Meeting of the Parliament 14 November 2023
Today, we have the opportunity to discuss issues of migration, including migration to, and internally within, Scotland. I welcome the chance to discuss how we deal with population challenges and the consequences that they have on our economy, our public services and our communities. I also welcome the opportunity to shine a light on the failure of the current Conservative Government in Westminster to get to grips in a humane and dignified way with the challenges that we face in migration, refugee and asylum systems.
We cannot avoid the fact that today’s debate is not set in the context of action that we could take right now in Scotland or in the context of how we might bolster our public services and invest in the skills of our people. Rather, we are having another debate in the context of independence. I question the value of spending time in the chamber debating the Scottish National Party Government’s latest series of hypotheticals. Then again, if I were part of this Government, I, too, would not be keen on debating reality at the moment.
We have reached number 6 in the “Building a New Scotland” series of papers from the Scottish Government—another paper outlining the Scottish Government’s vision for an independent Scotland. However, if it was not readily apparent, independence is not on the horizon, and this is just the latest in an ever-changing landscape of what independence is, will be or might not be, according to the SNP. Perhaps, like many similar documents, it will simply lie gathering dust while present needs remain unaddressed.
As I acknowledged in my opening comments, the Government motion lays out again in some detail the population challenges that Scotland faces. We have discussed that issue in the chamber before, and it has been well documented by Scottish Government papers and other bodies, including National Records of Scotland and the Office for National Statistics. Our debates in the chamber on the challenges have often been constructive and positive, and members from across the chamber have spent time trying to find common solutions, without simply retreating into constitutional binaries.
The headline figures from the 2022 census on population growth compared with the rest of the UK and with the previous census period only just scratched the surface. We have heard much already about the challenges that persist. On population age, the registrar general’s latest annual review of demographic trends showed that Scotland now has more people aged over 65 than aged under 15. We know that there are significant challenges due to an urban-rural divide. Most central belt local authority areas saw increases in population over the past decade, whereas a 2020 report from the Scottish Council for Development and Industry demonstrated that many of our rural and island communities are expected to experience a major decline in population by 2041.
There is no denying that those trends are posing challenges to our public services, not least to our national health service, and are affecting the national productivity rate and skill shortages, which we are currently experiencing and which will continue.
In that context, I ask the Scottish Government why we are not spending more time debating how to fix the issues in the here and now and why we are spending our time hypothesising about how the issues might be addressed in an independent Scotland. If the Government’s answer is that—we have heard this already today—we can solve the problem only with the full powers of independence, I believe that that is an incredibly defeatist attitude and that the Government should vacate the front benches and get out of the way for people who are determined to work on solutions in the here and now.