Meeting of the Parliament 11 September 2025
I remind members of my entry in the register of members’ interests—specifically in relation to the hospitality that I have received from the Scotch Whisky Association.
Since the parliamentary session started, this is the first proper chance that I have had to say that we are going to miss Kate Forbes in the chamber. I think that we all understand the reasons why she will step down from Parliament next year, but I genuinely think that she will be a loss to the Parliament. That view is reflected across the great majority of members—perhaps not every member—of the Parliament and by members of the business community, too. She will be a loss to the Government and to Parliament, and we wish her very well for the future.
In that tone, I agree with what the Deputy First Minister said about the need to celebrate the success of Scottish exports. She was right to highlight the tremendous success of exports such as Scotch whisky and Scottish salmon, which are flagships for the Scottish economy and are being exported around the globe. They are recognisable Scottish products that are growing our global brand. That is all to be celebrated.
We also need to acknowledge, as Kate Forbes did, that there are serious challenges with tariffs in the US and elsewhere, which I will come to later. Between 2018 and 2022, global trade rose by 10 per cent, and in the same period, Scottish onshore exports fell by 12 per cent. Not everything in the garden is rosy.
There were some glaring omissions in the Deputy First Minister’s comments. Scotland’s largest export by far is oil and gas, which represented 32 per cent of overall international exports in 2023. Curiously, though, there was no mention in her speech of the oil and gas sector.
However, the even more significant omission was of the defence sector, which is, to be frank, astonishing in the context of recent news about support for Scottish shipbuilding. It was announced just last week that Norway has agreed a £10 billion deal for anti-submarine warships to be built in the UK, which will secure thousands of jobs at BAE Systems in Glasgow—investment that was possible only because the Royal Navy had already contracted with BAE Systems for the construction of type 26 frigates. That investment will support an estimated 103 businesses in Scotland.