Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 03 February 2021
I am pleased to hear that, Presiding Officer.
Like most members, I celebrated the results of the US presidential election and counted down the days to Joe Biden’s inauguration. When it was mooted that, rather than attend the inauguration, Donald Trump would fly into Prestwick en route to Turnberry in my South Scotland region to play golf, I urged the UK and Scottish Governments to nip such talk in the bud and make it clear that the travel restrictions would be enforced. The only place that people wanted to see Donald Trump travelling was out of the door of the White House.
Given the hatred that he generated, and the violence that he incited, I also said that I hoped that Scotland had seen the back of Donald Trump. He has been an absentee owner of Trump Turnberry since he bought it, and with the financial losses being made year-on-year, the Trump Organization has been as successful at running the resort as the founder was at being President.
In the summer, the Trump Organization showed its true colours when it used the pandemic to try to axe 80 workers at Turnberry, as well as worsen working conditions, despite receiving public funds during the Covid pandemic. I supported the campaign by the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers—the RMT—to protect jobs and conditions amid fears that the company planned to casualise the workforce, and I lodged a motion on the matter. As an aside, that motion did not get support from the Greens. However, I support the Greens’ motion today.
In the discussions on the valid questions about the source of the funding for the cash spending spree that allowed Trump to purchase a string of houses and golf courses including Turnberry, we should not lose sight of the livelihoods of the workforce at the resort and its importance to the local economy. Turnberry is a fantastic hotel. It has a rich history and has great golf courses. Its importance to the economy is one of the reasons why I want to see the end of Trump’s ownership. The Trump brand is being diminished by the day and it would be a positive move if this fine venue could be freed from the discredited Trump name under a new owner who would give staff some long-term security and whose finances did not have so many questions hanging over them.
In the meantime, there are clearly grounds for carrying out further investigations into how the current owner acquired Turnberry, and a strong public interest in doing so. The Scottish Government has been keen to avoid responsibility for that decision and has insisted that applying for an unexplained wealth order is exclusively in the remit of the Crown Office. However, we have all seen the legal advice put forward by Avaaz that directly contradicts that position, claiming that, under the 2002 act, the Lord Advocate would be acting in his role as a minister of the Scottish Government when making that decision, not in his role as the head of the prosecution system.
It is also important to say that an unexplained wealth order is a civil power, not a criminal one. It does not necessarily make accusations of criminality. Rather, it is used to ensure that everything is in order. It is clear that, in this case, the threshold for applying for an unexplained wealth order also appears to have been more than met, in light of the alarming questions that are being raised by investigations in the US over Donald Trump.