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The final item of business is a members’ business debate on motion S6M-20595, in the name of Marie McNair, on the 85th anniversary of the Clydebank blitz. The debate will be concluded without any question being put. I invite members who wish to participate to press their request-to-speak button.
Motion debated,
That the Parliament commemorates the 85th anniversary of the Clydebank Blitz on 13 and 14 March 2026; understands that on these days in 1941, 439 Luftwaffe bombers dropped more than 1,000 bombs in their raid over the Clydeside, which killed 528 people from Clydebank and seriously injured 617, with Second Avenue having the highest number of deaths; notes that the bombings resulted in Clydebank experiencing a massive loss of housing, with 12,000 houses in the town damaged and 4,300 completely destroyed; further notes that the main targets were the armaments factory in the Singer Sewing Machine works, John Brown & Company’s shipyard and Beardmore’s engine works; acknowledges what it sees as the huge impact the Blitz had on Clydebank, causing incomprehensible hardship, anger and sadness; commends the people of Clydebank for their resilience and celebrates the heroes who saved victims on these dark days and helped with the rebuilding efforts; pays tribute to those who lost their lives, and promises to never forget.
18:39
I am honoured to have secured this debate to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the Clydebank blitz, and I thank members for supporting my motion.
I take the opportunity to thank Clydebank artist and historian Tom McKendrick and many of my constituents for sharing their knowledge of the blitz and shaping the contribution that I will make today. I dedicate this speech to the memory of all those who lost their lives in the Clydebank blitz.
On 13 and 14 March 1941, Clydebank was changed forever. During those two terrifying nights, Clydebank was pounded by the Luftwaffe, which dropped more than 1,000 bombs in its raid over the town, killing 528 people and seriously injuring 617. Those are the official figures, but many more died later as a result of their injuries. Clydebank experienced a massive loss of housing, with 12,000 houses damaged and 4,300 destroyed, leaving only seven houses in the area untouched. It resulted in 35,000 people being made homeless.
The main targets were the armaments factory at the Singer sewing machine factory works, the John Brown & Company shipyards and the William Beardmore and Company engine works. While most of those in the constituency will now be too young to remember the blitz, the stories and the feeling of sheer horror have been passed down through generations . It is not something that the town will ever forget—nor should it—and it has been, and always will be, part of the primary school curriculum.
Clydebank has always been a tight-knit town. Prior to war, it had a dynamic community that truly considered itself to be socialist. The notion that we are all Jock Thompson’s bairns was felt across the town. That is not to say that it was a perfectly equal society—we know that it was not—but, across the board, the Clydebank sense of community was strong and the people were never complacent, with strikes for better pay and working conditions being part of many people’s lives.
Oil was a high-priority target during the war, and Clydebank lay beside what has been described as a category A target, which contained potentially 178 million gallons of fuel oil. At 11:30 pm on 13 March, two and a half hours into the raid, a 250kg mine bomb landed at the junction of Kilbowie Road and Second Avenue in Clydebank, obliterating the town’s water mains, with supplies to firefighting services being instantly cut. Clydebank burned. People could see Clydebank burning from all over Glasgow—I know from speaking to people that that is one of their memories.
It would simply not be possible, in this short speech, to fully depict the devastation and tragedy that occurred. As Tom McKendrick so perfectly put it:
“The Clydebank Blitz could not be least described in a single story. It is thousands of tragic experiences bonded together by a single catastrophic event and like all things which entail human activity it is complex.”
The blitz had a huge impact on my home town of Clydebank. It was the only town in Britain that was rendered uninhabitable as a result of bombing, and the biggest loss to a single family in the blitzing of Britain was that experienced by the Rocks family in Clydebank. Fifteen of the Rocks family were killed on the first night at 78 Jellicoe Street in Dalmuir, alongside so many others.
