Candidate Name

Kris Keane

Rooted in compassion and community solidarity, I am standing to put people before profit. I am fighting for an independent Scotland that champions the dignity of working people, protects our vital public services, and builds a peaceful, sustainable future for all.

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Manifesto Outline

Click on a topic below to read the detailed action plan.

🏛️ Protecting Public Services

A truly compassionate society is measured by how it cares for all its people, not by the accumulated wealth of a few. Our public services are the bedrock of our communities, built on the solidarity of working people and essential for our collective well-being. To protect these institutions from endless austerity and creeping privatisation, we must take mindful stewardship of our resources. By utilising the powers of our parliament—and ultimately the full powers of an independent Scotland—we can ensure our shared wealth is invested directly into the common good, creating a society that prioritizes human dignity over profit.

  • Utilise Tax-Raising Powers: Boldly use the Scottish Parliament's existing tax-raising powers to actively invest in and grow our vital public services, ensuring they meet the needs of every community.
  • Progressive Property Tax: Urgently abolish the regressive Council Tax and replace it with a much fairer, progressive property tax system that shifts the financial burden away from working households.
  • Preemptive Investment: Commit to forward-thinking funding models—investing in our communities now to prevent social hardship and avoid far costlier crises further down the road.
  • Public Hands, Fair Pay: Keep public services fully in public ownership, halting all outsourcing while guaranteeing fair pay, strong union recognition, and safe conditions for the workers who keep our country running.
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🤝 Supporting Public Sector Staff

A hospital cannot heal, a school cannot teach, and a community cannot thrive without the dedicated human beings who breathe life into our public services. Recognising our deep interconnectedness means understanding that every worker is essential. We must reject the divisive, false distinction between "frontline" heroes and "back-office" staff; from nurses and teachers to cleaners, administrators, and IT technicians, every role is a vital thread in the fabric of our society. However, years of managed decline, excessive workloads, and eroding pay relative to the private sector have manufactured a severe recruitment and retention crisis. As we build a fairer, independent Scotland, we must restore the dignity of public service by treating our workforce not as a corporate expense to be minimized, but as our most valuable asset.

  • Value Every Worker: End the harmful rhetoric that devalues essential support and administrative staff. Guarantee that workplace protections, career development, and respect apply equally across all departments, acknowledging that the whole system relies on every part.
  • Restore Pay Parity: Implement an immediate, comprehensive review of public sector pay and conditions to reverse years of real-terms cuts, ensuring our wages are highly competitive with the private sector to actively resolve the recruitment crisis.
  • Technology for the Workers: Mandate that the integration of Artificial Intelligence and new technologies is negotiated directly with trade unions. AI must be utilised to reduce burnout, improve public services, and pave the way for a shorter working week — never used as an excuse to slash jobs or automate away livelihoods.
  • Empower Collective Bargaining: Strengthen trade union rights across the public sector, ensuring workers have a powerful, democratic voice in shaping their working environments and the future of the services they deliver.
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💷 Tackling the Cost of Living

The cost of living crisis is not a natural disaster; it is a symptom of an economic system that extracts wealth from working people to inflate corporate profits. True peace and community harmony are impossible when families are forced to choose between heating their homes and feeding their children. Driven by a deep commitment to social justice and the belief that basic needs are fundamental human rights, we must act decisively. By embracing sustainable, collective solutions and ultimately by utilising the full economic powers of an independent Scotland, we can build a compassionate economy that eradicates poverty, ends the exploitation of insecure labour, and guarantees economic dignity for everyone.

  • Accessible & Affordable Transport: Drastically reduce fares and expand local public transport networks. Moving towards a fully publicly-owned, affordable transit system will liberate communities from soaring fossil fuel prices while actively reducing our carbon footprint.
  • Inflation-Proof Wages: Champion a statutory Real Living Wage that is firmly pegged to inflation, ensuring that the purchasing power of workers is protected and the burden of economic instability never falls on the working class.
  • End Exploitative Labour: Eradicate the scourge of insecure work by banning zero-hour contracts and tackling under-employment, guaranteeing workers the right to predictable, secure hours and a stable income.
  • Eradicate Child Poverty: Radically strengthen our social safety net by expanding the Scottish Child Payment and ensuring universal access to fundamental human needs—like nutritious food, clean water, and warm shelter—so no child is left behind.
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🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scottish Independence

