Chamber and committees

As a member of the committee that scrutinised the bill at stage 1, I put on record my thanks to my colleagues for their diligence, to the clerks and SPICe for their immense support, and to all who contributed via our call for views and through our evidence sessions. There are passionate views on the subject of assisted dying, and I believe that our report reflected that while demonstrating committee scrutiny at its best. I also thank Liam McArthur for introducing the bill and for the way in which he has conducted himself.

I am speaking in the debate as an individual MSP, but I am also representing the majority of my constituents, who support in principle a terminally ill, mentally competent individual’s right to choose an assisted death. I am also speaking on behalf of my family in what I feel is the final act that I can carry out on behalf of my late mum, Irene McLeod. A five-minute speech does not feel long enough to do her justice, nor does it feel long enough for me to say all that I want to say as a humanist about bodily autonomy and choice. I respectfully ask my colleagues to refrain from intervening on me during this speech, which feels so personal and so important. I am not sure that I will get through it all without some tears.

My mum was all sorts of awesome. She was a teenage mum. She devoted her life to her kids, her husband, her friends and her family, and to social justice. She loved music and swore blind that Bon Scott was the best AC/DC singer and that Van Halen ceased to exist when David Lee Roth left the band. She was honoured in death by having the boys from Biffy Clyro at her funeral.

She was funny, sarcastic, passionate and complicated. Her name was Irene, but behind her back we sometimes called her “irate” or “I scream”. She made the best damn food you could ever eat. She spent too many nights in the company of Mr Smirnoff with her beloved menthol cigarettes, while reading a literal library’s worth of books.

She was a tigress when it came to fighting for what was right. From my teenage years, I was under no illusion about the fact that she believed that we all deserve the right to leave this world with compassion and dignity should we find ourselves dealing with a terminal illness. She was emphatic that she did not ever want to suffer, and she believed that no one should be denied the choice of an assisted death.

My mum was told that she had terminal stage 4 lung cancer in February 2014 and she was dead five short weeks later. As an aside, I note that she was really angry that she never got to vote in the independence referendum. I had not even processed the fact that she was ill by the time we were ordering her wicker casket.

She was only 58. She had so much to live for, yet her final decision on this earth was to starve herself in order to hasten her inevitable death. We had three weeks while they tried radiation to shrink the tumours that were robbing her of oxygen, to no avail. Every single moment was spent just trying to breathe—trying to get enough air into her diseased lungs to allay her all-encompassing terror. It was awful.

My mum did not tell us what she was doing. I think that she knew that we were not ready to let her go, and she wanted to protect us from her decision. However, her mind was made up in her usual headstrong manner, and she had the agreement of her medical team that she could choose to die that way. It is currently the only way in which the medical establishment will allow a death when you have a terminal illness.

I cannot even fathom the internal conflict that she must have experienced as she was consumed first by hunger and then by the urgent need to drink. It took two weeks for her to starve to death. She went from feeding a virtual army at Christmas time, seemingly hale and hearty, to being dead and weighing next to nothing on 23 March 2014. Make no mistake, she was vulnerable. Terminally ill folk are among our most vulnerable and our weakest people under current laws.

She woke up very briefly on the morning she passed away, when she was not sedated quickly enough. None of us will ever forget the terror on her face when she realised that she was not dead after being unconscious for three days. My mum deserved to be able to plan a compassionate death, surrounded by her family, not one that she had to conduct in secret, with us finding out only when a caring nurse explained what she had been enduring prior to lapsing into unconsciousness. She was really clever and she hid all the water that she was not drinking, putting tissues in the cup so that we did not know.

No one should be forced to starve themselves, travel overseas or use other traumatic methods to end their life when dealing with a terminal diagnosis. Voting today to keep the status quo is an act that is not without consequence. People will continue to make choices like the one made by my mum. She deserved better and we deserve better. Let us vote for this bill at stage 1 to continue the conversation.

Statistics recently highlighted by Shelter Scotland show that black people and people of colour are bearing the brunt of Scotland’s housing emergency, with 27 per cent of all failures to provide temporary accommodation and 28 per cent of unsuitable accommodation order breaches being experienced by those households. They can also expect to spend longer in temporary accommodation than white Scottish households. Will the cabinet secretary update the chamber on the actions that the Scottish Government can take to target support for those families who are facing systemic inequalities in Scotland’s housing system?

It is important that we recognise people such as my grandfather, who, due to being in a reserved occupation as a dairyman, was part of the home guard, and my gran, who fibbed about her age and left the Calton in Glasgow to come down to Ayrshire with the land army, and who received a medal in recognition of her service only in 2008. Does the minister agree that it is important that we remember them?

To ask the Scottish Government what action it is taking to tackle any racism in Scotland’s housing and homelessness systems. (S6O-04634)

I am interested in exploring the timeframes and the timelines as set out. We know that they are very challenging: halting nature loss by 2030 and having restored and regenerated biodiversity by 2045. What are the panel’s thoughts on how we ensure that the targets are set within realistic and achievable timelines and timeframes? Do you have any input on that for us?

As the question was being asked, I thought, “I was going to bring that up.” I would like to explore the issue a little further. It is difficult not only to conceptualise and then implement the targets, but to measure whether they have been met. Professor Park talked about how difficult it is for us to imagine what we have lost.

If we look across at our other targets, such as our climate targets, which have been mentioned, how can we use them and other targets that are out there to help to drive the targets that we are talking about today and to understand how to measure progress on those? How can we measure something that we do not understand at the moment? It is very difficult to understand what net biodiversity gain will look like and how we can measure it.

I studied environmental science at college as a teenager—I am 50 now, so that is a very long time ago. At that time, we spoke about tackling CFCs and other things that we were able to take tangible steps towards. Some of the things that we are talking about are things that I recognise from back then, when there were no targets set for change to happen.

I am interested in exploring what Jamie Whittle said about how we get not only public confidence but public sector confidence and business confidence, and the roles that they will play in this. We would not want other sectors to fall foul and not keep up with what they need to do, because everybody is responsible for this. In the timeframes that we have, will we be able to take the public, the public sector and the private sector on this journey with us to ensure that they play their role and do not fall foul of any legislation that we bring forward?

Do you feel that measuring progress on nature conservation is a bit more subjective because there is not a hard data set to look at in the same way that there is with climate change, on which there are numbers that we can look at?

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the measures that it is taking to support households to reduce emissions and energy costs. (S6O-04602)

The minister will be aware that large rural areas of Scotland, such as my constituency, have unique challenges that can make decarbonisation financially prohibitive for many home owners, be that due to the age and fabric of their home or their home being positioned in a conservation area where options such as solar panels are not allowed. Does the minister agree that citizens who live in such homes must be supported to find a balance between reaching net zero and reducing fuel poverty? Can the Scottish Government assist them in that?