Meeting of the Parliament 15 November 2023
I would like to start with a quote—I was actually a bit worried earlier, because a lot of what was in my speech was used by Alex Cole-Hamilton in his speech. The quote is from Nicola Sturgeon at around the start of the Covid crisis. She said:
“I understand, because I’m First Minister leading a government, how difficult and unprecedented this situation is. We’re all trying to make the best decisions.
We can undoubtedly get things wrong along the way, as every government across the world will be, and I’ve been very clear about that from the outset.
I’ll make mistakes, everybody involved in leading these responses will make mistakes, but it’s really important that we take the best decisions that we can at every single stage and try to learn from that as we go.”
I remember that time so vividly, because it had such a profound effect on me, my constituents, my family, my friends and my relatives who died at that time, in difficult circumstances. That is what we should be talking about today—the people and the effect that Covid had on them.
I remember sitting in a room upstairs with many of the people who are in the chamber today, getting briefings from Jason Leitch and the chief medical officer. They were open and transparent and willing to answer any of the questions that people in the room had about the policies that the Scottish Government was taking to try to keep people safe.
I do not remember anyone at that time making comments that they distrusted the chief medical officer or Jason Leitch, or that they were not all thinking that we were in it together. I do remember that there were never any suggestions at that time that there would be a policy to get herd immunity or that the bodies could “pile high”.
Everybody was concentrating on what the inquiry is about, and what today should have been about in this Parliament—people getting the answers that they deserve and which are needed, so that the learning from that experience can be taken forward. We do not know when there might be another such crisis and another pandemic.
The tone of the debate has been completely wrong. A pantomime villain is being sought by members across the Opposition benches, but the truth is that, at the time, everybody was just having to adapt to Covid by working differently, communicating differently and trying to do the best that they could. My team introduced WhatsApp and Slack at that time, because we were trying to do the best that we could to ensure that we were still able to provide a service to our constituents in the most difficult of circumstances.
The Scottish Government is complying with the inquiry. It has already provided 19,000 documents, in addition to 14,000 WhatsApp messages, in line with its own policy on how decision making should have been recorded at that time.
I cannot believe that we are hearing all this. I remember when there was a crisis: Catherine Calderwood made a mistake that was unforgivable and lost her job over it. At the same time, what we were seeing at Westminster was Dominic Cummings going on family trips to Barnard Castle and treating people with absolute contempt.
I know that hearing the WhatsApp messages that have come out in the Covid inquiry with regard to the atmosphere in Downing Street will have been really hard for members on the Conservative benches. It has really not been edifying in any way to see the contempt with which some civil servants treated politicians, the contempt with which some of the decisions were made and the attitude that meant that the individuals who were affected by Covid were not given the prominence that they deserved.
A lot has been said today about the nature of those decisions and the context in which they were made. I know that there are people who will not agree with me, but I believe that the context of the decisions that were made in Scotland—with the team of medical experts and the First Minister that we had at the time and the transparency that she showed every single day as she stood up to the press’s scrutiny, in marked contrast to Boris Johnson—shows that those decisions were made in the very best interests of the people of Scotland.
However, that is not for us to judge. It is not for the people on these benches or the people on the other benches to judge. It is for the people of Scotland to look at what happened in order to make their own decisions about whom they trust—whom they trusted at that time—and where they looked for their information. It was not the Downing Street briefings—that is absolutely true.
I do not think that this debate has helped the families who have been affected by this situation at all. I regret what has happened here this afternoon; this has been a search for a pantomime villain who does not exist. The debate has been implausible political point scoring from the party that partied all the way through Covid.
16:16