Meeting of the Parliament 02 September 2025
We gather today at the start of the fifth and final year of the sixth session of Scotland’s national Parliament—a Parliament that is more than a quarter of a century old, its place anchored at the heart of decision making in Scotland today, a Parliament elected to chart a way forward for Scotland and to wrestle with the challenges that face our people.
In this session of Parliament, our country has faced a number of those challenges, including the lasting effects of the Covid pandemic and the illegal invasion of Ukraine, with its consequences for energy costs and security. In the middle east, we have witnessed, and I have repeatedly condemned, Hamas’s barbaric attacks on 7 October 2023. I also share the concerns of other Governments and other international leaders that the brutal actions of the Israeli Government in Gaza constitute a genocide. That has unleashed widespread suffering and has caused such anguish.
In the United Kingdom, we are seeing the prolonged application of austerity at a time of desperate need to rebuild in our society.
These are difficult days. For many in our society, the implications of those events are that money is tight, prices are rising and hope is in short supply. The danger in such circumstances is that all those difficulties are marshalled together to be made the fault of others in our society, and that some get blamed for supposedly causing those problems. That has been ever present during the summer recess, when migrants have been put in the spotlight and the politics of intolerance has been stoked by some.
Let me be clear, at the outset of this final year of the parliamentary session, that I reject that demonising behaviour. Let me be clear that I intend to defeat the politics of fear and division by offering a clear, principled alternative based on the decent, welcoming values that have served Scotland so well throughout my lifetime. That is why I want to use every opportunity that is available to my Government to give that leadership to Scotland and to deliver improvements in the lives of people in Scotland.
Since becoming First Minister, I have heard loud and clear the desire of the people for effective delivery in Government alongside a meaningful message of hope. Today I will speak mostly about how we have delivered, how we are delivering and how we will continue to deliver for the people of Scotland in ways that will improve their lives. It is a story of much achieved but more still to do, of a corner that is being turned and of progress that is once again being made.
I will start with the national health service. I often hear my political rivals say that the national health service is broken. I reject that. I say that, thanks to our dedicated staff, Scotland’s national health service remains fundamentally strong and an asset for this country. Yes, it has problems, and why would it not, after a decade and more of Westminster austerity, after Brexit and after the foundation-shaking experience of Covid? That is not just my view; it is what the Labour Party says about the NHS in Labour-run Wales.
In Scotland, 97 per cent of people leave hospital with no delay, 95 per cent are registered with an NHS dentist, and 7 million treatments have been delivered since November 2023. Scotland’s core accident and emergency system has consistently outperformed that in England and Wales for the past decade, as has been repeated again in the most recent figures. Those are not just numbers: last year, more than 1 million patients were seen within four hours in our accident and emergency system, which is around one patient every 30 seconds in Scotland.