Meeting of the Parliament 10 February 2026 [Draft]
It is true that the bill is in better shape than it was when it was introduced by the Government, but I cannot help but be reminded of the phrase that Aneurin Bevan once famously used. He said:
“It has taken five years of governmental labour to give birth to that mouse”.
Parliament has improved the bill, and the Minister for Public Finance has been listening and co-operating. The promotion of employee ownership, worker co-operatives, social enterprises and supported businesses is now on face of the bill, including their promotion by the enterprise agencies and the Scottish National Investment Bank. Credit unions, mutual banks and building societies and municipal banks are also in the fabric of the bill, which is welcome. The ministerial list of measures is now mandatory, not discretionary. Reporting mechanisms are now much more robust. There will be a review of the Procurement (Scotland) Act 2014 within 12 months of royal assent, including, explicitly, how it can support workers to transition their company into employee ownership. Those are very welcome improvements.
In the passage of the bill, many amendments that I lodged, including some that I lodged for debate this afternoon, have been opposed by an unholy alliance of the Scottish National Party and the Conservatives, with the Conservatives claiming that some of my proposals were, in their words, “extraneous” to the bill and the SNP claiming yet others to be “tangential”, when it is my contention that in-sourcing, not outsourcing public services, harnessing the considerable community wealth that already exists inside multibillion-pound local government pension schemes in Scotland or using public procurement progressively are measures that are the very essence of community wealth building—they are axiomatic to community wealth building, not extraneous or tangential.
In the end, the real test of our political principles is whether or not they bring about change. All too often, change is promised but not delivered—a hollow political slogan rather than meaningful political action. I started by quoting Nye Bevan; let me finish by quoting him on something that, over the years, I have tried to apply to my own politics. In his final speech to the Labour Party conference just a few months before his untimely death, he said this:
“Let me give you a personal confession of faith. I have found in my life that the burdens of public life are too great to be borne for trivial ends. The sacrifices are too much, unless we have something serious in mind.”
I hope that the low platform provided by the community wealth building act will be something that the next Parliament can build upon; that we can have a Marcora law in Scotland, with statutory rights for workers to become co-operative owners; and that we can make this—the home of Robert Owen and the birthplace of the Fenwick weavers—a Mondragon of the north.
I hope that we can believe that those who follow us really do have, in Bevan’s words, “something serious in mind”, something that goes way beyond trivial ends: a rejection of the creed that the economy is nothing to do with Parliament and politics and an understanding instead that there is an alternative to an overreliance on foreign direct investment and extractive capitalism and that we can act in the wider community and national interest, rather than simply the narrow shareholder interest—economics as if people mattered, as if communities matter, and as if future generations matter.