Ann Holmes, the daughter of Annie Rocks and Walter Greig, records a heartbreaking account of the impact on her family in the book, “Untold Stories: Remembering Clydebank in War Time”, and I commend it to Parliament. Ann promised her mother that she would honour the memorial to the event every year, and the Rocks family attend the service at the communal grave every year in big numbers.
The blitz caused incomprehensible hardship, anger and sadness. For the people of Clydebank, those nights were terrifying, as is made clear in these quotations from Tom McKendrick’s book:
“What I’ll never forget as long as I live was the noise and the screams and cries when I was taken to the First-Aid post. This was something you couldn’t believe, the screams were terrible, people had lost arms and legs, people were doing what they could to help but it was just too much for them”.
“These people were your neighbours, people you had known all your life”.
“The dead were laid out in rows in the school … it’s a sight etched in my mind for ever. All those bodies lined up in neat rows, after all that noise it was the silence that got to you”.
Among this fear, though, was bravery and solidarity. We will never forget the many brave souls who saved others and who often sacrificed themselves. They are our heroes, who will never be forgotten.
The blitz caused irreparable damage and hardship to Clydebank. Many close-knit communities were severed, with many relocated. However, Tom McKendrick is correct to say:
“Clydebank people were no stranger to hardship”,
as those who know the town’s history will know,
“the psychological effect was the exact opposite of what was intended. Rather than divide the community and throw it into frenzied panic, it strengthened and immeasurably hardened peoples’ resolve to survive and resist.”
The sense of community and of a shared longing, as I mentioned earlier, has never left our town and I hope that it never will.
Clydebank paid a heavy price on those nights, but the burden of rebuilding the town fell on the council and the citizens of Clydebank. The replacement of houses resulted in the Burgh of Clydebank being left with an annual deficit of £61,000 for the next 60 years—£61,000 in 1941 would be equivalent to around £3 million now. Not only did the people of Clydebank suffer the bombing; they were also burdened with such a heavy charge because of the high replacement costs for capital lost in the form of houses. That was not right.
I pay tribute to all those who lost their lives on the tragic nights of 13 and 14 March 1941. Eighty-five years on, their memories live on with the people of Clydebank. Clydebank has always been resilient, and no more so than in the aftermath of the blitz. I am forever grateful to the heroes who saved victims on those fateful nights and who helped with the rebuilding of our town. They will never be forgotten.
It is hard for many of us now, in 2026, 85 years on, to comprehend what the Clydebank blitz must have been like. To understand that level of terror and anguish is hard, and in remembering events like the Clydebank blitz, we must be resolute and clear about one thing: this cannot happen again. We, in Clydebank, resolutely take time to remember the blitz and those who were killed.
We also remember the brave Polish sailors of the ORP Piorun, which was docked on the Clyde. They fired their anti-aircraft guns at the bombers in defence of our town, and I pay tribute to those in our town who have done so much to galvanise efforts in their memory, such as Kilbowie St Andrews church, West Dunbartonshire Council, the late Jack Tasker and so many more.
Every year, we gather at the communal grave at Old Dalnottar cemetery above Clydebank, and we will always remember those we lost to such evil.
We move to the open debate.
18:47
I am grateful to Marie McNair for lodging the motion and for her speech. She has brought to us all remembrance of the events of 13 and 14 March 1941, when Clydebank was subject to devastation on a scale that is beyond belief: 439 Luftwaffe bombers and thousands of bombs; 528 killed and 617 seriously injured; and 12,000 homes damaged, with 4,300 destroyed completely. She mentioned the seven houses that were, famously, not damaged, which is an incredible statistic. Second Avenue suffered the heaviest loss of life. As Marie McNair said, whole families were wiped out and streets disappeared.
The targets were strategic. As has been mentioned, they included John Brown’s shipyard, the Beardsmore engine works and the Singer factory. Incendiaries were dropped first, to set the town ablaze, followed by high explosives and parachute mines to finish the job. That was calculated and deliberate—it was the work of a regime that believed that terrorising civilians would break a nation’s will. It did not.
