Despite covering a truly enormous area, the proposed Highland region currently only consists of two current councils – the entirety of Highland, and most of Argyll and Bute. Highland Council in particular is without a doubt the biggest mockery in Scottish local government. The idea you can put Inverness, Fort William, Portree, Ullapool and Thurso in the same most local unit of government and call that “local” is laughable. In historic terms, this region covers the counties of Argyll, Caithness, Sutherland, Nairn in full, plus the bulk of the Inverness and Ross & Cromarty counties, excluding only the Western Isles. There’s also a small section of what was traditionally Moray, which was transferred by the 1973 Act.

Under that Act, the Highland Region was coterminous with what became Highland Council in 1994. Argyll and Bute on the other hand formed part of Strathclyde. From a transport links perspective, I can see the logic there. Argyll and Bute is more directly connected to the West Central Belt than to the rest of the Highlands, especially at the southern end where Bute and Dunoon have direct ferry links to Inverclyde. Demographically speaking however it’s much more like the Highlands.

Given I think that there are always certain aspects of governance that are going to need cross-body co-operation, I went with the demographic rather than infrastructure fit. Apart from the Helensburgh and Lomond area, which was historically Dunbartonshire and thus sensible to break off, it wouldn’t really have fit to stick Argyll and Bute onto the Lennox region anyway. In addition, the previous version of this project was published in January 2020, and the pandemic that followed shortly afterwards showed that it is possible to conduct council business remotely, opening an avenue for how to approach the regional council despite the vast expanse.

For this region as a whole, there are two important things to bear in mind. The first is that due to the enormous geographic extent of the area, many of the municipalities here come in substantially below the 20,000 resident target. This is precisely where flexibility is most required to achieve genuinely local government, so the threshold has actually been mostly sidelined here. I’ve nonetheless made a few changes relative to the 2020 version to try and tidy some areas up a bit.

The second is that politically speaking, the Highlands have a notably strong Independent streak at local government level. Given the electoral system suggested is a simple municipality-wide list, it’s not brilliantly easy to translate 2022 results. There are municipalities where huge amounts of the Independent vote goes to waste as candidates win far more votes than they need to be elected, which also then means parties end up over-represented. I’d expect this to be far less of a problem in reality, as a District electing twice as many councillors as the current wards do is likely to have more Independent candidates and a better split of votes between them.

The Highlands have long been an area of more political diversity than Westminster elections have let on, as evidenced by decent showings for all of the major parties. The SNP are the largest party at both levels, and although Independents win many more votes, they nearly tie for seats at municipal level with the Lib Dems due to the inability of those votes to elect multiple candidates. The Conservatives are the third largest in party terms, whilst Labour and the Greens alternate fourth and fifth between municipal (favouring Labour) and regional (favouring the Greens) levels. The Greens do have a lot of gaps in their contesting though which means a lot of their shares are more loosely estimated, so what is their best regional result nationally needs taken with a big pinch of salt. Note too that Alba get a rare councillor here, and although similarly reliant on looser estimates, come relatively narrowly shy of winning regional seats.