The First Minister had wrote the following column in the Herald, published on Wednesday the 20thof December, one day prior to the election.

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For Scotland, it Must be Green

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It is a stark choice that this nation faces when it heads to the polling places tomorrow, it can be brought down to Green vs Conservative, as one of us will be in Bute House and you could even reduce it to personalities. This doesn’t help the public make a choice, however, because it loses tracks on the issues, the policies and the record of all parties. Ultimately this is a choice between two radically different, competing views for our nation. We cannot lose focus of this in the final hours of the campaign, we cannot forget what was included within the various manifestos, we cannot devolve ourselves into apathy at this late stage. This is too important a decision to not give it our full attention, because the future of all of us depends upon the count on Friday.

The Conservatives have, this time, not even hid their desire to flog our treasured National Health Service to the highest bidder, or any bidder in fact. This makes the election a decisive moment in our history, will we continue to build on what we have done for decades, both pre and post devolution, or will we throw that all away to insurance multinationals. Scotland has enough health inequalities as it currently stands, we can ill afford for these to be amplified in the near future. This is not a risk that our most vulnerable can afford and not one that I believe our nation can possibly be willing to take. We should be expanding healthcare into communities with poor access, we should be helping those who are carrying genetically linked conditions and above all we should care for the infirm in our communities. These are not political policies, but moral standards I believe every decent society should uphold.

Education is another massive area where the future of so many people hangs in the balance tomorrow. The Conservatives in their manifesto have also proposed the return of tuition fees, the infamous tax on learning. This does nothing other than make university here in Scotland more middle class and more elitist than it already is. This goes against the message that everyone should be able to achieve whatever they are capable of with just a little bit of hard work. University admission must continue to be based only on your ability to learn and have nothing at all to do with what your parents earn. Only a vote for the Scottish Greens can guarantee that this will remain to be the case, because we will never place a Conservative into Bute House as First Minister.

We will fend off this rightward extreme politics and protect our public services. From our railways, to our hospitals, our schools and our universities, the Scottish Greens will stand up for them. We shall place them at the centre of our next term in government, we shall focus on them every day to enhance the service for all. This is what you get with a Scottish Green government, as Scotland has seen for the entirety of my time in Bute House. This is why it must be Scottish Green tomorrow, if only to keep Scotland moving forward.