droves, as demonstrated by Labour’s landslide win in the 2024 UK general election, and numerous polls and by-elections since.

As for the other parties, most are sliding further and further into irrelevance, including the floundering ruins of what were the Scottish Conservatives – the less that is said about them, the better – and the people of Scotland know better than to waste their vote on Farage’s merry band of chancers, failed Tories and former UKIP stooges. They are merely a distraction to be ignored.

It is true, however, that people are fed up. They need and want something else. They deserve a new, fresh, dynamic Scottish Government centred on meeting their needs and delivering their desires for a future Scotland – the vision of a strong, safe, prosperous nation within a family of nations working together for universal gain. This is so essential, in an increasingly fractured world where it is clear that more than ever before, together we will stand and divided we will fall. Only Scottish Labour can and will deliver that new direction in government.

After being elected, I will therefore contribute to a Labour-led wholesale revival of Scotland and Argyll & Bute, with a fresh take on renewing our rural economy, supporting businesses both large and small, promoting sustainable tourism that works for the people of our region, and fighting to drive down the cost of living that is punishing us all, including soaring energy costs and a crisis in housing that is inflating prices across our constituency.

I will lead on reconstructing our shattered NHS before it is lost forever – a reality I am intimately aware of working on the frontline of healthcare every day, a problem particularly acute in Argyll & Bute which very much feels like an unwanted afterthought when it comes to health and social care.

Alongside my Scottish Labour colleagues I will, once and for all, end the infrastructure omnishambles that has defined the SNP government for years now, including the national embarrassment of the ferries fiasco and the seemingly never-ending Rest and Be Thankful saga. Our constituency has suffered disproportionately from this incompetence.

I can’t do any of this unless enough of you, the people of Argyll & Bute, choose to end the status quo, to give us a chance to show you that another, better way is possible. You can do that with your vote, sticking a number one against my name on your ballot paper. You won’t regret it.

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