Interview with Daniel Hampsey, Scottish Conservative candidate in Dunoon, Argyll & Bute

Interview with Daniel Hampsey, Scottish Conservative candidate in Dunoon, Argyll & Bute

• Why a Conservative candidate in Dunoon?

I believe the Scottish Conservatives are the party of local government. We believe in strong local governments that are the representatives of local people and really use our powers for the better of people. I think in comparison to other parties in Scotland, we’ve seen centralisation under the SNP, local powers have been removed from local governments and sent to Holyrood. We don’t believe in that, we believe in local government and giving our local people a strong voice, trying to benefit our locals. We also believe of course in the responsibility of our council to work well on a decent budget, despite budget cuts from the Scottish Government; but really ensuring there’s a responsibility in the council and at the same time providing those council’s services to the best standard possible.

• What are the main issues you want to prioritise in this campaign?

That’s something that will go in my second leaflet in a couple of weeks. I’ve got a 5 point plan, 5 priorities that they could benefit Dunoon. The first one would be for me transport, which is a huge issue for Dunoon. We live in a very rural area, where to get to the mainlands such as Inverclyde or Glasgow you need to get ferries, and ferries are being a huge issue in Dunoon, we’ve seen over a decade of poor ferry services provided by central government, and that is really taking a toll on our local people, unable to access education and jobs and also on our tourism. 

The second one would be education. We believe in getting back to full-time face to face education and looking for our local recovery and supporting people’s needs and aspirations to the best extent after the pandemic which has hit our students quite significantly. That falls onto health.

Health of course is probably one of the biggest things the pandemic has affected, and COVID of course the cause for that, but it’s now taking a toll in other health services such as face to face appointments. During the pandemic we had online meetings which are a digital barrier, specially with our elderly people who had more trouble to access online health.

The roads of course as well. Roads are something the local government is fully responsible for and being in a rural area they’re important and in comparison with other councils I would say that we have done a better job but at the same time there’s still a lot of work to get done. 

But of course I think the main thing would be economic development, supporting our local businesses financially and actually trying to take advantage of Dunoon’s unique points, one of the main things I would say is tourism. We’re really trying to push that to ensure more tourism and more staycation as we’ve seen during the pandemic. 

• Why are the Scottish Conservatives the best alternative to the SNP and Labour?

As I said in the first one, I believe the Scottish Conservatives are the main party for local government, we really stand up for that local power and local people. In recent years, the SNP have centralised a lot of local government powers. In a wider perspective, before 2013 the police was more regionalised such as Strathclyde Police but the SNP stopped that; the benefit of local government is that we understand the locals and the opportunities that they have and we understand the specific needs in that council area, and it’s something that central government simply cannot understand, because the people that know what needs to get done in our communities is the people that ultimately live here and experience different issues. Obviously the Scottish Conservatives have been, in terms of an alternative, in coalition in Argyll & Bute for the past 5 years doing a great job. We are definitely the best party for local government.