Scottish independence is not about looking backward to romanticised battles of the past, nor is it about drawing lines between ourselves and our neighbours. Independence is simply the natural expression of a community taking peaceful, democratic responsibility for its own future. It is about securing the levers of power needed to harness our own abundant resources and build a fairer, more sustainable society in our own way. My vision for independence is rooted in civic inclusion—a welcoming home for everyone who chooses to live here. Scotland will achieve this not through cultural division, but by demonstrating undeniable competence in our governance, building deep trust, and engaging in respectful, continuous dialogue with all voters to forge a shared vision for our country.

  • A Civic and Inclusive Nation: Guarantee that an independent Scotland is defined by shared community, not background. Everyone who chooses to make Scotland their home is a valued citizen with an equal voice in shaping our society.
  • A Voice for Global Peace: Commit to a principled, pacifist role on the world stage. An independent Scotland will be a beacon for diplomacy and climate justice, beginning with the immediate and safe removal of Trident nuclear weapons from our waters.
  • Harnessing Local Wealth: Utilise the full economic powers of independence to ensure the wealth generated by Scotland's vast natural and renewable resources is retained locally, rather than extracted, to directly fund our public services and communities.
  • Progress Through Governance and Dialogue: Build the majority for independence through the power of good example. We should focus on delivering exceptional, progressive governance today while actively reaching out to listen and collaborate with all voters to build a united path forward.
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🌍 Protecting the Environment

The climate emergency is a symptom of an economic system that aggressively exploits both people and the planet for short-term corporate profit. As mindful stewards of Scotland's immense natural wealth, we have a moral obligation to act decisively. By utilising the full powers of an independent Scotland to bring our energy and transport networks into public hands, we can orchestrate a "just transition" — one that decarbonises our society, protects workers' livelihoods, and builds an economy rooted in ecological balance rather than endless extraction.

  • A Publicly-Owned Green Grid: Rapidly phase out fossil fuel dependence by investing massively in Scotland’s abundant wind and solar potential, alongside advanced battery storage. This new energy infrastructure must be publicly owned so the benefits flow to our communities, not private shareholders.
  • A Just Transition for Homes and Transport: Implement a fair, fully-supported phased transition to electric vehicles and energy-efficient heat pumps. We must ensure comprehensive government grants are available so that working households are never left to shoulder the upfront costs of going green.
  • Public Transport as the Default: Bring all local bus and rail services into full public ownership. Backed by historic levels of investment, make reliable, green public transport the cheapest, most accessible, and default option for everyday travel.
  • Connecting Communities, Replacing Flights: Champion the development of a publicly-owned high-speed rail network connecting Scotland seamlessly to England and the European continent, providing a fast, affordable, and low-carbon alternative to heavily polluting short-haul air travel.
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🕊️ International Solidarity & Peace

Our solidarity cannot end at our national borders. The suffering of people anywhere is a tragedy for people everywhere. We must absolutely reject the imperialism, militarism, and corporate greed that drive global conflicts. An independent Scotland must refuse to be complicit in the machinery of war, using our voice on the world stage entirely to champion human rights, uphold international law, and provide a safe haven for those fleeing violence.

  • Solidarity with Gaza: Stand in unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people by demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the illegal occupation. We must fiercely condemn the collective punishment of civilians and support international efforts to secure a just, lasting peace.
  • End the Arms Trade: Ban any public funding, grants, or enterprise subsidies from the Scottish Government going to international arms manufacturers. We must transition these highly skilled engineering jobs into the renewable energy sector, ensuring Scottish workers are building a sustainable future, not weapons of war.
  • A Nuclear-Free Nation: Commit to the immediate, safe, and permanent removal of Trident nuclear weapons from the Clyde. We refuse to harbour weapons of mass destruction that exist solely to threaten the annihilation of millions of lives.
  • Championing Refugees: Replace the cruelty of the current immigration system with a foreign policy based on profound compassion. We will proudly uphold our legal and moral obligations to welcome refugees fleeing war and persecution, providing them with safety, dignity, and the right to work.
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🗳️ Empowering Local Government

True democracy thrives when decisions are made as close as possible to the people they affect. However, Scotland currently has some of the largest and most centralised local authorities in Europe, leaving many communities feeling disconnected from the distant bodies that govern them. Compounding this democratic deficit, years of severe underfunding from Holyrood have pushed our councils to the brink of financial collapse, forcing devastating cuts to the local services we all rely on. To build a society genuinely rooted in solidarity and community empowerment, we must reverse this trend. We need to revitalise local democracy, returning power, resources, and direct accountability back to the neighbourhoods and towns where people actually live and work.

