Chamber and committees

I have a follow-up question. Audit Scotland made a number of recommendations on progress in delivering the Promise in a report that was published in October 2025. It is not clear what progress has been made in addressing those recommendations. Can you provide an update to the committee on how those recommendations are being taken forward?

I want to ensure that we are cognisant of the time, because other members still have to come in. We can always come back if we have time after that.

Thank you so much for your contributions this morning. That brings our session to a close.

Meeting closed at 11:11.

I open questions up to members.

I hope that we will dig into more of that in the session.

Nobody should be made a stranger in the place that they call home. That is the Scotland that I believe in, and that is the Scotland that I will always stand up for.

To ask the Scottish Government what funding it expects to receive from the United Kingdom Government’s fishing and coastal growth fund, broken down by financial year. (S7O-00182)

In thinking about this debate, I kept coming back to one word in the title of the motion—the word “Together”, because what is at stake is the kind of communities that we want to live in, and what we should do when something starts to pull them apart.

I do not want to say that racism is somehow “back”, which I keep hearing. It never went away. What concerns me is that it feels more unmasked, people feel more emboldened, and we are hearing the dog whistles more openly. In the language that I am referring to, race might never be mentioned, but we know who is being described when the word “stranger” is used, and who people are being encouraged to fear. Behind that language are human beings who hear a conversation about whether they belong.

In my constituency, I have seen how quickly misinformation and prejudice can come together. Last summer, 122 young sea cadets arrived at a training centre in Boddam for summer camp, under the command of the royal naval reserve. A photograph of them was posted online, along with claims that immigrants were being secretly brought into the village. They were children. Nobody had asked who they were. They were looked at, labelled and turned into strangers, and, suddenly, there were concerns for their safety and they had to cut short their camp. That is where misinformation and racism meet, because the lie only works if people have already been encouraged to believe that the stranger is someone to fear.

I remember something similar happening when a photograph of young Afghan men who were living locally was shared on one of our community Facebook pages. Some of the comments really stayed with me. Those young men had travelled through countries and refugee camps and crossed here in dangerous conditions. They arrived knowing nobody, thousands of miles from home, only to read people making assumptions about them online. There is a human being at the other end of the dog whistle—the person who is told that they are a stranger in a place where they are trying to make a life.

Those same young men found something very different at Fraserburgh Cricket Club. When Omar was asked what he liked the most, he said:

“It’s our teammates, and just being part of the team.”

I could spend a paragraph defining “community cohesion”, but I think that Omar did it better.

Cohesion is what happens when labels fall away and people meet as neighbours, classmates, workmates and teammates. We saw that spirit, too, in Banff, when a divisive message was taken there and local people came out in greater numbers to peacefully reject it. Cohesion is not passive—it is correcting the false post, recognising the dog whistle and challenging it when it comes from a friend, a colleague or someone around our own family table.

It is easy to oppose racism when it belongs to somebody else. The real test is what we do when it enters our own circle. That is why education matters. The late Sir Geoff Palmer told the Parliament:

“Although we cannot change the past, we can change consequences such as racism for the better, using education.”—[Official Report, 21 September 2021; c 2.]

We need to help young people to recognise prejudice and misinformation, support schools and grass-roots organisations, and act firmly when hatred becomes intimidation or violence.

Political leadership matters, too. People have every right to be concerned about housing, public services and the cost of living, and our job is to answer those concerns honestly. However, refugees and migrants did not create those problems.

Scotland has more than 60 per cent of the UK’s fishing capacity and lands more than 75 per cent of UK quota species, yet Westminster allocated less than 8 per cent of the fund to Scotland, or £28 million over 12 years. That was a political choice as, previously, agricultural funding was devolved without being Barnettised. I fully understand why fishers are looking to the Scottish Government for help, because businesses, jobs, and communities matter. Will the minister press the Treasury for a fairer settlement to reflect Scotland’s share of the industry, while working across Government with industry to maximise support now?

Sit down.

Scapegoating refugees and migrants will not build a house, reduce an energy bill or shorten an NHS waiting list. When politicians take genuine frustration and give it a human target, that is not leadership; it is a cowardly escape from true accountability.

When I talk about unity, I do not mean silence or pretending that we all agree. I mean deciding that, whatever our disagreements, nobody’s humanity should be up for debate. If racism is becoming louder and more emboldened, our answer has to be more than warm words. It has to be truth, education, solidarity and the everyday courage to speak up in our homes, in our communities, online and especially in the Parliament.