Meeting of the Parliament 05 March 2024
Deputy Presiding Officer, you already know that I think very highly of our Minister for Independence. I think that he is destined for many greater things in the world. I did not think that he was so cunning, however. Jamie Hepburn clearly has a new strategy for achieving independence: relentlessly producing paper after paper, week after week, in boring, soporific detail, he is trying to bore us into submission. Just when is it all going to end?
I have not read “An independent Scotland’s place in the world”, just like the other papers, but I can imagine what is in it. It will be full of grand assertion of just how brilliant the SNP and the Greens have been on the international stage. However, let us look at the record. Nicola Sturgeon personally signed a deal with the China Railway No 3 Engineering Group—CR3—during a meeting at Bute house. No due diligence was done. It was discovered that CR3 had been blacklisted by the Norwegian state pension fund for gross corruption, and it was found by Amnesty International to have connections to human rights abuses. The Chinese company SinoFortone was also a signatory to the same £10 billion deal, which was later described as “all bollocks” by the chief fixer, after it was revealed that it only owned—