Meeting of the Parliament 18 June 2025
As per our position in the previous debate, the Scottish Greens believe in progressive taxation as a way to pool our collective resources and invest in the things that matter to all of us. An important principle of modern democracy is that voters should be able to see how their Governments are spending money; there should be transparency and accountability.
We know that, since 2019, at least £8 million of Scottish Enterprise grants have been awarded to companies that are involved in arms dealing and manufacturing. We also know that a number of those businesses have directly supplied weapons and military equipment to Israel during its assault on Gaza. Genocide, war crimes and more than 60,000 people killed—I hope that we would all agree that our Government should not be spending money to support those things.
Although I recognise that the Scottish Government does not provide grants for the manufacture of munitions, there is not a moral difference between supplying money to build bombs versus supplying money to build a bomb factory or a training facility to train bomb makers.
The principled point is very simple: if a company has profited from the sale of arms and weapons to countries that are complicit in war crimes and genocide, then it should not receive—[Interruption.] I will take interventions in my closing speech. Such a company should not receive public money from the Scottish Government.
In 2019, the Scottish Greens secured a commitment from the Scottish Government that all Scottish public bodies would conduct human rights checks on companies, including arms companies, prior to funding them. In November 2023, The Ferret revealed that, despite Scottish Enterprise having conducted 199 human rights checks, not a single firm had failed them, even though some have armed states that have been widely accused of war crimes, including Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Amnesty International has called the current human rights due diligence process “inadequate” and states that it
“is failing to ensure that Scotland upholds its international obligations.”
Still, to this day, no company has failed Scottish Enterprise’s human rights due diligence checks.