  • Genuinely Local Councils: Initiate a comprehensive review of existing council boundaries with the explicit goal of creating smaller, more localised authorities that foster deeper civic engagement and true democratic accountability.
  • Fair Resourcing and Financial Autonomy: End the financial starvation of our communities by guaranteeing increased, sustainable funding from the Scottish Government, while simultaneously granting councils greater localised control over their own financial revenues.
  • Return Powers to Communities: Reverse the centralisation of power by devolving key decision-making capabilities back to local councils, trusting communities to govern their own unique needs and priorities.
  • Direct Democratic Control: End the outsourcing of civic responsibility by bringing Arm's Length External Organisations and Integration Joint Boards back under the direct, transparent, and democratic control of elected local councils.
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🏥 Defending Our NHS

The National Health Service is our greatest achievement of collective compassion—a concrete commitment that healthcare is a fundamental human right, not a commodity. Yet, today, our NHS is severely underfunded and buckling under the weight of a broken social safety net. For too long, it has been treated as the provider of last resort, forced to pick up the pieces of devastating cuts to addiction support, housing, education, and community services. To truly heal our health service, we cannot simply treat the symptoms; we must address the root causes of illness through systemic solidarity, preventative care, and unwavering support for the workers who hold the system together.

  • Proactive, Preventative Care: Shift our healthcare model from reactive crisis management to preventative healing by massively reinvesting in proactive public health and mental health initiatives, alongside fully restored community addiction services.
  • End Delayed Discharges: Deliver impactful improvement for NHS capacity by resourcing local social care. This will allow medically fit patients to return to their communities safely and immediately, freeing up vital hospital beds.
  • Respect the Workforce: Fix the chronic understaffing crisis through comprehensive, long-term workforce planning and radical pay reform. We must pay our healthcare workers their true value to stop the devastating drain of talent and end reliance on expensive private agencies.
  • Holistic System Funding: Recognise that funding the NHS means funding society. We will end the chronic underfunding of the health service while simultaneously investing in the wider public services—like housing and education—that keep our communities healthy in the first place.
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🤲 Reforming Social Care

How we care for our elders and most vulnerable citizens is the truest reflection of our society's soul. For too long, social care has been treated as a source of private extraction rather than a profound social responsibility, leading to compromised care and the severe exploitation of the workers who provide it. Driven by a fundamental belief in human dignity and collective compassion, we must entirely transform this vital sector. By permanently removing the profit motive and integrating care seamlessly with our NHS, we can build a system that honors our aging population and treats every single care worker with the profound respect and security they deserve.

  • A Non-Profit National Care Service: Kick the profit motive out of care by establishing a comprehensive National Care Service. This framework will guarantee strict, high-quality national standards while ensuring services are democratically run at the community level by empowered local councils and genuine non-profit organisations.
  • Sectoral Collective Bargaining: Institute immediate sectoral collective bargaining for all social care workers. By driving up pay and improving working conditions, we will end the staffing crisis and build a resilient, highly valued workforce capable of meeting the complex needs of our aging population.
  • End Migrant Worker Exploitation: Eradicate the systemic racism and disgraceful exploitation of migrant care workers. We will implement rigorous regulatory oversight to ensure all workers, regardless of their background or origin, are guaranteed fair treatment, equal pay, and absolute protection from predatory employment practices.
  • Seamless Health and Care Integration: Build a genuinely integrated health and social care system through a program of insourcing. By removing private shareholders from the equation, we ensure that every penny of public money is spent directly on providing seamless, dignified care from the home to the hospital.
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📚 Investing in Education

Education is the most profound expression of our hope for the future. Funding education is never a burden — it is the ultimate preventative investment. By nurturing every individual's potential from their very first days, we build resilience, prevent future inequalities, and lay the foundation for a peaceful, cohesive society. To guarantee every person in Scotland the best possible start in life, we must ensure our entire education system — from early years through to our colleges and universities — is universally accessible, fully funded, and deeply valued.