For me, this commemoration is personal. My mother was six years old when her own street in Birmingham was bombed from 19 to 20 November 1940. She lived in a small back-to-back house beside St Andrews football ground. That night, there was no siren and no warning. She remembered her mother suddenly shouting, with absolute authority, “Get out—into the shelter.” There was no visible threat, but she and the other children in the family obeyed. They hurried into the Anderson shelter at the back of the house and, moments later, the bomb struck. Their home was obliterated—brick, timber and dust filled the air, and a fractured pipe began to flood the shelter. My mother told me and my sister many times how she sat in the darkness, hearing the crash of masonry above her, and kept saying to her mother, who was praying for the family, “Pray louder, mummy. Pray louder.”
For six hours they were buried in the rubble, and, when they were finally dug out, cold and soaked, my grandfather, who had been on duty as an air raid warden, was there in what had become a smoking ruin. She remembered being lifted from the rubble and passed into his arms. She carried that night with her for the rest of her life—interestingly, not with bitterness but with gratitude.
Clydebank endured that horror on an even greater scale. Some 35,000 people were left homeless, yet, the next morning, people dug, rescued, cleared and began to rebuild.
The crew of the Polish destroyer that was docked at John Brown’s yard for refitting manned their guns that night and fired back. They stood their ground.
That generation understood evil, because it fell from the sky on to their homes. They knew what Adolf Hitler and his gangsters represented—tyranny, racial hatred, the crushing of liberty—and they defeated it. They endured the bombs, they buried their dead, they rebuilt their town, they refused to be broken. We stand here today because they did that.
We honour the 528 people who were killed that night in Clydebank. We honour those who were injured. We honour the homeless. We honour a generation that faced down violence and terror and prevailed. We will remember them, and we will not forget what they secured for us—our freedom.
18:51
I am grateful to Marie McNair for lodging her motion, which gives us the opportunity to mark the 85th anniversary of the Clydebank blitz—two nights that left an indelible mark not only on Clydebank and Clydeside, but on all of Scotland.
I grew up in Glasgow, a city that, through gaps in tenements that are now largely filled but that were there when I was a child, bore the scars of wartime bombing. However, I was driven to speak in the debate today mainly in memory of my grandparents’ generation and, in particular, in memory of what my grandmother told me of her experience of home-front living in Dumbarton, not too far down the river from Clydebank.
We know that the river was a vital artery of the war effort, which made its communities a target. I see that Jackie Baillie is due to speak, and she will probably speak more about this, but we know that Dumbarton was targeted on the same night as the Clydebank blitz. Thankfully, it suffered nowhere near the same devastation as Clydebank. Of course, a few months later, there was another bombing raid on Dumbarton, but, because of the experience of the previous raid, various mitigations had been put in place, including the misdirection measures and decoy targets that were installed on Lang Craigs moor, so the town was spared a similar fate. Indeed, I recall my grandmother telling me that her father, who was an inspector at the Garshake waterworks and was required to check on those waterworks the next day, said that, if those decoy measures had not been put in place, Dumbarton would definitely have suffered the same fate as Clydebank.
Marie McNair has laid bare the horrors of the Clydebank blitz. In two nights, more than 400 Luftwaffe bombers dropped more than 1,000 bombs, and 528 people were killed and 617 seriously injured. In the retelling of the history of war, there is often a tendency to use numbers like that, but they are not just abstract figures. Among the dead and injured were mothers, fathers, children, sons and daughters, workers and neighbours.
As has already been said, of the roughly 12,000 houses in Clydebank, only a handful—seven—escaped any form of damage, which is quite a staggering thing to imagine, and more than 4,000 were completely destroyed. By the morning after the second raid, there were not only the dead and the injured, but tens of thousands of homeless people. Contemporary accounts describe families walking towards Glasgow, carrying what little they could salvage, with smoke still rising behind them.
