Chamber and committees

If anybody else wants to answer, they should indicate that.

Does anybody have ideas about how we can improve accountability at implementation level—local authority level and school level? At the moment, there is a lot of scrutiny and accountability at Government policy level, but I think, from what I hear, that more of that should happen at local authority level and school level.

I absolutely agree that there are amazing pockets—they are actually quite vast—of good practice. I have taken part in cluster projects and shared good practice. Our challenge now is to ensure that practice is consistent across all 32 local authorities. We can explore that further.

My supplementary, which is for Becky Francis, goes back to an issue that was raised a few questions ago. I was interested in your comment about attainment being the primary outcome and that you consider wellbeing, too. Do you consider other positive pathways such as apprenticeships?

I also wanted to ask about tutoring and the expectation on our young people and children to go to school between 9 o’clock and 3 or 4 o’clock and then do additional work. I wonder how many adults would want to do additional work in the evening—indeed, I am always mindful of that impact. [Interruption.] Yes, that was a comment, convener.

Has any thought been given to the impact of that? Adults seem to think that additional tutoring is a good thing. I am not against it by any means, but has there has been any consultation with young people and learners on what they feel about doing that additional work? What is the take-up rate?

Before I let people in, I want to make a comment about the Volunteer Tutors Organisation, which I had the chance to meet a couple of weeks ago. It is based in the Glasgow Kelvin constituency, and its amazing work is being rolled out across and beyond Glasgow. I just wanted to put that on the record.

It is understandable that students and staff might be anxious about exams and need assurances that the process will be fair and the results that are awarded will reflect their hard work. What extra steps has the SQA taken to ensure that the appeals process takes account of the disruption that has been caused to learners?

When we think of the cornerstones of democracy, a few things come to mind. In the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the concept is projected in the statement:

“The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government”

In a free and fair society, it is the will of the people that prevails, and it is the will of the people that the UK Elections Bill seeks to undermine.

In September 2021, a report that was published by the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights raised concerns about the introduction of voter ID. The committee stated:

“The Government must explain why they have concluded that a voter ID requirement at polling stations is necessary and proportionate given (i) the low number of reported cases of fraud at polling stations, (ii) the even lower number of convictions and cautions; (iii) the potential for the requirement to discriminate against certain groups; and (iv) the lack of any clear measures to combat potential discrimination faced by those groups, including disabled people and older people.”

I, too, am eagerly awaiting that explanation, and I am yet to hear a convincing argument that the proposals are, in fact, necessary and proportionate.

In a small number of pilots that were carried out at local elections in 2018 and 2019, more than 1,000 people were turned away for not having the right ID and subsequently did not come back.

I am afraid that I do not have time. I am going to plough through.

It does not take much to imagine how those numbers would soar if we were to scale up that approach in a local election. In fact, the Electoral Reform Society, citing the UK Government’s own statistics, says that 38 per cent of Asian voters, 31 per cent of people with mixed ethnicity and 48 per cent of black citizens do not currently hold any form of photo ID. Research that was carried out by the Cabinet Office found that it was also more common for respondents with disabilities to say that a requirement for photo ID would make them less likely to vote.

The information that I have given should be enough on its own to ensure that any person who is even remotely interested in preserving democracy and democratic integrity should denounce this bill for what it is: a tool of voter suppression that is guaranteed to affect the most marginalised communities in our society and, perhaps, as has been mentioned by my colleagues, the most bizarre case yet of Trumpian mimicry by the Conservatives.

I share the concerns that have been expressed by my friend in the Welsh Senedd, Rhys ab Owen. We have issued a joint statement setting out those concerns, and we would like to thank the #HandsOffOurVote campaign for its support in this area.

We have seen examples of measures to increase electoral participation such as extending the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds as well as to foreign nationals. Scotland has also introduced a fairer electoral system for local elections via the adoption of the single transferable vote. However, the Elections Bill signifies that the Tories would prefer to move in the opposite direction and force increased use of the already problematic first-past-the-post system, threaten the independence of the Electoral Commission and disenfranchise even more voters along the way.

