Meeting of the Parliament 25 April 2017
First, let me say that I welcome this debate today, not because it is about an issue that is easy to discuss in public—something so appalling never is—but because it is only right that issues of difficulty and passion like this are debated in our Parliament here in Edinburgh.
I would like to begin on a note of consensus. As politicians, I suspect that we all know survivors of rape. Indeed, I know that there are even those among us here who have been subject to sexual violence ourselves and who find the issue and even the word difficult to articulate. In the past two weeks, as this debate has emerged into the public domain, I know that many of us—me included—have spoken to women who are recovering from their ordeal. We know the awful circumstances that they face: not just the terror of the attack or attacks but the indignity of the criminal justice system that faces them if they report the crime, the prospect of a protracted court case to follow, the criminal injuries compensation process and the lengthy spell afterwards when women who have been attacked—and, in some cases, men, too—have to try to pick up the broken pieces of their lives and confront the world anew.
In the past few weeks, when we have talked about how we should help women in such circumstances, we have used words such as “sensitive” and “compassionate”. I agree that those words do not even begin to cut it; they shrivel next to the enormity of the violation that the women have suffered. That is even more the case when we face women whose rape has resulted in the birth of a child. Perhaps we do not have the words for it at all; certainly, I struggle to find them.
I would like to use my speech here today to try to place this issue in context. The issue of the so-called rape clause arose as a result of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, which was passed in the House of Commons in 2015. The proposed changes to welfare spending were introduced in the wake of the 2015 general election, when my party set out in its manifesto a clear plan to try to put the UK’s public finances back on solid ground.
We all know that the UK continues to spend more than it can afford, borrowing to the tune of £69 billion last year. It is the view of members on these benches that, in order to restore public finances, we must eliminate that deficit and then reduce the debt mountain that we as a country have allowed to build up over a period of years. Otherwise, future generations will have to pay our debts.