We also know that the immediate aftermath brought scenes of extraordinary courage. We know that firefighters—many drafted in from surrounding areas—battled flames that lit up the night sky. Rescue workers and volunteers dug through rubble in search of survivors. Churches and halls became shelters. Neighbouring towns opened their doors. That is a salient reminder that, in the face of incomprehensible hardship, anger and sadness, solidarity prevailed.
The suffering did not conclude with the last bomb. Displacement, overcrowding and trauma persisted for years. The psychological toll was borne quietly by a generation. Despite that, Clydebank endured. It rebuilt its homes and its civic institutions. It sustained its proud industrial tradition and heritage. It did so because its people possessed a resilience forged in adversity and a determination that their community would not be defined solely by destruction.
As we mark and commemorate this 85th anniversary, we should pay tribute to those who lost their lives and to all those who were injured and displaced. We commend the bravery of those who saved others in those dark days and who laboured in the long years of rebuilding that followed. To remember is not merely to look back, but to honour sacrifice and reaffirm our commitment to peace, community and solidarity.
We remember Clydebank.
18:56
I start by thanking Marie McNair for bringing the debate to the chamber. Like others, I pay tribute to the resilience of the people of Clydebank. They paid a heavy price, with direct strikes by the German Luftwaffe in one of the most destructive bombing raids of the second world war almost 85 years ago.
As we have heard, the raid started on Thursday 13 March 1941, just after 9 pm, when 236 German bombers arrived above Clydeside. Towns along the River Clyde were targeted because of their shipyards and factories, which were the engines of Scotland’s war effort. Even Dumbarton was not spared, as a plane got lost and mistook the town for Clydebank, with the result that high-explosive devices and parachute mines destroyed more than 100 homes and claimed 17 lives in the town. As Jamie Hepburn rightly noted, misdirection measures were subsequently implemented, with starfish bunkers presenting a series of decoy fires that directed German bombers away from Dumbarton in further raids.
However, in Clydebank, the devastation was significantly worse. As Marie McNair rightly said, 528 people lost their lives that night, a further 617 were seriously injured and thousands more were hurt, cut or traumatised by the blast. Some 12,000 dwellings were destroyed. Every community, from Bowling and Old Kilpatrick through Dalmuir, Radnor Park, Parkhall, Mountblow, Whitecrook and Duntocher to Yoker, was razed to the ground. The next day, almost 40,000 people started the great evacuation out of the area. Some ended up walking to Glasgow, others to Kirkintilloch. The lucky ones came to Dumbarton and the Vale of Leven.
I came across a letter from Thomas Kearns, a riveter who fled his home the day after the raid with his family and moved to Main Street, Alexandria. He wrote it to his pal Patrick Diamond. Unfortunately, Patrick never received it, because the censor would not let it through, such was the detail it contained. I will share some of it with the chamber. The letter talked about
“a ‘Murderous Attack’ on the poor defenceless women and children in their homes, terrorising and sending to eternity the peaceful and industrious citizens of the industrious town of Clydebank.”
Thomas continued:
“We were just sitting at the fire after the children got to bed, the gunfire started, this made us a bit panicky naturally, a hurried dressing of the children and rush down to the close level with our neighbours and there we remained for 9½ hours, with the bombs and land-mines dropping from the moon-light heavens.
They seemed never to cease … The buildings began to rock with the heavy high explosives, windows began to blow in, doors and ceilings, slates and plaster with mixtures of soot and God knows what.
The building was on fire at the bridge end, and to keep Goering’s Bombers with a good target Singer’s enormous piles of wood got set to a raging furnace which could be seen for miles and high. They peppered away, never a lull in all this time.”
Time prevents me from sharing more, but I commend the letter to members.
Within weeks of that devastation, production resumed along the Clyde. Thomas Kearns, who wrote that letter, was among those who had returned to work. The people along the Clyde were not intimidated, and the same spirit endures today. The threats that we face today may be different, but they are present and evolving. We need to make sure that the lessons of the second world war are never forgotten.
