Meeting of the Parliament 29 April 2025
I very much welcome this afternoon’s debate on supporting Scottish industry. I also welcome my good friend Jamie Greene to his new position as the economy lead for the Scottish Liberal Democrats, which is a very welcome and encouraging lurch to the right on the part of the Liberal Democrats. I am sure that we will hear a lot of good sense from Mr Greene shortly.
On Friday, along with a number of colleagues, I attended the business in the Parliament conference, which was held in this chamber and the Parliament’s committee rooms. That conference is always a valuable opportunity to bring together members of the business community—both those in leadership and those who work at the grass roots—and MSPs. I was pleased to sit on a panel in the well of the chamber with the Deputy First Minister, Michael Marra and Lorna Slater and take questions from the audience. Those questions were, as members would expect, wide ranging, but they gave us a useful insight into some of the pressures that the Scottish economy and the business community face at this time.
One question that came up in that discussion that is relevant to this debate was on the cost of energy, and electricity in particular. At the heart of the issue that we are discussing this afternoon—the decline of heavy industry in Scotland and across Great Britain, including Britain’s steel industry—lies the high cost of energy in this country. In that respect, I agree very much—not for the first time and probably not for the last time—with the intervention that Fergus Ewing made a few moments ago.
I recall that, more than two decades ago, when I was first elected as an MSP to represent Fife, paper making was a major component of its economy. Over the years, we have seen that industry shrink and almost disappear, as have other sectors, such as metal production and steel making. All those sectors are high users of energy. Rising electricity costs have been a major factor in the deindustrialisation of Scotland and the United Kingdom.