Meeting of the Parliament 05 November 2014
No. I am afraid that I must get on.
I know that we will hear from the Government that it committed £9 million over three years to research, education and community-based and policing initiatives aimed at addressing sectarianism. I hope that we will hear today from the minister whether the evaluation that the advisory group requested is under way.
The Scottish Labour Party has consistently taken sectarianism very seriously. The Labour-Liberal Democrat Government created the offence of religiously aggravated breach of the peace in the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2003 and funded Nil by Mouth and sense over sectarianism. Those of us who were here at the time will recall that Jack McConnell, as First Minister, personally championed a number of measures to address what he described as “Scotland’s secret shame”, including supporting shared campuses and the twinning of denominational and nondenominational schools.
Our motion also refers to the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012, which all the Opposition parties felt was unnecessary and unhelpful. Despite the broad remit of the advisory group’s work, that act was placed off limits by ministers and was therefore not discussed at any point.
I have only a few seconds left. I would have liked to have made a number of other points, but I argue that the 2012 act was an inadequate, knee-jerk reaction. I think that many of us felt that, and I suspect that the Government may feel that way, too, but that is no reason for the issue to be kicked into the long grass until after March 2015. We must discuss the wider issues around education and the preventative measures that need to be taken to tackle sectarianism.
I move,
That the Parliament notes that, in December 2013, the Advisory Group on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland published its report, Independent Advice to Scottish Ministers and Report on Activity 9 August 2012 – 15 November 2013; considers that the report’s recommendations require action from groups and organisations across civic Scotland; regrets that neither this report nor the Scottish Government’s response of February 2014 has been debated in the Parliament or scrutinised in depth by a parliamentary committee; agrees that education and prevention are the best ways of tackling sectarianism, and believes that the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012, which was railroaded through the Parliament by the Scottish Government, is flawed and should be repealed.
14:50