A previous generation rebuilt the towns along the Clyde from the ashes. Today, as we remember those who lost their lives, their homes and their families in the blitz, let us honour them by paying tribute to their determination to rebuild and to defend their nation.
19:00
I thank my colleague Marie McNair for bringing this important debate to the chamber and for giving us the opportunity to remember and reflect. We remember the losses, the lives cut short, the families broken and the homes reduced to rubble on those terrible nights, yet we also remember the ordinary men and women who, in extraordinary circumstances, displayed such resilience and courage.
As we have heard, Clydebank bore the brunt of the raids, but the attacks were not confined to there. Bombs fell across our city of Glasgow, especially in areas such as Partick, Temple and Knightswood. Tenements shook, windows shattered, families huddled in closes and, ultimately, many lost their lives or their loved ones.
In the aftermath of the Clydebank bombing, thousands of survivors fled from Clydebank, and many went to Glasgow. Communities that were already strained by war were almost overwhelmed, but they were proud to open the doors to those displaced people who had bravely stood up to what had happened to them.
In 2010, John MacLeod captured the trauma in his celebrated book, “River of Fire: The Clydebank Blitz”. As the author so eloquently recounts, it had been
“a beautiful day in Clydebank—dry, sunny, the first bashful daffodils—and, after school, after their tea and till well after dusk, nine-year old Brendan Kelly played football on Jellicoe Street with his big pal, 13-year-old Tommy Rocks.
But, bedtime beckoning, they abandoned their game and sat at the tenement door, marvelling as the great full moon rose over the town, illuminating every highway and the shimmering Clyde itself.
‘God,’ breathed Tommy. ‘Look at that moon. If Jerry comes tonight, he cannae miss…’”
Jerry did come that very night and took little Tommy Rocks. John MacLeod continues:
“The attack was of such intensity that the explosions could be heard in distant Bridge of Allan; the glow in the night sky, as Clydebank burned, visible from Aberdeenshire, from the Inner Hebrides, and even from Ireland.”
Yet, for all that suffering, for all that sacrifice, history did not always give those events the prominence that they deserved. Much of the devastation and death from the German bombing raid was, for a time, wiped from our national story. The lack of adequate air defences and the lack of preparation were matters too uncomfortable for those in authority to confront. Shamefully, many victims were not even given a proper burial, with a vast mass grave being dug in Dalnottar cemetery, where, without the dignity of even cardboard coffins, corpses were interred wrapped in sheets knotted with string. Similarly, in the cellar beneath a Dalmuir pub, where dozens were killed, authorities did not even bother to recover the bodies—they just poured in quicklime. In the national press, a photograph of that mass grave was cropped on censors’ orders, so that its sheer size would not be apparent.
As we know, the second world war ended with the unprecedented horror of the nuclear devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—cities annihilated in moments, humanity brought to the brink by weapons of unimaginable power. Today, those dangers have not receded. We live in an age of renewed geopolitical tension, of modernised arsenals, of doctrines that still contemplate the unthinkable. Here, in Scotland, we have HMNB Clyde a short distance from Clydebank and our largest city of Glasgow. Just as in 1941, we must ask ourselves whether that proximity places a target on our back—whether we have learned the lessons that history has written in fire. Today, as we remember those past horrors, we must speak out against the potential of today’s, and we must work together to ensure that they are not repeated.
I will offer a minor tangent. My granda, Davie Gray, who worked on the building of the Kelvingrove art gallery in Glasgow—a famous and beautiful place—was a very good stonemason and he built a massive Anderson shelter at the back of our family’s house, in Temple. One night—it would be the night of the Clydebank blitz—the bombing was very intense and the family all went into the Anderson shelter. The old man from upstairs ran in and said, “Oh, Davie, I think we’re gonnae get it this time—just listen to how close they’re getting there.” My granda said, “I think you might be right, Willie—I think you might be right. Just think, though: there’s weans in here—away and put your bloody troosers on.”
