Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 25 November 2020
It is tempting to make the same speech that I made the last time we debated this issue, because in the past three weeks, absolutely nothing has changed—not one single thing. The cabinet secretary’s pace on the issue makes a snail look like a sprinter. As for the Scottish Government, it is treating the Parliament with contempt and it is treating with contempt the parliamentary committee that was set up to scrutinise its actions. The Scottish Government appears to be determined to withhold the legal advice that underpinned its botched handling of the judicial review. The outcome of that cost taxpayers just less than £1 million but, more important, it failed the two women who made complaints in the first place. They and other women who might come forward in the future are faced with a policy that has been successfully challenged in the courts and which, despite the years that have passed, has not been altered or used since. Shame on the Scottish Government for allowing that to happen.
Shame, too, on the Scottish Government for the position in which it has placed the Lord Advocate. He is an honourable man, placed in an impossible position. Five times I had to ask him a basic question that was allowed by the ministerial code, and five times he could not or would not answer. I bow to Murdo Fraser’s counting of the number of unanswered questions, which totalled 27.
As well as being Scotland’s senior law officer, the Lord Advocate is a member of the Cabinet. He is a minister, bound by the ministerial code. I was not asking him about the content of legal advice. It was a process question about whether the cabinet secretary had spoken to him following the vote in Parliament. Given the Lord Advocate’s discomfort, I can only assume that the cabinet secretary had not bothered to pick up the phone, because he had no intention of providing the information to Parliament. That is certainly what I understand the cabinet secretary told the Scottish National Party group meeting recently. He is simply refusing to hand over the legal advice.
The Scottish Government likes to think of itself as a world leader, and indeed it is: a world leader at dissembling, obstruction and secrecy. The latest example of that is information on the complaints handling process. It was promised to the committee for July. Then it was August. September and October sailed by and nothing was received. When the committee invited witnesses to give oral evidence to talk about the complaints handling phase, the Government refused. It said that the witnesses could not attend because the written evidence had not been received. Who, I ask, was responsible for not providing the evidence? It was none other than the cabinet secretary himself.