Chamber and committees

What is the Salvation Army’s perspective?

How can a family or an individual challenge decisions if they are not getting access to the support that they believe that they require? That, to me, is the nub of the issue: if they do not have a right in legislation, what is the remedy? Do we lack a remedy at the moment?

Jan Mayor has already touched on something that answers my second question. To what extent would the bill complement, or even conflict with, the charter of rights for people who are affected by substance use? I am concerned that the Scottish human rights bill that was meant to underpin the charter of rights is not on the horizon. Annemarie, I see your hand going up. I am interested in hearing how you think the bill might complement or conflict with the charter of rights.

I guess that my question was really about how we ensure that somebody is able, and has the right, to access what will work for them at the earliest opportunity to prevent some of this from happening down the line. I know that Graeme Callander wants to come in, and I do not know whether Annemarie Ward has anything to say.

Graeme, I will bring you in briefly—I know that we have loads of questions from other members.

Thank you. I think that accountability and implementation will be big topics this morning.

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)