Meeting of the Parliament 10 June 2026 [Draft]
In the interests of transparency, I place on the record that my wife is presently employed by the Scottish National Party and has been since April 2023.
I begin by stating emphatically and clearly that what Peter Murrell did represents a serious breach of trust. His guilty plea makes that beyond dispute. Over more than a decade, he used his position of privilege to embezzle more than £400,000 from the Scottish National Party—my party—and from the many dedicated members and activists who placed their faith in him: people whom I and other SNP politicians know and have campaigned alongside for many years. That is a matter of settled record that has, quite understandably, shone a spotlight on the relationship between the public and elected representatives. We all recognise that it has led to some people calling into question a sense of trust in our political system.
For that very reason, it is my belief that the Parliament must be disciplined in its response—a response that must not be about protecting any single party and must not be about promoting any other; rather, it must be about protecting the integrity of the Parliament itself.
Let us be very clear about what is actually being proposed. We are being asked to agree to conduct an inquiry, presumably through the convening of a parliamentary committee comprised of elected representatives of competing political parties, to scrutinise the internal financial operations of one of those competing parties. Every single member who would sit on such a committee has a direct material interest in the outcome of its findings. Their parties contest the same seats. They seek support from the same electorate. They fight the same elections. Therefore, it is surely reasonable to question whether any inquiry and any committee constituted under those conditions could be independent or, at the very least, could be held to be independent.
I believe that there is an obvious conflict of interest in parties investigating each other in this way. When conflict of interest is baked into the very structure of a proposed parliamentary inquiry, no amount of procedural formality can remove that partiality or, at the very least, the perception that such an inquiry would fail to meet the test of impartiality.