Chamber and committees

I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests, which shows that I am a member of the GMB union.

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to the allegation made by Jim McColl in The Herald on Sunday that £25 million of public money was wasted on the “forced” nationalisation of Ferguson Marine Engineering Ltd. (S6T-00069)

We all share the cabinet secretary’s commitment to financial transparency and transparency of the decision-making processes.

When Ferguson Marine fell into administration in August 2019, as a direct result of ministers’ negligence in instructing CMAL to undertake arbitration, CMAL had the contractual right to claim a £25 million cash refund guarantee in the form of an insurance bond from specialist marine insurers, HCC International, which would have seen the insurance company take control of the shipyard. Instead, the Scottish ministers chose to forfeit the £25 million and to buy the shipyard outright at a further cost of £7.5 million. If the £32 million forced acquisition was not the alleged misuse of public funds and an attempt to cover up for the failures of CMAL and ministers that caused the collapse of the shipyard, as asserted by the previous management of Ferguson Marine, will the Government agree to release all correspondence between the Government, HCCI and CMAL?

Thank you, Presiding Officer, for your indulgence in including me in the debate.

I will offer a couple of observations based on my experience of being on universal credit until last month. I pay tribute to Neil Gray’s work on the issue; we discussed its importance in our previous lives in the House of Commons. Frankly, I do not care how we do it, we need to get the money into people’s pockets by whatever means and with whatever innovation necessary to do it. That is what this Parliament is about.

As my colleague Michael Marra said, Labour is keen to work constructively in that endeavour. A good example is the opportunity to look at universal credit, which is already woefully insufficient and makes the cost of being poor far harder for people. That destroys potential and means that people’s ability to function as citizens is denied, which is a bigger cost to the community in terms of healthcare, housing arrears and all sorts of other knock-on effects that are hugely disastrous for local communities.

My calculations are that roughly 110,000 people are on universal credit in Scotland. To scale up that payment with a £20 per week uplift means that it would cost £114 million to deal with the matter in Scotland—to exercise sovereignty over it, if you like. It would be useful for the Parliament to consider that right away. The figure pales into insignificance when compared with the costs of, for example, the overspend on the CalMac Ferries or the Rangers Football Club malicious prosecution compensation of £100 million. Let us look at ways in which we can fix the problem now.

My constituent Pauline Boris runs LBS Event Design and Wedding Planners in Glasgow. She got in touch with me today to highlight her frustration that another wedding season is being lost because there is no flexibility on the number of attendees or on any form of outdoor entertainment, and her business has been specifically excluded from further financial support. Meanwhile, she is watching big corporate organisers being allowed free rein to set up a Euro 2020 fan zone for up to 6,000 people a day on Glasgow green, with no testing or vaccination safeguards. The obvious unfairness of those double standards is now undermining the credibility of ministers’ public health advice—

Will the Government now urgently extend financial support to the wedding industry and put in place a level playing field, so that all outdoor sport and entertainment events can take place again, and not those just those that are run by big corporate interests?

I thank Mr Gray for his point. He is correct, but that is why we need to build constructive dialogue. Antagonistic rhetoric has often been a comfort for many people, but let us consider what technical opportunities there are to constructively engage on the issue.

The member makes a good point about the five week wait. It certainly was not a pleasant experience for me. I did not use the advance, because I had sufficient savings to deal with that period myself, but I realised that I was not able to find out what I would be paid until a week before the payment was made. People are living in limbo and do not know what they are going to get. I did not even realise until earlier this year that I was also eligible for new-style jobseekers allowance. No one is practically advising people on what they are entitled to. I also had to apply for a council tax reduction, which is a separate bureaucratic procedure, and pursue other ways of income maximisation. Those are things that we could deal with better in Scotland by having an approach of applying once and getting everything that you are entitled to. Let us try and figure out how we can do that; our civil servants are capable of figuring that out.

Dealing with Department for Work and Pensions employees on the front line, I found them to be hard-working and kind people who are trying to be constructive, given the circumstances. They are Scottish civil servants; they just happen to work for a master that it is not particularly constructive or helpful. There are ways in which we can deal with that and help to advance the cause in Scotland. I would like us to realistically explore how we could enhance universal credit in Scotland and deliver an output that would be highly effective for our citizens. There is a way to do that and I would like to work constructively with other parties to deliver it. With a ready, willing and capable approach from the Parliament, we can deliver something constructive for Scots.

Thank you, Presiding Officer. I congratulate Mr Lumsden on his first speech in the chamber, and the cabinet secretary on her position in the new Government.

As I rise to give my first speech in the chamber of the Scottish Parliament, I recall a formative political experience. I was sitting in bed at Yorkhill hospital as a 10-year-old, transfixed by the opening ceremony of the Scottish Parliament on television as it unfolded up on the Mound in 1999. The excitement and optimism of that day remains vividly etched in my mind, as do Sheena Wellington’s rousing rendition of “Is there for honest poverty” and Donald Dewar’s exhortation that the establishment of the Parliament must not be merely an end, but

“a means to greater ends.”

Perhaps my political affiliation was inevitably influenced from that moment onwards, as I watched one great Labour achievement come to fruition from another.

