Meeting of the Parliament 04 June 2026 [Draft]
Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I take this opportunity to congratulate you and welcome you to your post. I also congratulate the cabinet secretary on her appointment. I look forward to working with her across the next five years.
This is my first speech, and I must admit that I agree with my SNP colleague Katie Hagmann that the prospect of making it has been terrifying. However, it is also an honour to stand here, as one of Glasgow’s newest regional MSPs, after running what was an incredibly positive and hopeful election campaign. In Glasgow, hope beat hate and progress beat stagnation. I am proud that hundreds of activists from a variety of backgrounds came together and joined me to knock on thousands of doors. However, the real work begins here. I look forward to serving my constituents and fighting for them in the greatest city on earth over the next five years.
There are some new things that I bring to the chamber. As the youngest member of the Parliament, I must admit that I was slightly shocked to find out that the First Minister had already taken his first crack at leading the SNP before I had taken my first crack at breathing—I am sure that he will love finding that out. It is crucial that this Parliament reflects the whole of the country that it seeks to represent. Although I am the youngest in the chamber, I am absolutely honoured to bring my experience to all the debates in this place. Our world is changing rapidly and it has never been so important that our politics catches up with it.
I will turn to the substance of the debate. Colleagues, we are presented with a fiscal black hole and crumbling public services. Over the next five years, the 128 people who sit in this chamber will make choices that decide the fates of millions of people across our country. Our constituents look to us not to point our fingers at one another but to make decisions that will help them. If we fail to deal with issues adequately, it will only lead to further problems.
Recently, we have seen what that looks like. We all remember the sandcastle majority led by Keir Starmer, which, with promises of change, swept its way into number 10 on the lowest vote share in history to form a majority Government. Two years later, it has failed to adequately challenge the systems that are holding down our constituents, which has made it one of the most unpopular Governments in history. Its tendency to finger point and scapegoat has led to the re-emergence of the very hatred on our streets, in the form of in the National Front and the British National Party, that we thought we had defeated.
We cannot allow our communities to shoulder the burden of our failures. This Parliament cannot be an austerity Parliament. It was not disabled people who caused the current length of NHS waiting lists. It was not those seeking support for surviving gender-based violence who caused the shortage in social housing. It was not those who receive benefits who caused our fiscal black hole. Yet we find our counterparts down south ripping support from all those groups, and some of them are seriously suggesting that they must go further to help fund more of Donald Trump’s disastrous wars. Is that what this Parliament wants to be?
The STUC estimates that a wealth tax of 2 per cent on the 10 wealthiest people in Scotland alone could raise around £500 million a year. Imagine what we could do together if we were ambitious for Scotland.
Colleagues, I speak of this matter with so much passion and urgency because of my own personal experiences. As someone who grew up in a single-parent household with a young working-class mum, I understand what such cuts could mean for so many people across our country. I am not ashamed of my upbringing, and I am not ashamed to have relied on free school meals or to know that my experiences growing up were markedly different from those of the majority of members in the chamber. However, I am afraid that, for many children like me, this Parliament will fail to deliver the necessary support for them to survive and thrive. Although I may now be in the immensely privileged position of standing here, I refuse to leave anybody behind.
At the thousands of doors that I knocked on during the election campaign, nobody asked for cuts, nobody wanted to see a reduction in service and nobody believed that we must shrink our state. In fact, so many people wanted to see us go further and faster. Across our country, there are countless teachers without permanent contracts; local councillors passing on the centralised cuts that we do not address here; a lack of good housing; a rise in homelessness; and an NHS that, admittedly, is doing better than it is down south but is still not being given sufficient support to thrive.
I do not believe that this Parliament should use the politics of envy to address the problems that we face. Debates of this kind will always focus on making difficult choices. However, it is always those who give up who tend to have the least. Let us not do that. We have five years in which to address the problems that our state is failing to solve and to help those in all our communities.
As my final assertion, I make one ask and plea: let us be a Parliament that is truly ambitious for Scotland, let us tax the wealth that we have and let us make our country work for everybody who lives here.