That is one of the true stories that took place at the time. Sorry for the industrial language, Presiding Officer, but there you go.
Thank you—I think—Mr Kidd.
19:05
I thank Marie McNair for bringing the debate to the chamber.
People might ask why a member from Ayrshire who represents the South Scotland region would ask to speak in a debate about the Clydebank blitz. The truth is that my dad, Bill Mochan, is a Bankie. He has not lived in Clydebank for a long time, but he has always maintained his connection to the town and has spoken with pride, humour and love for Clydebank.
My nana and papa, Annie and Jimmy Mochan, and my Auntie Agnes all lived through the two nights of bombing. My nana and papa did not often speak about those evenings—there was nothing about the fear, the loss of life or the effect that the bombing must have had on them emotionally. Rather, they spoke occasionally about the loss of buildings or the loss felt by other families. On the other hand, Auntie Agnes did speak about the nights themselves—about the noise, the shelters and the devastation as they emerged from the bunkers.
I do not think that I fully understood the events until I was much older. I know now that the Clydebank blitz was one of the most destructive air raids in Scotland during the second world war and had lasting impacts on the town and its people. As others have said, the brutal attack occurred over two nights, on 13 and 14 March 1941. People were killed and infrastructure was damaged, and pretty much the whole population of Clydebank became homeless basically overnight. On reflection, I wonder why my elders did not describe it in that way to me. Perhaps, like so many working-class people throughout history, they accepted the things—often, brutal things—that happened to their communities.
I want to raise three points in my reflections on the Clydebank blitz. First, as my Uncle Jim reminded me last night, the Government covered up what was happening at the time. The media reports cited only a town in western Scotland, while official censorship suppressed casualty figures and imagery of the near-total destruction of the town’s housing. Photos were cropped and film crews were not permitted in. In this day and age, with immediate films, Instagram and all the social media that we now have, it seems unbelievable that such restrictions were able to be put in place.
My second point relates to the rebuilding of Clydebank after the war. The devastation happened in 1941, but I have a childhood memory of sitting in the back of a car—probably in about 1977, more than 30 years later—and asking about a little side building that had an old fireplace and wallpaper that seemed out of its time. My papa replied, “Yes, that came down in the blitz.” That was many years later, so I now think to myself that the Clydebank community, like so many working-class communities, was somewhat abandoned during the rebuilding in favour of perhaps more affluent and less industrial communities.
My final point is how similar that feeling is to the feeling in my community. I live in a working-class ex-mining area. It was not bombed in 1941, but it has definitely been abandoned at times by Governments. Just as the pit closures were an insult to the miners who contributed so much to Scotland’s culture and economy, deindustrialisation in the years after the war led to Clydebank experiencing generations of unemployment, a lack of investment by Governments and an accepted decline in services. Neither the miners nor the shipbuilders created those conditions; rather, their communities fell victim to the social and economic problems that we all know about and have observed. Governments had no contingency plans, provided no support and had no sympathy for communities as times changed and decisions were made that removed opportunities from people in those areas. Working-class communities continue to face those realities.
I pay tribute to the people of Clydebank. I pay tribute to those who lost their lives during the blitz and to the local people who immediately came to people’s aid in many different ways. I also pay tribute to the communities that went on, are resilient and continue to demand that Governments do better.
I invite Graeme Dey to wind up the debate.
19:09
I thank Marie McNair for securing this members’ business debate to mark the 85th anniversary of the tragic events that took place in Clydebank on 13 and 14 March 1941.
It is entirely fitting that we come together today to reflect on what was the worst destruction and civilian loss of life in Scotland during the second world war. It is something that should never be forgotten, especially as we move further away from the events themselves. I am sad to say that the lessons of the past are becoming increasingly relevant as world events grow more turbulent in ways that we might not have expected a few years ago.
