Chamber and committees

Does the minister agree that we would be in a better position if the SNP Government scrapped its presumption against oil and gas?

I thank the member for the intervention, but it is also about managing the decline. The Labour Party seems not to be doing that just now. It wants to accelerate that decline and see thousands of jobs lost right across the north-east.

In June, a poll showed that 75 per cent of Scots back our oil and gas industry. That is because the Scottish people have the common sense to understand the impact to the environment and the economy of stopping domestic production before we have reduced demand. Sadly, the sense that the Scottish people have seems far less common in the parties opposite.

Representing the north-east of Scotland, I feel that we are suffering from a double whammy—not just the destruction of the oil and gas industry but the constant raiding of the rural budget, which is having a hugely negative impact. We have seen £32 million cut from the forestry grant scheme and £5 million cut from the nature restoration fund, and £33 million of agricultural support funding from the Bew review has been snatched from our farmers. The rural sector is key to our economy and also to our drive towards net zero, but it seems to be an easy target for this central belt-biased SNP Government.

Does Patrick Harvie now regret supporting the council tax freeze that was Government policy quite recently?

I thank the cabinet secretary for advance sight of her statement, but that statement by the devolved Scottish National Party Government is an embarrassment. The Government constantly misses its climate change targets and now has to admit that it cannot even do its sums properly, which smacks of complete incompetence. Targets have been missed, calculations are wrong, the section 36 report is inaccurate and the peatland restoration figures are wrong. We were promised a climate change plan months ago but have no guarantee that we will see a draft by next summer. We were promised an energy strategy and a just transition plan months ago, but those have still not been published. Targets have been scrapped and there is no real clarity about when the new carbon budgets will be in place.

When it comes to climate change, the SNP has overpromised and underdelivered. It has simply lost all credibility. What will the devolved Government do to regain the people’s trust? Can the cabinet secretary guarantee that there will be a climate change plan in law before the end of this parliamentary session? What steps will the Government take to ensure that the data that is published is accurate?

Thank you, Presiding Officer.

The member claims that it is decisions at Westminster that have resulted in the cost of living crisis. Does she not agree that maybe Ukraine or the pandemic had something to do with it?

Will the member take an intervention?

To ask the Scottish Government what discussions it has had with Channel 4 in relation to increasing its made outside England quota from 9 per cent to 16 per cent in line with population breakdown, as called for by Pact, the independent television representative body. (S6O-03717)

I am sure that the cabinet secretary shares my anger that Ofcom, instead of proceeding with a 16 per cent quota, chose to proceed with a 12 per cent quota, and even that will not apply until 2030. That will mean that 25 per cent fewer programmes will be made in Scotland and 25 per cent fewer people will be involved than would have been the case if the quota had been accepted.

Scottish freelancers in the independent TV industry are really hurting, and many are being forced out of the industry. What more can the Government do, in conjunction with Pact and Screen Scotland, to protect the industry as it goes through a difficult time?

While sitting in the chamber earlier today and listening to the nationalists going over the same old arguments about independence, I decided to look at the agreement between both our Governments that set up the 2014 referendum. It said:

“The governments are agreed that the referendum should ... have a clear legal base”,

that it

“should be legislated for by the Scottish Parliament”

and that it should be

“conducted so as to command the confidence of parliaments, governments and people”

and

“deliver a fair test and a decisive expression of the views of people in Scotland and a result that everyone will respect.”

That is the problem—the nationalists have never respected the result of the referendum and have embarked on a journey of grievance politics to make their case for another one.

We should not really be surprised. After all, all the SNP exists for is to try to rip our country apart. It exists not to improve the lives of Scots, to run our country well or to bring economic growth, but to sow division and use every tool in its nationalist toolbox to cause that division, even by using the doomed deposit return scheme as a weapon.

Its Scottish Green chums are no better. It must be the only Green party in the world to care more about division and gender ideology than about climate issues. [Interruption.] I am not going to take an intervention at the moment.

I do like the part of the motion that talks about understanding

“that support for Scottish independence has consistently polled at 45% to 50% of Scotland’s population in the decade since”.

That tells me that support to remain part of the United Kingdom has consistently polled at 50 per cent to 55 per cent, which shows that, despite a pandemic, a war in Ukraine, three new First Ministers, six Prime Ministers, Brexit, four general elections—one of which was meant to be a de facto referendum—Jamie Hepburn as independence minister and the constant stream of independence papers that even Humza Yousaf admitted nobody reads, the desire for independence has not increased one little bit.

It is time for this Parliament to focus on what it was created to do—to improve the lives of Scots with the power that it has and to put aside the constitutional grievance that is holding Scotland back.

George Adam rose—