  • Resourcing Local Learning: Guarantee that local councils are sustainably and adequately funded by the Scottish Government so they can properly resource our schools, protect vital local libraries, and ensure every child learns in an inspiring environment.
  • Fully Supported Classrooms: Recognise that teachers cannot do it alone. We must urgently increase funding to guarantee proper levels of Additional Support Needs (ASN) and classroom support staff, ensuring that every child receives compassionate, individualised attention.
  • Reinvesting in Colleges: Reverse the damaging cuts to our Further Education sector. By massively reinvesting in our colleges, we will rebuild the engine of practical skills training, support lifelong learning, and provide a robust, accessible pathway to university for all.
  • Sustainable Higher Education: Address the chronic underfunding that currently leaves Scottish universities operating at a financial deficit when teaching home students. We must establish a sustainable, publicly-backed funding model that protects free tuition without forcing institutions to rely precariously on fluctuating numbers of international students.
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⚡ Public Water & Energy

Water and energy are not commodities to be traded for private profit; they are the fundamental lifeblood of our communities and the natural gifts of our environment. Access to clean water and a warm home must be guaranteed as absolute human rights. For too long, the energy market has allowed corporate shareholders to extract vast wealth from Scotland's natural resources while leaving working people to bear the burden of soaring bills. By defending our existing public utilities and boldly establishing a publicly-owned energy sector, we can harness our nation's immense renewable wealth to serve the common good, not the corporate bottom line.

  • In-House Expertise for Scottish Water: Halt the increasing reliance on private contractors within Scottish Water. Bring outsourced work back in-house, ensuring that the stewardship of our water is managed by direct, public employees with secure, unionised jobs and fair conditions.
  • Renewing Infrastructure, Creating Jobs: Launch a massive, publicly-funded program to upgrade our aging water and energy networks. This essential maintenance is an investment in our future that will simultaneously create thousands of highly skilled, secure green jobs across the country.
  • A State-Owned Energy Company: Establish a fully state-owned national energy company to harness Scotland’s vast renewable potential. By cutting out private shareholders, 100% of the operating profits will be retained and reinvested directly into lowering household bills, upgrading grid infrastructure, and funding nationwide home insulation programs.
  • A Genuine Just Transition: Accelerate our shift away from fossil fuels toward a resilient grid powered by wind, solar, and advanced battery storage. Guarantee a true "just transition," ensuring the energy workers and communities who powered our past are fully supported, retrained, and prioritised in the sustainable economy of our future.
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🏘️ Affordable Housing

A home is much more than just a physical structure; it is the vital sanctuary from which we build our lives, raise our families, and contribute to our communities. By allowing basic shelter to be treated as a speculative asset for private wealth extraction, we have plunged Scotland into a devastating housing emergency. True social justice requires that everyone has access to a safe, warm, and secure place to live. To eradicate homelessness and provide absolute security for working people, we must radically intervene in the broken housing market and commit to the largest expansion of public housing in generations.

  • Mass Public Building: Declare a national mobilisation to build at least 16,000 new homes every single year for the next five years. We must proudly return to the mass construction of high-quality, publicly-owned social housing to permanently break the back of this crisis.
  • Reclaiming Our Communities: Increase direct capital funding to local councils and genuine non-profit social landlords, empowering them to buy back former public housing, convert unused commercial buildings, and bring Scotland's thousands of empty homes back into immediate public use.
  • People Over Profit: Firmly reject extractive, private "build-to-rent" corporate schemes that trap working families in a cycle of extortionate rents and precarious tenancies. Public land and public money must be used exclusively to build permanent, affordable social housing.
  • Future-Proof and Accessible Homes: Launch a comprehensive, state-funded retrofitting program to vastly improve the energy efficiency of our existing housing stock. We must ensure every home is cheap to heat and environmentally sustainable.
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🌍 Welcoming Migrant Workers

In a truly interconnected world, our strength lies in our absolute solidarity with working people, regardless of where they were born. Scotland’s most vital institutions — especially our NHS and social care sectors — simply would not function without the immense, dedicated contributions of migrant workers. Yet, these essential members of our community are too often subjected to unacceptable racism from the very people they serve, and are trapped in precarious employment, terrified that speaking out against poor conditions could jeopardise their immigration status. Without the vitality and skills of new Scots, our country faces a future of severe labour shortages and economic stagnation. As we build an independent nation, we must dismantle the cruelty of the Westminster "hostile environment" and create a compassionate society that treats migrant workers not as disposable economic units, but as equal, valued neighbours.

