Meeting of the Parliament 13 December 2016
I declare an interest as an Aberdeen City Council councillor.
I acknowledge the comments of my colleague Liam Kerr in his opening speech. We welcome the Parliament’s acknowledging the UN’s international migrants day on 18 December because as it is important that we recognise the tragic loss of the lives of people who have tried to reach our shores and other places in order to secure freedom, finally.
It is really important that we take on head-on some of the arguments that have been made during the debate—in particular about the rhetoric and stirring up of emotions during the EU referendum campaign by the leave campaign and people who voted for Brexit, which Joan McAlpine and Tom Arthur have mentioned. We need to be absolutely clear that the SNP Government has consistently and unashamedly attempted to paint a false image of leave voters—including 400,000 of its own voters—as anti-immigration and anti-globalisation nativists. Believe me, leave voters noticed when the First Minister declared that Scotland voted to remain in order to be
“an open, inclusive and outward-looking society”.—[Official Report, 28 June 2016; c 5.]
Therefore, all those who voted to leave automatically represented the opposite. In her rhetoric, the First Minister has painted leave voters as “the other”. In fact, following Mike Russell’s comments in Brussels, it is clear that the SNP is trying to airbrush the 1 million Scottish leave voters from history.
To address the point that Pauline McNeill made, I say that people in Scotland who voted to leave the EU did so for a variety of reasons—not just because of migration. One of those reasons was to create a fairer immigration system that is fit for purpose, in the age of globalisation.