Chamber and committees

I absolutely support the creation of a wealth fund in that regard, and I would like to see it financed, but I am concerned by ScotWind being dependent on foreign direct investment. I am also concerned that only 30 per cent of the £29 billion supply chain is destined to come to Scotland. We need to concern ourselves with that.

The Conservative Party, which has dominated British politics for the past 40 years, took the greatest resource bounty in British history—a black gold wave that should have underwritten our schools, hospitals, infrastructure and industrial future for generations—and used it to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest and the welfare bill from the mass unemployment that it deliberately created through an inflationary surge in the pound and the Dutch disease that ensued. The Conservatives sacrificed our steel mills, our shipyards and our coalfields on the altar of free-market dogma, leaving permanent scars that continue to sear with pain across the working-class communities of this country. They could have protected the north-east, built a transition fund and safeguarded the workers in Aberdeen and across Aberdeenshire, but they did not care. They abandoned those workers, and that is precisely why the Scottish people rose up in 1997, including in the old Conservative heartlands, wiped the Conservative Party off the political map of this country and voted to build this Parliament.

Colleagues, it did not have to be this way. We need only look across the North Sea to Norway. In 1990, Norway made a different choice. It took its petroleum wealth, stood up a state oil company and built a sovereign wealth fund. That required fiscal discipline and vision, but today that fund stands at more than $2.2 trillion. That is a permanent national legacy. The fund guarantees public services, funds state-of-the-art infrastructure and protects future generations for ever.

Given that the UK Government has explicitly confirmed that shifting to a direct state procurement model would allow Scottish contracting authorities to use the Procurement Act 2023 to legally disregard bids from non-treaty state suppliers such as China and embed domestic social value, will the cabinet secretary commit to scrapping the failed ScotZEB model in favour of a state-backed purchase and leasing scheme in order to legally ensure the return of full bus manufacturing in Scotland?

[Made a request to intervene.]

It feels as if every few weeks we stand in this chamber, trapped in an endless cycle of political short-termism and false binaries as we repeat the exact same arguments about Scotland’s energy mix. I get the frustration, though. World energy markets are in turmoil, and families up and down the country are being squeezed to breaking point at the pumps and by utility bills. Meanwhile, the long, slow decline of the North Sea basin over the past 12 years poses colossal economic challenges to every tier of government—I saw it a decade ago when I was an account manager at Scottish Enterprise. Yet, time and again, the response in the Parliament is to scramble for quick fixes and short-term solutions instead of confronting the foundational truth of how we got here.

We are surveying the wreckage of 40 years of failure of the political economy in this country and 40 years of systemic economic vandalism, engineered by the Conservative Party, which left the proud university city of Aberdeen dependent on resource extraction, handed our strategic sovereign energy assets to foreign multinationals and ensured that an oil and gas boom that was built by Scottish entrepreneurial genius and state support was monetised and strip mined, with privatised profits taken overseas.

Let us remember our economic history. As I have said before, when Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, the British state still had the power to shape the future of the North Sea and reap its benefits for the people of this country because of Labour Government policy. British Petroleum was majority publicly owned; the British National Oil Corporation, headquartered in Glasgow, was owned outright by the public; and British Gas held direct strategic assets beneath the bed of the North Sea, with a big national storage reserve.

Civil servants warned ministers, and world-leading economists advised ministers, to build a sovereign wealth fund. Likewise, from Parliament to the picket line, the labour movement said, “Take those revenues and deposit them in a national investment bank.” The choice was staring us in the face then: on one side was long-term stewardship, state-led industrial strategy and honest recognition—to quote Labour’s 1983 manifesto—that

“the oil won’t last forever”,

and on the other side was ideological dogma, rapid privatisation and the squandering of our national wealth.

We know what choice the Conservatives made. The party that dared to lecture this nation on fiscal prudence became the party that, in the words of Harold Macmillan, sold off the family silver to bankroll tax cuts and engineer a short-term speculative bonanza in the North Sea.

It is important to note, as a point of procedure, that pre-emption applies, so that is not possible. However, we agree, in spirit, that we would support the idea.

The balance seems out of kilter to me. The new United Kingdom procurement policy note 025 explicitly instructs contracting authorities to treat shipbuilding as a national security priority and it empowers them to restrict procurements to domestic suppliers. However, just months after CMAL handed a major ferry contract for the northern isles to China, it is now hiding behind commercial confidentiality and has concealed the shortlist for that procurement after, in effect, excluding all UK shipyards from bidding.

Why is the Government allowing CMAL to use that sleekit legal loophole to keep the identities of state-subsidised foreign shipyards secret instead of using the new powers to protect Scottish industry? Will the cabinet secretary order CMAL to publish that shortlist today?

I have to give way to the minister.

I am glad that Mr Brown is in such violent agreement with me, but I will not be giving way.

The Conservative Party robbed that future from the people of Scotland and the United Kingdom, so let us face that reality today. The North Sea is a mature basin that is in terminal decline. Fluctuations in world commodity prices might yield temporary blips, but the trend is clear. We cannot leave our country or the north-east region hostage to the whims of global market volatility, foreign-owned capital or resource depletion.

The economic ruin left to us by decades of Conservative failure will not be fixed overnight, but through a genuine state-driven green just transition, underwritten by public investment, strong trade union jobs and local supply-chain content, we can reindustrialise Scotland. We can ensure that the wealth created by Scotland’s wind, wave and energy potential stays in the hands of the working people who build it and is not exported to foreign shareholders again and again.

However, we seem to be repeating the same mistakes, with our dependence on foreign firms, the selling off of key assets such as Wood Group and the failure to invest the ScotWind proceeds. As I mentioned, only 30 per cent of the supply chain is coming to Scotland, which is not good enough. I urge the Scottish Government to do better and support the amendment in the name of my friend, the member for Edinburgh Southern.

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to reports that Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd will no longer publish the names or locations of shipyards bidding for the MV Lord of the Isles replacement contract or any future vessel tenders. (S7O-00325)

To ask the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body whether it will develop a memorandum of understanding with MSP staff trade unions concerning the matters for which it is responsible. (S7O-00250)