Official Report 1039KB pdf
Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection, and our time for reflection leader today is Tim Maguire, humanist.
Presiding Officer, members of the Scottish Parliament, thank you so much for inviting me to address you today.
I invite you to cast your minds back to one of Scotland’s darkest and most unsettling novels, “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner”. It was published in 1824 and it was written by a man who was baptised in Ettrick on this very day in 1770—James Hogg—but it speaks to us still.
The novel tells the story of a young man who believes that his salvation is guaranteed; that whatever he does—however cruel, however violent—he is safe in the eyes of God. With that belief, he falls into arrogance, into cruelty, into despair and, ultimately, into ruin. The moral is clear. When people believe themselves to be beyond question, beyond scrutiny and beyond doubt, disaster follows.
This is not a story only of religion; this is a story of politics, a story of power and a story of the human heart, for when certainty hardens into pride, and when conviction turns to fanaticism, the result is always the same: division, intolerance and, sometimes, tragedy.
This Parliament was not founded on such pride. Devolution was not given to Scotland so that its leaders might rule as if they were without fault. It was given so that you, the people’s representatives, might answer daily to those who sent you here.
Hogg’s tale warns us of what happens when humility is lost. When one voice insists that it cannot be wrong. When dialogue is silenced. When doubt is treated as weakness.
However, there is also compassion in Hogg’s story. The “justified sinner” is not born a monster. He is misled, he is persuaded and he is drawn step by step into darkness. Is that not a lesson for us, too? For in our own time, when neighbours are consumed by extremism, or seduced by conspiracy, our duty is not only to condemn; our duty is to understand, to educate and to bring back into community those who might otherwise be lost.
Let us hear Hogg’s voice today not as an echo from the past but as a warning for the present. He reminds us that democracy, like faith, requires humility. It requires us to admit mistakes; to question ourselves; to accept that none of us—not saint nor statesman—is beyond accountability.
That, members, is the moral that the Scottish Parliament must carry forward—not the false security of being “justified” but the living, daily duty of being just. Thank you.
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