In conclusion, one thing is clear in all of this: Westminster is not working for anyone right now. Amidst the shambolic display of disdain for the electorate that is currently being evidenced, the UK Government’s insistence on pursuing an authoritarian and hostile agenda poses the greatest risk of all to our most basic freedoms. As the human rights activist Loung Ung declared:

“Voting is not only our right—it is our power.”

We cannot let that power slip through our fingers.

What impact is increased investment in teacher recruitment having on pupil to teacher ratios?

Does the First Minister share my view that, if the Scottish Conservatives sincerely want to support Scotland’s railway network, passengers and employees, they should lobby their colleagues in the UK Government for full devolution of responsibility for Scotland’s railway to the Scottish Parliament?

I express my sincere thanks to Jackson Carlaw for lodging the motion, and I am honoured to speak in the debate. I also want to acknowledge the educators up and down the country and across the world who are teaching our next generations about Holocaust memorial day.

It can be difficult to know where to begin or what words to use when attempting to contemplate such an atrocity. Indeed, that feeling was expressed by Holocaust survivor Sonia Weitz in 1995, 50 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, in a poem that she read aloud to a group of middle-school students in the United States. She proffered the following lines:

“Come, take this giant leap with me

Into the other world, the other place,

Where language fails and imagery defies”.

To educate ourselves and confront the most painful and depraved aspects of our history is to take that giant leap.

In our struggle to comprehend the incomprehensible, survivor testimony has always been one of the strongest tools that we have. As such, I would like to thank the Scottish Jewish Heritage Centre in Garnethill, in my constituency, for sharing two stories with me and for keeping these memories alive through an extensive collection of refugee testimonies, documents and information about how the Nazi regime impacted the lives of people in Scotland. Jackson Carlaw was quite right to emphasise the personal in commemorating this day, and, on my visit to the heritage centre, I was struck by two particular examples in the archives.

Dorrith Marianne Oppenheim was Jewish. She was just seven years old in July 1939 when she left Kassel in Germany and came to Scotland via Kindertransport just weeks before the outbreak of the second world war. Her grandfather had received an iron cross for his services in the Red Cross in the first world war, as did her father, Hans Oppenheim, who was an officer in the dragoons. However, that could not save them from the Nazis.

Dorrith’s parents were unable to follow their daughter to Scotland and later perished in Auschwitz. A young Christian couple from Edinburgh, Fred and Sophie Gallimore, took in the young girl. Dorrith lived and worked in Scotland, later marrying Andrew Sim in 1952, and raised her family in Ayrshire. When she passed away in 2012, her family gifted thousands of documents, letters, photographs, papers, books and artefacts to the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre.

The other story that struck me is that of Hilda Goldwag, who was a talented young Jewish artist living in Vienna with her widowed mother. She escaped to safety in Scotland in April 1939, thanks to the Scottish Domestic Bureau for Refugee Women, a Jewish and Quaker initiative that secured her a UK domestic visa. Hilda was exempted from internment as a refugee from Nazi oppression and was permitted to work while living in Glasgow, raising funds for the war effort. Later, she worked as a textile and graphic designer and was a prolific painter. She lost her family in the Holocaust and remained in Glasgow for the rest of her life.

For those people, and for the estimated thousands and thousands of Jewish refugees who came to Scotland before, during and after the second world war, this country was their salvation. We represented safety, acceptance and a light in the darkest of times. Without Scotland, the fates of many of those individuals hardly bears thinking about.

As the debate has demonstrated, it is rarely an unproductive or fruitless endeavour for a nation to consider its role in history. Countries must take ownership of the individual parts that they have played and reflect on the lessons learned, however painful. In this chapter, Scotland chose compassion for those who had been denied their most basic human rights, and we must take this opportunity on Holocaust memorial day to consider those in need of compassion today.