  • Zero Tolerance for Racism: Implement strict, enforceable protocols across all health, care, and public service settings to fiercely protect migrant staff from racial abuse by service users, guaranteeing that management will always back their workers.
  • End the Fear of Deportation: Advocate for robust whistleblower protections and the decoupling of workplace rights from immigration status. No worker should ever have to endure unsafe conditions, wage theft, or exploitation because they fear reporting it will lead to deportation.
  • A Humane, Tailored Immigration System: Use the powers of an independent Scotland to design a welcoming, needs-based immigration system that actively invites the people we need to resolve our critical demographic and skills shortages, offering them a secure, permanent home.
  • Equal Rights and Union Representation: Guarantee that all migrant workers possess the exact same employment rights, access to public funds, and trade union protections as domestic workers from their very first day in Scotland, ensuring they are empowered to collectively bargain for their worth.
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🌈 Championing Equality for All

True liberation is collective; a society rooted in genuine compassion and solidarity understands that none of us are free until all of us are free. Equality is not a passive ideal, but an active, daily commitment to dismantling the systemic barriers that hold people back. We must build a country where every single person — regardless of their gender, race, sexuality, age, or ability — is provided with the resources, respect, and absolute safety required to live their best, most authentic life. In an independent Scotland, our greatest strength will be our diversity, and our government must be a fierce shield for the rights of all marginalised communities.

  • Smashing Systemic Barriers: Actively dismantle the structural inequalities that disproportionately impact women and ethnically diverse communities. Fight for absolute economic justice by closing the gender pay gap, eradicating workplace discrimination, and rooting out systemic racism across our justice, education, and health systems.
  • Empowering Disabled People: Embed the social model of disability into all levels of government decision-making. Guarantee fully funded support for independent living, universally accessible public spaces and transport, and the total removal of societal barriers that prevent disabled people from participating fully and equally.
  • LGBT+ Liberation and Safety: Stand in unwavering solidarity with the LGBT+ community. I will champion policies that protect individuals from hate crimes, ensure timely, affirming, and localised healthcare for trans and non-binary people, and celebrate love and identity in all its forms without condition.
  • Intergenerational Solidarity: Build a society that honours and supports every stage of the human experience. We will guarantee our older citizens can age with warmth, dignity, and absolute financial security, while empowering our young people with well-funded youth services, secure housing, and a powerful, democratic voice in shaping their own future.
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🚓 Community Policing & Safety

True peace in our communities is not achieved through force, but through mutual respect, social harmony, and ensuring everyone's basic needs are met. When we slash funding for youth work, education, and social care, we abandon people to poverty and despair — the true root causes of crime. Currently, our police and civilian staff are bearing the brunt of these systemic failures, facing completely unsustainable workloads as they are forced to act as the emergency responders for a broken social safety net. To build genuinely safe neighbourhoods, we must recognise our profound interconnectedness and return to the foundational principle of policing by consent, treating community safety as a social responsibility rather than just a matter of law enforcement.

  • Tackling the Root Causes: Acknowledge that cuts to public services directly fuel desperation and crime. Reverse the devastating defunding of youth work, community centers, and social work, recognising that investing in these areas is the most effective and humane form of crime prevention.
  • Relieving the Burden on Staff: Address the crushing workloads experienced by police officers and civilian staff. By properly funding dedicated mental health and addiction services, we will stop forcing police officers to act as a substitute for healthcare professionals, protecting their well-being and allowing them to focus on genuine community safety.
  • Policing by Consent: Shift the operational focus back to deeply embedded, localised community policing. We will prioritise building trust, transparency, and continuous dialogue between officers and the neighbourhoods they serve, ensuring that safety is always built on mutual respect and cooperation, never through heavy-handed escalation.
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