Meeting of the Parliament 29 May 2024
I hope to be brief in my comments. The Scottish Greens will support the sanction recommended by the committee, and Mr Matheson should be held accountable for his actions. Beyond that, I will lay out our concerns about the committee process in this case and in more general terms.
I believe that members who commented publicly on the guilt of the member being investigated should have recused themselves from the process. I believe that that should equally apply to anyone in the future who expresses their thoughts on the innocence or guilt of a colleague. There should also have been public condemnation before today of the leak of the potential sanctions on the day before the committee met.
More generally, the process needs reform. We do not, for example, take precedent into account. I know that the convener of the SPPA Committee and I disagree on that, and I am aware that there are differing opinions, but the situation is that, previously, an MSP who had been sanctioned for sexual harassment received a lesser sanction than the one that is in front of us today. I certainly hope that members in the chamber agree that harm to people should carry the greatest sanctions. Taking previous sanctions into account would allow us to ensure that sanctions are consistent.
We also allocate seats on the committee in the same way as for scrutiny committees. If we want it to be truly cross party and considered fair, the allocation of seats on the committee and its make-up need to be looked at to ensure fairness and to prevent politicisation of sanctions. The process at Westminster, although far from perfect, is better than the one that we have here and there are some aspects that we might be able to adopt.
I hope that, in the coming weeks, Parliament will be able to take a serious look at the process and have a serious conversation about how we fix and depoliticise the process.
15:19