ANALYSIS: Holyrood election 2026 – Caithness, Sutherland and Ross
Scotland is facing its most decisive election in a generation and nowhere is that more true than in the Highlands with three of the most interesting races in the country.
May’s Scottish parliament election will see a major changing of the guard, with 39 MSPs standing down including some of its most experienced members.
In August, Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes decided to stand down in Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch and Fergus Ewing chose to go it alone in Inverness and Nairn – instantly both seats became competitive.
Then with polling suggesting the Liberal Democrats are ahead in Caithness, Sutherland and Ross, the political tide may be turning.
Once safe seats for the SNP are no longer secure as opposition parties sense blood in the political waters and are making a determined drive to win.
The candidates on the ballot paper so far
No Highland constituency has been more vocal about its dissatisfaction with government – local or national – than Caithness, Sutherland and Ross.
One way to recognise if a party is determined to target and win a seat in parliament is when they announce their candidate and what level of support they get from their parties.
There are four candidates running for the seat at the moment: David Green (Liberal Democrats), Eva Kestner (Labour Party), Elaine Kirby (Conservative and Unionist Party) and Maree Todd (Scottish National Party).
Ms Todd and Ms Kestner were both confirmed in May, and Ms Kirby in June. Mr Green started running in April 2024 – more than two years before the election.
One of the battleground issues is whether the opposition parties can convince voters that they have been heard, that the issues they live with will be addressed.
That is where the support comes into play and Labour and the Liberal Democrats have been hitting the SNP hard on one issue above all in the far north – maternity services.
Jackie Baillie – deputy Scottish Labour leader and by any count one of the most important and effective parliamentarians – made the trip to Caithness in the autumn.
As her party’s health spokeswoman, she put Caithness front and centre during a Scottish parliament debate on maternity and neonatal services.
That shone a light on Ms Kestner, who while well respected inside Labour circles was hampered by revelations at the general election that she was a Croydon councillor living in London.
At that Holyrood debate on maternity, health secretary Neil Gray said that “Maree Todd and Emma Roddick have raised their own concerns about the views of women in Caithness”.
U-turn on maternity
He went on to back a LibDem amendment to Ms Baillie’s motion to commission an independent review of maternity services in Caithness – and then the government U-turned.
Having the minister for sport as well as drugs and alcohol policy in Ms Todd on the ballot should get the SNP voters out – but she had previously also been women’s health minister too.
As a serving minister in the Scottish Government, that means that, despite the sticky issue of maternity services in her constituency, Ms Todd must accept the government stance on the subject.
The government has been warned over and over again that mums-to-be having to travel from Caithness to Inverness to give birth in over 90 per cent of cases was unacceptable to voters.
To those we have spoken to, both on and off the record, one feeling more than any other comes through – that it is an affront to decency and it is “just not right”.
So that attempt by the government to deal with Caithness maternity circled the drain for a month and half before finally being flushed out with a Freedom of Information request that confirmed a taskforce review, led by an SNP minister, would go ahead rather than a separate, independent review into local maternity services which had been promised.
That is a high risk game to play after LibDem MP Jamie Stone won the Westminster seat with the biggest majority of his career against one of the best SNP candidates the party has fielded in the north in Lucy Beattie.
Can LibDems take a major scalp?
All the while the LibDems have been knocking on doors and campaigning relentlessly – our inbox, freighted with unused press releases as there are just too many, is evidence of that.
So what of the semi-newcomer Mr Green, who learnt his politics working for Charles Kennedy?
He has tread a steady path, hitting many of the issues people care about, but no matter how many people he has spoken to – the real test comes in the months up to the election.
Mr Green has made contact with businesses and organisations, but how this really translates into what would be a major scalp for the party remains unknown.
He may be polling ahead at the moment but it is impossible to rely on polls in the Highlands – as the authoritative pollster John Curtice remarked, the “Highlands is in and of itself”.
But for the first time since Rob Gibson won the seat for the SNP back in 2011, there is a chance it could change hands.
Ms Kirby’s campaign has yet to take flight but, as with Labour, the chances of the Conservatives winning in the far north remains remote – at least on recent election returns.
All will be revealed after Thursday, May 7, when we all go to the only poll that matters.