It was not merely the spectacle of that day that influenced my interest in politics, but the experience of growing up in a family that bore the brunt of the industrial turmoil of Clydeside in the 1990s and the anxiety of unemployment as redundancy struck the shipyards and took my father’s job, along with those of many hundreds of others. Seeing that happen to an industry that was synonymous with Glasgow’s purpose burned into me a sense of anguish. The decline of the work, which was the pride of generations, was presided over by an aloof political establishment that was indifferent to its fate. The economic dogma of the free market, which served the interests of a distant few, mattered more than the dignity and wealth of Glaswegians.

I also realised that that decline was not inevitable, that there is no such thing as honest poverty and that Government could reverse it with a sense of clear mission, innovation and determination. One of the first actions of the Labour Government and of this new Parliament was to save the Govan shipyard from closure. That act not only restored my dad’s livelihood but would later give me work, too.

Although a burning passion for Glasgow and everything that it represents was instilled in me from a young age, I could scarcely have imagined that, just a few years later, I would have the precious opportunity to represent that teeming, turbulent, tremendous city in Parliament, first as an MP in the House of Commons, and now as a member of the Scottish Parliament.

William McIlvanney described Glasgow as

“the right hand knocking you down and the left hand picking you up, while the mouth alternated apology and threat.”

His character Laidlaw said that what he loved about Glasgow was that

“It’s not a city, it’s a twenty-four-hour cabaret.”

If it is not already like that this week, I am sure that it will be by Saturday night and that Pauline McNeill will be offering us a song or two down at the pub.

It is certainly a city of contrasts—a tumultuous mix of triumph, hilarity, misery and tragedy. Having the honour of representing and helping its persevering and passionate people in the Parliament has revealed to me a whole new level of understanding about their needs and how Government policy so often misunderstands, underestimates and ill serves them.

Until someone finds themselves at the mercy of an oppressive and inhumane policy, or unexpectedly advocating for those who do, it is easy to just assume that the system works. The realisation that it does not is what drives my motivation to improve my city and my community. My initial naivety might have given way to an even greater resolve and fervour to help the vulnerable and oppressed, and I hope that my conviction is widely shared by colleagues across the chamber.

That conviction was certainly shared by my two predecessors, James Kelly and Johann Lamont, who were formidable advocates for our communities—from expunging draconian legislation that criminalised working-class football fans to speaking out against the Government’s illegal failure to house the homeless of Glasgow. Patricia Ferguson and the late Maria Fyfe also inspired me through their fearless pursuit of social justice for the people of Milton and Springburn, where I grew up.

This intergenerational moral crusade has never been more urgent, but this Parliament and this Government is barely keeping pace. In the half decade that it has taken to set up a modest £10 a week child payment, child poverty has risen by 50,000. By the Government’s estimations, the £10 a week child payment will reduce the number of children who live in poverty by just 20,000. Meanwhile, in Glasgow alone, more than 30,000 children live in poverty. That is not only an intolerable situation but an indictment of a lack of ambition and political will. We are consciously planning an economy that fails tens of thousands of children. I will not stand by while that happens, and neither will my colleagues. We cannot tolerate that any more.

The late Jimmy Reid once looked up at a block of high-rise flats in Glasgow and observed that behind every window could be a Nobel prize-winning scientist, an Olympic athlete or perhaps a First Minister, but—you know what?—they will never get the opportunity because of where they were born and the circumstances in which they were brought up. From birth, they have been denied their potential.

As a nation and as a community, that tacitly accepted sabotage of young people’s lives is the greatest loss to us all. In many cases, it is literally a life sentence. I have seen that at first hand when working with Peter Krykant at the overdose prevention pilot in Glasgow, where we witness daily the impact of social alienation and trauma on so many young lives. We can only hope that they will still be alive tomorrow, having been failed by a state that prioritises criminalisation over compassion.

There is nothing inevitable about that economic and social trauma. It can be fixed if we—the 129 of us here—are willing to take a lead. After all, this is the Parliament that was forged in the furnaces of Ravenscraig and welded together on the banks of the Clyde. Our mission is to build up our industries, not to simply stand by and observe their decline.

It was heartbreaking for me to watch the convener of the Caley railway works in Springburn break down in tears in this building two years ago as he realised that he would be the last in a long line of trade union leaders that stretched back 163 years to the dawn of the railway industry, because Government ministers failed to do what was necessary to preserve those precious skills and jobs. The Parliament failed those workers and it failed my community. What is the meaning of home rule if our industries are ruled by faceless men in boardrooms far from Scotland and our Government is not prepared to defend them, but simply indulges in shallow public relations that later end in failure? I will not stand by and let the same happen to the McVitie’s workers in Tollcross and neither will my colleagues.

As Edwin Morgan said, we are adept at indulging in convenient Scottish fictions. Unless the Parliament urgently becomes more alive to the alienation, exploitation and hardship that is faced by millions of Scots, and unless we who have the privilege of working in this chamber test our Parliament’s ability to address those ills more strenuously than ever, our country will never reach its full potential.

There is a tremendous challenge in front of us all and it is an endeavour that I will be relentlessly and humbly focused on over the next five years.

Scotland’s tenants union, Living Rent, has concluded that 70 per cent of all evictions that have happened in the past year have been caused by rent arrears. That suggests that the measures that have been put in place by the Government are simply not sufficient to stem the flow of evictions caused by the problem of low income because of the pandemic. Will the Government consider extending the financial support measures that are available to tenants, particularly those who are at risk of eviction because of rent arrears, bearing in mind that the Government has a legal obligation to prevent homelessness?

took the oath.