Chamber and committees

I appreciate the First Minister’s answer. If that update could eventually be shared with members, that would be welcome. However, this is not an isolated case. Last week, the Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Tourism and Transport, Stephen Flynn, said that the Government was using

“every lever at its disposal to stand up against the inhumanity”—[Official Report, 16 September 2026; c 86.]

that is being inflicted on Gaza and the West Bank. Yet, in the days since then, The National has revealed that a firm whose parent company has also been listed by the UN holds a Scottish national health service contract worth tens of millions of pounds. If a company has profited from apartheid and genocide, it should not be profiting from public money in Scotland. Will the First Minister commit to ending that contract as soon as possible? Will his Government urgently review every public sector contract, including parent companies and subsidiaries, to ensure that Scottish public money is not going to companies that are complicit in human rights abuses?

Last week, the Parliament backed a Green motion declaring that

“a company’s involvement in illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian Territories constitutes grave professional misconduct and should … automatically disqualify that company”

and

“any parent company or subsidiary”

from public contracts or Scottish Government support.

Just four days later, the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen—ASLEF—union revealed that CAF, which has been named by the United Nations as a company that is profiting from the exploitation of Palestinians, has been shortlisted for a major contract building trains for ScotRail. Does the First Minister agree that CAF should be blocked from the contract, and will he stand with the rail workers who have refused to drive trains produced by a company that, as they say, profits from apartheid?

I appreciate that the First Minister is trying to adhere to last week’s vote and to do those good things, but it is difficult to take that position seriously when ministers have named Barclays as a partner in their upcoming bond scheme. Research by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign says that Barclays holds more than £2 billion in shares in, and provides more than £6.1 billion in loans and underwriting to, nine companies whose weapons and technology are being used by the Israeli military against Palestinians. If a company is so directly linked to the financing of arms companies that supply the Israeli military, it surely should be covered by any boycott that is worthy of the name. Is Barclays really the kind of partner that the First Minister wants for his Scottish Government?

As we have heard from members around the chamber, access to good and reliable healthcare advice is essential, but there are far too many places where misinformation exists. Martyn Day’s confession about spreading misinformation inadvertently was amusing, but it demonstrates how harmless people think that sharing information is. Nevertheless, I would like him to share his sources for the hot toddy comment.

The cabinet secretary said in her opening speech that some people share misinformation unknowingly and out of concern for others. I was pleased that she mentioned meeting people where they are to give them information. Health information can often be technical and jargon heavy in nature, and making it plain and easy to digest is essential because that is what AI is doing, which is what we are battling against.

Irshad Ahmed mentioned the need to support GPs and other clinicians in dealing with the misinformation that people are bringing in when they have asked ChatGPT about their symptoms. That is an essential part of all this.

My colleague Kayleigh Kinross O’Neill mentioned how education, health and other parts of Government policy can overlap to ensure that we upskill people to interrogate information. That is essential in preventing people from passing on information that they may not know is untrue. It would be good to know how the strategy is being shared across other parts of Government to make sure that they all play their part in tackling health misinformation and upskilling children and young people in particular to ensure that they can interrogate the information that is in front of them.

Although some people share misinformation unknowingly, we have to be aware that others do not have such good intentions. In the previous session, the Parliament resoundingly passed my member’s bill, which became the Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) (Scotland) Act 2024, which was designed to ensure that women can access abortion care safely and with dignity. In February 2025, the vice-president of the United States was on the stage at the Munich security conference saying things that were categorically untrue about information that the Scottish Government had shared about the act.

There are global players who are very willing to undermine the confidence that we are trying to provide the public with, and abortion care is absolutely on the front line of that. Safe access zones were the first small step in making abortion care easier to access and less traumatic. The bill faced huge opposition and there was huge misinformation about it; it took a full chamber effort to challenge that, and I am hugely grateful to colleagues who played their part in that.

If we are to make progress on abortion care—on the two-doctor rule, for example—we will face that level of misinformation and challenge again. It will take all those in the chamber who are willing to continue to make progress.

Social media is a fantastic tool, but we have heard repeatedly, over several years, about the issues with information on those platforms. The speed at which information can be shared versus how quickly the Government can respond is a difficulty to which we are yet to find a neat solution.

Jackie Baillie mentioned the misinformation around the MMR vaccine, which shows that this is not a new problem—misinformation on vaccines goes back decades. Confidence in those life-saving healthcare interventions is hard gained and easily undermined. Making vaccines part of everyone’s routine healthcare is essential, so the work that we do has to focus on building parents’ confidence in getting their children vaccinated and getting the habit in early. Fantastic work is already being done at antenatal appointments, on midwife visits and through health visitors to encourage parents in that regard. Everyone with whom I came into contact when I had my baby last year was excellent at answering questions with empathy and dispelling myths when they were raised. Creating space, especially for first-time parents, to ask questions without feeling silly is essential if we are to have a well-informed population.

However, that can easily be undermined, particularly by some of the trends that we see in America, where people hold so-called measles parties to intentionally spread the disease in the hope that deliberately making children unwell in that way will make them acquire immunity, completely ignoring the potential complications for those kids. That seems both extreme and ridiculous, but the popularity of such parties has risen in the past decade or so. Research from Columbia University partially credited them for the measles outbreak in New York in 2019, saying that it is likely that that was the result of increased contact between children in the one-to-four age category, likely through measles parties.

We need to ensure that we do not rest and let ourselves believe that it is impossible that that trend could come here. We need to make sure that parents know that vaccinations are the best way to acquire immunity.

The situation is not all bleak, though. We have overcome misinformation before. I was once groaned at in this chamber for saying that I was too young to remember the misinformation of the 1980s around HIV. Jackie Baillie was there, and was one of the ones who groaned.

I see that.

Battles against misinformation that we have fought and won do not live on for ever in the minds of those who are taking policies forward. We need to ensure that we continue to share what we have already done and that that informs what comes next. I follow Heather Anderson in committing my party to doing everything that we can to work towards the HIV elimination target.

This entire chamber has the duty to tackle health misinformation, and I believe that there is a coalition of the sensible across the chamber that is willing to do that.

16:41

Will the minister take an intervention on that point?

Will the member take an intervention?

Multiple members have asserted that no decisions will be made before Christmas. There is a pre-determination hearing tonight in Larbert, and that decision is supposed to be taken by 5 October. Are the Scottish Government and the SNP willing to let down the people of Falkirk by not taking a decision quickly to issue guidance and have a formal moratorium?

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I believe that I should have had six minutes.

The agreement that I believe the cabinet secretary is relying on is the World Trade Organization agreement on Government procurement. Some of the companies that we are talking about, which have subsidiaries on that list, are registered in countries other than Israel, and the WTO GPA might not apply in some of those countries. Can the cabinet secretary reflect on that and tell us whether we can exclude some of those companies?