Chamber and committees

There are lessons to be learned from this situation, but that will be of little comfort to the staff and patients who are dealing with an old hospital. Right now, it is 30°C in some parts of Monklands hospital, wall trims are held on with duct tape and there are historical issues with asbestos in the building.

The cabinet secretary said that immediate infrastructure risks will be addressed. How quickly will those infrastructure risks be dealt with? Will the cabinet secretary meet unions and staff representatives to ensure that the hospital is a safe place to work?

I declare a voluntary interest, as I am a member of Unite the Union.

Since we raised the issue of hyperscale data centres with the First Minister last week, more than 6,000 people have written to him to back the Scottish Greens’ call for a moratorium. Hundreds of those people gathered outside the Parliament yesterday to make their voices heard.

Communities are rightly worried about the local environmental impacts and the massive strain on our energy system that approving such applications could bring. António Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, has now joined the call, saying that artificial intelligence data centres are

“hungry for land, water and power”

and calling for every major AI company to

“publicly disclose the full environmental impact of its systems”.

Will the First Minister stand with communities across Scotland and the head of the UN in taking on big tech, or will he continue to allow a free-for-all on hyperscale data centres?

I am pleased to hear that the First Minister is considering that, because councils are saying that they do not have the necessary guidance to decide on the megaplans. Fife Council has confirmed that the Scottish Government is looking at whether an environmental impact assessment is needed for the Auchtertool application, because that is not clear enough from existing guidance. That comes on top of City of Edinburgh councillors saying that they cannot make a decision on local applications until the Scottish Government comes up with a definition of what exactly a green data centre is. If the First Minister is considering a pause, what will be the timescale for that to ensure that we can take an overview of the applications?

I appreciate the First Minister’s response. Local issues aside, the most significant impact of the data centres is their combined energy use. If all 24 applications are approved, they will use up to one and a half times the peak energy use of the whole of Scotland. If it is the Government’s position that councils should be able to make the planning decisions locally, I note that they cannot. How are we supposed to possibly get a handle on the combined energy impacts? How many do we have capacity for? At the moment, we simply do not know.

Councils cannot make those decisions in a co-ordinated and planned way without the Scottish Government stepping in. The Government has the responsibility to provide councils with guidance and communities with certainty, and they need the pause that we are asking for. While the guidance is being considered by the First Minister, will he announce a pause on applications?

To ask the Scottish Government when it will implement management measures for inshore marine protected areas and priority marine features. (S7O-00109)

I am pleased that the minister is getting up to speed on that part of the portfolio.

Scotland’s network of marine protected areas was intended to be a vital marine safeguard, but the designation itself does not protect our marine environment from the impacts of trawling and dredging. Will the minister set out a clear timeline for the consultation and development of those management measures, to give assurance to our coastal communities?

We all know how damaging Brexit has been to our economy and our democracy. I am pleased to hear the minister highlight the human costs, because I think those are tangible things that everybody can realise we have lost.

At a time when global relations are so unstable, we need to work more closely with our European allies. That involves having a strong programme of international engagement. Can the minister confirm that he will prioritise maintaining the network of international offices, and particularly those in Europe, to assist with that alignment?

I follow others in wishing Steve Clarke, the Scotland men’s team and the tartan army a safe and productive journey in the US.

The racist violence that we have seen on the streets of Belfast, as well as in Glasgow and elsewhere in Scotland this week, has been utterly shameful. People were trapped inside Glasgow central mosque and the St Enoch centre, sheltering for their own safety. Others were attacked in the street because of the colour of their skin, while mobs shouted “Send them home” at children because they were not white.

Nobody should be made to feel unsafe on our streets, and it is horrific that that has happened to so many people. No so-called legitimate concerns can justify that kind of hateful action. What will the First Minister do to provide reassurances to people and communities who are worried about their safety and that of their loved ones?

This is a time when our Parliament must stand together to condemn racists and fascists who seek to divide our communities, and I am heartened by most of the response that we have had so far this afternoon.

However, today, The National has revealed that an active member of Reform UK, who attended the election count in Glasgow alongside the party’s deputy leader in Scotland, not only took part in the racist scenes on Buchanan Street but also boasted that he would do so again. Last year, that man, who is clearly a friend of Reform UK’s leadership, wrote:

“Jews are forcing us to swallow hordes of migrants, flooding land with the dregs of the world to dilute our Protestant stock and shatter the Union.”

Just quoting that makes me feel sick.

As we have seen this afternoon, this is a party that has consistently branded new Scots as strangers, attacked Glaswegian schoolchildren who speak more than one language, and scapegoated and demonised our migrant communities. What does the First Minister have to say to those on the Reform benches who have fanned the flames of hate and actively welcomed racist and antisemitic members?

The violence this week has been stirred up by an online landscape that is designed to promote hate and by social media algorithms that deliver fascist propaganda into people’s news feeds 24 hours a day. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, used his personally owned social media platform to share abhorrent content, including quotes that call for millions and millions to be deported from the United Kingdom, along with adverts for those protests. That is a direct threat to the safety of communities across our country, and it cannot go unchallenged.

Online regulation is largely reserved to Westminster, but there is one area that this Parliament has control over. Will the First Minister work with the Scottish Greens to class social media platforms as publishers, since the content that they show people is the result of their algorithm instead of people’s choices as users? That way, we can finally start to take action on hateful and misleading online content.