Standing here responding to the debate, I have a sense of déjà vu. Five years ago, I found myself filling exactly the same role when Ms McNair’s predecessor, Gil Paterson, brought a members’ business debate to mark the 80th anniversary of the blitz. Just to spare mischievous colleagues from indulging in research, let me assure them that my speech is not a copy‑and‑paste job from 2021. However, I must say that I seem to have heard before the tangential tale that Bill Kidd regaled us with, and there is a nagging doubt at the back of my mind that it may have featured five years ago.
To be serious, what is clear from the debate—we have had some excellent contributions from members, who have vividly brought back to life the events of 85 years ago—is that we are united in recognising the formidable spirit of the people of Clydebank and that their courage, their determination and their efforts to rebuild their community amid such devastation deserve lasting remembrance.
As we have heard, in just two nights, Luftwaffe bombers transformed a once vibrant industrial community into a landscape of ruin. The scale of destruction was immense, with only seven of about 12,000 homes undamaged by the blitz and 35,000 people left homeless. Many families were devastated by loss and injury. It is almost impossible to comprehend the scale of what unfolded.
Those nights left an indelible mark on Clydebank, but they also forged a legacy of unity and resolve that continues to define the community today. In the face of devastation, people pulled together and worked tirelessly for three days to rescue trapped victims and minimise loss of life. Their actions serve as a lasting reminder of the strength that can arise from even the darkest of circumstances.
Of course, it was not only the people of Clydebank who pulled together but the brave crew of the Polish navy destroyer ORP Piorun. As we heard, the destroyer came to the defence of the town, where it was docked for a refit at the John Brown & Company shipyard. Coincidentally, the vessel was, when she was acquired by the Polish navy in 1940, constructed in the same John Brown dockyard at Clydebank that she later defended during the blitz. By the time of the blitz, the vessel and its commander had already played a key role in the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck.
The story of the ship and her crew are symbolic of the enduring ties between Scotland and Poland, which span centuries and reach across culture, economy and society. The very depth of our ties is demonstrated by the fact that, by the 17th century, there were more than 30,000 Scots in Poland.
We are extremely grateful to our large Polish community today for making the opposite journey and calling Scotland home. From the courageous Polish soldiers of world war two to the young families who have settled here in more recent years, and the many Polish nationals who now contribute their talent and dedication within the Scottish Government, we thank them for their service and the vital role that they play in shaping the Scotland of today.
The redevelopment of the former John Brown shipyard, which is now called Queens Quay, where the ORP Piorun was built and docked on the night of the blitz, marked a major milestone in the regeneration of the historic shipyard site. The first phase of the development has delivered 146 high-quality affordable homes, which is a significant investment in the future of Clydebank’s community.
We have a monument commemorating the civilians killed during the Clydebank blitz that was unveiled in West Dunbartonshire in 2009, with the names of the people inscribed on a bronze plaque. The memorial sits over the remains of Clydebank’s unclaimed dead, to ensure that we never forget those who lost their lives and that current and future generations learn of these historic events and the strength that emerged from them.
The minister is making an excellent speech. Does he think that it is highly appropriate that we are debating this subject on the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which at least 15,000 Ukrainian civilians have died? The lessons of Clydebank and this country’s experience in the second world war are not lost on us now, as we support the Ukrainians. Does he agree with that sentiment?
I absolutely agree with that sentiment. Oddly enough, as I was sitting here earlier today thinking about the debate, the thought that was going through my mind was that this is unfolding in Ukraine right now, so we really have not learned the lessons of the terrible tragedy of 85 years ago.
As I prepare to step down from my role as minister for veterans, I find myself reflecting on what a privilege it has been to represent our armed forces and the veterans community. Commemorating the Clydebank blitz reminds me, as I think it should for all of us, that sacrifice during conflict is not solely the preserve of combatants and their families. Remarkable courage was shown in Clydebank in the face of profound loss and unimaginable hardship, and it is absolutely right and proper that we recognise that tonight.
That concludes the debate.
Meeting closed at 19:15.
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