Meeting of the Parliament 10 June 2026 [Draft]
I should say that that filming is happening during recess, so I will let the programme makers know that I am available if they need me. My office will be in touch. I have also been informed that I have a passing resemblance, when the right lighting hits me, to Ben Whishaw and the main character, but I will leave that with members.
“Dept Q” features the Scottish actor Sanjeev Kohli, who played Navid in “Still Game”. Navid came from India, arrived in Craiglang and, speaking little English, learned Scots from his neighbours until he became the beating heart of his community. I watched that show right before I came to Scotland, and I think that I understood something about what this country is and what it was capable of being.
The screen, in some ways, taught me, before anything else did, that someone like me could belong here and be celebrated as almost an essential part of Scottish culture. I think, in some ways, that that is also what we are debating today. The screen sector is on track to reach £1 billion by 2030, but it is a sector that generates not just economic value but narratives. It decides whose lives are visible, whose voices carry, and whose experiences are treated as central and whose are, at times, treated as optional. I do not think that that is a soft concern alongside the economic argument—it is the economic argument. A screen sector that draws on the full range of Scottish life will make better work. That is not woke ideology; it is a question of craft.
Recently, I lodged a motion following restructuring at BBC Radio Scotland in which, reportedly, the majority of those who were stood down were women. Despite BBC successes, a pattern nonetheless emerges about who speaks with authority in our cultural institutions and who is treated at times as replaceable. I think that that question travels through broadcasting, through screen and through culture.
I am grateful for the inclusivity that BBC Scotland has shown in its programming and I acknowledge its importance in our culture. We need a strong, stable, well-funded BBC. One funded by advertising will have extremely negative consequences for commercial public sector broadcasting—that is an issue that has been raised with us.
Screen Scotland has also increasingly emphasised creative origination, which involves more than just production taking place here in Scotland and means that stories are developed, owned and led here. That distinction matters enormously because we can grow output without growing control, and growth without authorship is, at the end of the day, dependency. Research that was commissioned by Screen Scotland found that, of the top 15 producers of programmes that were counted as Scottish by volume, only five were headquartered in Scotland, with the remaining 10 based in London. I was happy to see Channel 4’s creative hub open in Glasgow in 2019 and I note that it now has 26 full-time members of staff. We need to progress with creative origination or else any production will not be Scottish or represent growth; it will just be a statistic wearing a kilt.
The workforce data tells a similar story. Around 87 per cent of screen workers have experienced a mental health problem. Factors including long hours, freelance insecurity and short-term contracts select for people with financial cushions and existing cover for their caring responsibilities, and they select against everyone else. According to recent reports, it will take until 2085 for gender equity to be achieved in the UK’s film industry, and the Equal Media & Culture Centre has reported high rates of sexual harassment and bullying in the industry.
Growth in the screen sector cannot just be measured in terms of investment and output; it has to include who gets to show up. When Screen Scotland invested in writers such as Alia Ghafar and Dawn Sievewright through its first draft programme, it was not just backing good scripts, it was backing the next generation of people who get to decide what Scotland looks like on the screen. That is important because, for many young people, including me, screen culture is often the first place where we get to see Scotland reflected back to us, and it shapes what we believe is possible and what we believe is not.
The test for this Parliament is not whether Scotland’s screen sector can grow—it will. Rather, it is whether we build a sector that redistributes cultural power, or one that quietly concentrates it in the hands of those who are not here. Therefore, we must ring fence resources for training and mentoring opportunities for women; provide resources for peer support networks; formalise rates of pay, policies on flexible work and inclusive workplace practices; and ensure that public funding bodies apply conditions to their funding and procurement practices to ensure that fair work for women and efforts to close the gender pay gap remain central focuses for our creative industries, including Scotland’s screen sector.
I hope that we reach a point where the sector contributes £1 billion to the economy, but, more than that, I hope that our future generations see Scotland build a screen sector that is capable of seeing more of Scotland and the world.