Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 23 March 2021
Earlier today, we held a minute’s silence on the steps outside the chamber to remember all those who have lost their lives over the past year and all those grieving the loss of a loved one. On this, the penultimate day before the Parliament reaches the end of its five-year session, I would much rather that we were reflecting on the impact of this dreadful pandemic and debating what we need to do to ensure that our country recovers in the years ahead. Instead, we are confronted by a litany of Government failings, which led to two women being so badly let down, and by a Tory party that cares not about the principles but about the politics.
The harassment policy failed and two women were let down. That has shaken trust in the system and risked discouraging victims from coming forwards. The situation has called into question the integrity of Government, it has undermined the principles of transparency and accountability, and it has seen a misuse of public money. There are huge failures and big questions to be answered.
There are no winners in this debate. The Scottish National Party is not a winner in it. The spectacle of using a harassment inquiry as a recruiting tool was grotesque.
In the face of all those failures, the Tories have played politics and have been interested only in getting a scalp. They announced that they would bring forward a vote of no confidence before the First Minister had even given evidence to the committee. They lodged the motion on 4 March, before the Hamilton inquiry or the committee inquiry had concluded. Seriously?
On one side, there is a litany of failings from a Government that let down two women; on the other, there is an Opposition that is guilty of playing grubby party politics with an issue as serious as sexual harassment. This is a day of shame for our Parliament. Scotland deserves a better Government and a better Opposition.
From the outset, I have made it clear that we would not prejudge the outcome of the inquiries and that we would remove party and personality. I accept the conclusion of the report that was published yesterday, but I also accept the conclusions of the cross-party report that was published today by a committee of the Parliament, which highlights a catalogue of errors. However, still nobody has taken responsibility for the catastrophic failings of the Government. There are still serious questions for the permanent secretary and for the First Minister, because the buck ultimately stops with her.
It cheapens the Parliament to have the Government attacking the work of the committee. The SNP’s tactics risk calling into question all the verdicts of every committee of the Parliament ever. Members have spent months scrutinising and investigating in an attempt to get to the truth, often in the face of obstruction from the Government.
There are huge challenges ahead for our country, and we cannot come back to such a Parliament after 6 May. We cannot use the chamber as a game that is designed to divide our country further.
Earlier today, I lodged an amendment to the motion that recognised the gravity of the Government’s failures, demanded that someone take responsibility and called out the shameless game playing by the Conservatives. I regret that that amendment was rejected. As happens far too often in Scottish politics, we are left with a binary choice once again.
Do I have confidence in the way that the First Minister, her team and senior members of the Government have handled the matter? Do I have confidence in the Government’s record—we need only see today the report on the attainment gap; the First Minister said that we should judge her record on that—and its ability to focus on coming through a national recovery as we come through Covid? No, I do not. However, on what I hope is the Tory party’s second-last day as Scotland’s main Opposition party, I have no confidence in a Tory party that seeks to use an awful episode in our country’s history in the futile and vain pursuit of a cheap political scalp, and contradicts what it says here by what it says in a different Parliament elsewhere.
We cannot support a motion that is designed not to deliver the strong opposition that the Tory party promised but purely to divide our country and our politics still further. There is a failing Government on one hand and a game-playing Opposition on the other. Our politics must be better than that, and our people deserve better than that.
For the sake of the people of Scotland, who are coming through Covid, and with the huge challenge and task that faces us, we cannot come back to this. Scotland deserves a better Government, and it deserves a better Opposition.
15:34