Hansard

I absolutely agree with the member, who chairs the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee in Parliament. Let us not forget that previous SNP Government ministers, including previous SNP First Ministers, have referred themselves to the independent adviser. I have to question why the current First Minister and Deputy First Minister are unwilling to do so.

In November last year, the United Kingdom Covid inquiry wrote to the SNP Government to ask:

“To what extent was there informal or private communication about significant decision-making? For example, were there WhatsApp groups (or other forms of group chats) which key decision-makers used”?

Then, in February this year, it asked for

“any communications relating to key decisions, including internal and external emails, text messages or WhatsApp messages (on Scottish Government and private or personal devices)”.

I will give way to any SNP member who can argue that that does not constitute a request for the messages—I will give way to any of them—but I see none. No SNP member is able to stand up in this Parliament and defend their Government’s argument that it had not been asked for the messages. That is because it was not a request for a summary or a minute of the decisions that were made but a request for the actual messages. The silence from the SNP members suggests that they know it.

Let us be clear: that request was made not only once in February, but again in March, July, August, September and October. Again, we are in a debate, so I will give way to any SNP representative who, having heard about all those requests, can claim that there was no requirement for the Government to hand over messages. I say that not just to SNP back benchers—I will give way to the Deputy First Minister if she would like to defend her case that that was not a request for messages. Again, I see nothing—not a single member is willing to do so.

We know that on each of those occasions, bar the last one, the messages were withheld. Jamie Dawson KC, the counsel to the inquiry, said this three weeks ago:

“The Scottish Government has provided the inquiry with no WhatsApp or other informal messaging material, either in its own possession or in the possession of”

individuals.

We have a situation where nine months ago, the Scottish Government was asked for WhatsApp messages to be provided to the inquiry, but they were handed over only last week. On 31 October, though, the Deputy First Minister said:

“In June this year, the inquiry came back to ask for groups of WhatsApp messages—the titles of those groups and who the members of the groups were—and then in September the inquiry asked for the individual messages”,

refusing to mention the fact that the inquiry had made similar requests in February, March, July and August. Shona Robison also went further. In response to my questions in the chamber on 31 October, she said:

“it is not correct to say that it has been a year since that request was made; it has been just over a month.”—[Official Report, 31 October 2023; c 66.]

That is not the truth. The evidence that was supplied by the Deputy First Minister in the Scottish Government-initiated question on 8 November contradicts that. Let us not forget that that evidence was supplied only by the SNP Government, because it was forced to do so by the UK Covid inquiry. The Scottish Government was all too happy to spin a different tale on timings until the inquiry called it out.

The First Minister was even more definitive in his framing of the requests. On 2 November, he said

“It is crucial to say that, when the UK Government inquiry asked us in June for details of the various WhatsApp groups concerning Covid 19, it did not request the messages themselves. The messages were asked for in September, just a matter of weeks ago.”—[Official Report, 2 November 2023; c 17.]

Again, that is not true—that is a false statement from the First Minister to this Parliament. Details of the WhatsApp groups were asked for a year ago—not five months ago, as Humza Yousaf claimed—and it was for nine months, not a matter of weeks, that the SNP Government left request after request for those messages outstanding. When I raised that with the First Minister last week, he said that the Government had interpreted the requests “too narrowly”. Too narrowly? It did not consider the requests at all. It ignored them time after time.

Two weeks ago, not a single WhatsApp message had been transferred from the Scottish Government to the Covid inquiry. The Scottish Parliament has been told contradictory stories about key messages that the Scottish National Party Government should have provided to the UK Covid inquiry and when that crucial information was requested.

Humza Yousaf and Shona Robison should be ashamed of their blatant attempt to deceive grieving families who lost loved ones during the Covid pandemic. They chose spin and secrecy over transparency and truth. How can we draw any other conclusion than that they have not been honest, have misled Parliament and have broken the ministerial code?