Marc Wilkinson is standing in Edinburgh Southern and represents the Edinburgh & East Lothian People party.
He told The Edinburgh Reporter that he has been working “like a horse” during this election campaign.
He launched a TikTok account and within four days he had 16,000 views. But he also forwarded to us his five minute campaign speech which he used at recent hustings.
This is his speech in full which you can also watch on YouTube here.
FIVE MINUTE HUSTINGS SPEECH
Good evening.
How despondent, how disillusioned, how depressed are you?
I am hoping to bring you a light shining at the end of the dark long tunnel we all find ourselves in.
I’m Marc Wilkinson, standing with your new local political party EDINBURGH & EAST LOTHIAN PEOPLE.
Thank you to Reverand Ian Gilmour for inviting me and to his team for organising this hustings and thank you to so many of you for being here tonight.
We are standing on the Regional List. It is important for everyone to know that we only need around 25K votes out of a total confirmed electorate of over 564K for us to secure one Regional MSP.
We are starting a revolution here in Edinburgh to remove the mechanism which allows billionaires to influence politicians.
Before I start, everyone needs to know the name Christopher Harborne. He is the defence billionaire who made a record-breaking donation to an individual MP, Boris Johnson, of ONE MILLION pounds in November 2022. Coincidentally, within three months his defence business QinetiQ secured an EIGHTY MILLION POUND MOD defence contract for the UKRAINE WAR.
In, August 2025 Harborne donated NINE MILLION POUNDS to REFORM UK. Presumably REFORM have been burning his cash like there’s no tomorrow because 4 months later he donated a further THREE MILLION POUNDS.
Additionally, as revealed on the front page of today’s Guardian he made an undeclared personal donation of FIVE MILLION to Nigel Farage in 2024.
We MUST all be very concerned about what he is expecting from a Farage Prime Minister in 2029.
The revolution is our plan.
First off, what is the mechanism and how are we going to reomove it?
The mechanism is the Party Whip. This is how top-down autocratic parties force their MPs and MSPs to vote opposite to how they would otherwise vote were they free to use their intellect, judgement and conscience when voting on your behalf.
The Party Whip is totally undemocratic and sometimes corrupt as we saw earlir this week when 334 Labour MPs agreed to be whipped into voting against a motion calling for Starmer to be referred to the Priveleges Committee.
So, the revolution has two elements.
First, I am committing to registering a total of 100 local political parties with the Electoral Commission, one for every region of the UK.
LONDON PEOPLE, NORTHUMBERLAND PEOPLE, GLASGOW PEOPLE.
We have started with EDINBURGH & EAST LOTHIAN PEOPLE.
The trick is that the purpose of the party is to only represent the interests of the people who live within Edinburgh & East Lothian with zero external influence thereby cutting the billionaires out of the equation.
The second element is that OUR POLICY IS THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE. Once I am elected to Holyrood which will be surprisingly easy as we only require 25K votes, I will be bound by an UNCORRUPTIBLE system as I won’t vote how I want to vote or as per any backhanders I have received and I won’t vote as per instructed buy a top-down autocratic party and any backhanders they have received. I will vote as per instructed by the members of the party on a vote-by-vote basis through a system of Direct Democracy.
For every vote in Holyrood an email will go out to all the members. In any case I will not pretend to be qualified to vote on all the issues so if the vote is on Health, I am expecting the members of the party who are qualified in that field to jump onto the forum and tell me why and how I should vote thereby informing all the other members who can then have a dialogue and debate and cast their vote.
On the day I will just vote as instructed.
So, in summary our proposal is totally transparent totally democratic, totally uncorruptible and totally worthy of your consideration.”
Thank you very much for listening and if anyone wants to ask me questions, they can join me in the Braid Hills Hotel for a drink afterwards.
(Sadly it is now too late to join Marc at the Braid Hills but he is contactable on social media.
