Chamber and committees

I thank the cabinet secretary for that helpful answer; it is good to hear about the progress that is being made.

Does the cabinet secretary agree that reducing the number of non-violent offenders who are imprisoned has helped to reduce disruption to children and families who are negatively impacted emotionally and financially, and that we must continue to make progress in this area?

To ask the Scottish Government what progress it has made on expanding the use of electronic monitoring for non-violent criminals. (S6O-01850)

That is interesting and helpful; thank you.

How would that compare with the resources in England? Do you have a view on the size of team that you think would actually be required in reality in Scotland?

I will come back to the gender aspect. My daughter was very ill when she was small: one bit of advice that I would give to female parents is that they make sure that they take a male with them, because they tend to be listened to more.

Is there scope for the commissioner to make the fact that women do not seem to be listened to an overarching issue that they look for in all the evidence that they consider across all the issues that they cover?

It was good to hear Simon Whale talk about reducing the risk of harm and, possibly, reducing litigation costs. However, the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman has expressed some concern that the resources that are set out in the financial memorandum fall short of the ambition for the post. What are the witnesses’ comments on that?

I thank Siobhian Brown for bringing the debate to the chamber and for all the work that she has been doing on the issue for quite some time.

There have been some great speeches that have covered all the main points—sales and advertising, flavours, recent reports and statistics, the environmental impacts and the health impacts—so I will keep my contribution quite short. However, I wanted to speak in the debate because—I admit it—I am a vaper. Quite a lot of people know that already; I have vaped for several years. My mum is always on at me to stop, and I hope that, one day, I will, but not right now.

After smoking cigarettes for 30-plus years, I am massively relieved that I now vape instead of smoking. Giving up the fags is probably the best thing that I have ever done for myself. I used to lie awake at night worrying. I did not want to die and not see my children grow up and not meet my grandkids. Cigarettes kill, as I think we all know. My dad died of lung cancer in 2020. His dad—my granda—was also a smoker and he died of lung cancer relatively young. My mum was a smoker, but she stopped decades ago. She has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is likely to have been caused by the fags.

For many people, vaping is a really valuable route to stopping smoking. I am not sure that I could ever have stopped otherwise, and I am certainly not alone in that. However, although quitting smoking is one of the best things that I have ever done, and vaping helped me to get there, as a parent, I am seriously worried about the sharp rise in the number of young people who regularly use vapes.

The main point that I want to labour tonight is that although vaping is a valuable tool in stopping smoking, marketing recreational single-use vapes to young people who have never smoked is an entirely different issue. We must not conflate the two. Evidence shows that vapes are less harmful than tobacco, but we do not yet know what long-term health harms are caused by breathing vape liquids into your lungs. Frankly, it is high time that we got rid of the rainbow displays at vape bars, where every flavour under the sun is available. I fully support the suggestions that have been made by other members.

Is vaping less dangerous than smoking? The evidence tells us that it is. How safe or harmful is vaping? In truth, we really do not know, but it is common sense that breathing such substances into your lungs is not a good thing. That is why I hope that I will stop vaping at some point. Less bad than smoking does not equal good, which is why I believe that urgent action is needed to protect our young people and avoid a new generation of nicotine addicts.

I will finish with a question: who benefits from creating a new generation of nicotine addicts? I think that we all know what the answer is.

I thank Fergus Ewing for today’s debate and his touching speech. The other speeches have been fantastic, too. Holocaust memorial day is a time to remember the millions of people who were murdered during the Holocaust under Nazi persecution.

Our world is scarred by genocide and we seek to learn the lessons of the past, recognising that genocide does not just take place on its own; it is a steady process that begins with discrimination, racism and hatred that grow and spread when left unchecked. Therefore, it is the responsibility of ordinary people—every individual—to challenge discrimination on their own doorsteps. That takes courage and is easier said than done on many occasions, but it is not good enough just to talk the talk; we must walk the walk, too, because the language of hatred and exclusion has not gone away. To quote Sir Nicholas Winton, who rescued 669 children from Nazi-occupied Europe,

“Don’t be content in your life just to do no wrong, be prepared every day to try and do some good.”

Paul O’Kane has already mentioned young people, and I will focus with real pride on a few schools in towns and villages across my home constituency of Uddingston and Bellshill. The first is St Gerard’s primary school in Bellshill, which has planned a school assembly to remember all those who were murdered during the Holocaust. The primary 7 class topic is already world war two. They will start studying the Holocaust on memorial day, linking that to racism, antisemitism and prejudice, and they will also celebrate the diversity and culture within their school, in North Lanarkshire and right the way across wider Scotland.

Next, we have Brannock high school out in Newarthill. Tomorrow, its themed event is “ordinary day”. That will be led by senior pupils who visited Auschwitz, again through the Holocaust Educational Trust. The students will play three pieces of Jewish music, which I think is lovely. Every pupil at the school has taken part in Holocaust lessons and made a butterfly to represent hope—all the butterflies put together made a touching visual display.

I was delighted to learn recently that the school has been awarded level 1 vision school status. Pupils will attend Parliament next month to receive their award, and members can expect a little motion from me on the detail about how the school won—I hope that they all sign up to it.

Finally, at Holy Cross high school in Hamilton, students are considering ordinary people, talking about turning a blind eye and believing in propaganda, and about how ordinary people join the murderous regimes that facilitate genocide, as Fergus Ewing pointed out. As well as commemorating victims of the Holocaust, pupils will consider more recent genocides and the relevance that those terrible events have for today’s world. They will talk about persecution, oppression and how genocide seeks to absolutely destroy particular groups of people; they will relate that to the challenges that Roma, Tutsi and other communities still face today.

Today, a PowerPoint presentation highlighting Holocaust atrocities will run continually in the main street area of the school, which all pupils will pass by. I give a special mention to a couple of sixth year pupils, Emma Murdoch and Ailish Donachie, who took part in the school’s lessons from Auschwitz programme. Those young women have been delivering presentations, and tomorrow’s will be followed by a sixth year ceremony, in which students will receive a little padlock on which they will write a message before fastening it to the fence outside the classroom area. The long-term plan is to establish a Holocaust memorial garden.

The lessons from Auschwitz programme is a long-standing tradition at Holy Cross. One of the current history teachers, Ms Lucy Ferguson, took part in it 10 years ago as a pupil; she is now encouraging her own pupils to get involved and is working with Emma and Ailish to find next year’s students to take part.

I am so proud of all the schools that are taking part in the Holocaust memorial day—the ones that I have mentioned and all the others that I have not. As I have said in the chamber previously, children and young people are everyone’s future. Our children are the leaders of tomorrow and it is our children—ordinary children—in turn, who will seek to pass on the lessons of the Holocaust to future generations.

No—it is fine.

I want to pick up on your point about supermarket-branded products not following suit. We have a situation in which, for example, the cheapest own-brand cereals are not fortified with nutrients in the same way as some of the leading brands or the more expensive own-brand products are. Has that come up at all in conversation?