Meeting of the Parliament 05 November 2014
I assure everyone in the chamber that this Government remains completely committed to tackling sectarianism. The level of that commitment can be seen in the immense amount of work that has been undertaken over the past three years.
Elaine Murray talked at length about the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012, which in our view has a clear role to play in meeting the commitment that was made. There are welcome indications of success—offences of religious hatred and offending under the act have decreased, so it is working.
It is important to remember that the act was brought in for a reason—to tackle offensive and abusive behaviour at and around football. In recent days, we have been reminded why the act is needed by the online abuse, including threats of violence and death, that has been sent to players and their families. People need to remember the extraordinarily heated atmosphere in which the legislation emerged.
We have never tried to claim that sectarianism is confined to football, which is why we have invested a record £9 million over three years to tackle this scourge through a range of activities. That has been the biggest commitment that any Government in Scotland has ever made to anti-sectarianism. As was stated in the draft budget last month, I am making a further commitment to invest more than £3 million in 2015-16 to support community-based initiatives to tackle sectarianism and to further develop our understanding through research, while continuing to support work to tackle racial or ethnic hatred. It is a pity that Elaine Murray did not read that line in the draft budget.
When I came into this job, I had two very clear aims for the anti-sectarianism agenda. The first was to ensure that the work that we were supporting was getting into communities and tackling the problems that they were experiencing, and the second was to build a robust research and knowledge base on the nature and extent of sectarianism in modern Scotland so that future policy could be made on the basis of evidence and not innuendo. When I first came into this job, I remember being quite shocked to discover that there was virtually no information or evidence base available in Scotland. We have spent considerable time and money beginning to put that work into place to ensure that we have the necessary evidence in future.
That is why I have ensured that our work is a good example of what we are calling the Scottish approach, which is informed by the Christie commission. It is an approach that is assets based and which places the needs of communities at the centre of the agenda. There are 44 community-based projects, which are bottom up and not top down. They are allowing us to get to the heart of the issue as it is experienced by communities. The solutions that are emerging are being tailored to the specific issues that are identified.