Chamber and committees

That is a good question. We have a good example from the New Zealand Parliament. During our committee meeting this morning, we heard a good example from the Canadian Parliament. Our committee’s role should be to bring together different ideas. Ms Whitham joined us a few weeks ago. We are a diverse committee with two female members and three men. We have different experiences. We should pull together and discuss the best practice from New Zealand, Canada and other parts of the world. We need to look at parliamentary privilege—I am glad that the member agrees with me on that. We should extend members’ privileges and can look at the example of other countries.

As a member of the SPPA Committee, I hope that the remit of the inquiry that we will undertake in 2022 will include those and other issues.

If we want to ensure that we can serve our constituents to the best of our ability, can effectively and robustly scrutinise legislation and can hold the Scottish Government to account, it follows that we must honestly evaluate how this Parliament works and how it can work better.

I, too, am proud to be a member of the Parliament. It is a diverse Parliament, 45 per cent of the members of which are women, and we are working to make it more inclusive. I do not want to be dictated to, and I also want my lectern to be up.

This debate is set against the background of the public health constraints that have been necessitated by the outbreak of Covid-19 and how the Scottish Parliament has adapted its procedures and practices to meet those challenges. I thank parliamentary staff for the support that they have provided to all MSPs during the pandemic, which has allowed this legislature to operate safely at a time of crisis and deep uncertainty.

More than two decades after the Scottish Parliament was created, today’s debate is an opportunity to look at how it operates not just during Covid-19 but more generally. It is, after all, a nascent Parliament but one that is steeped in history and one of which expectations are very high.

There is a wide spectrum of parliamentary experience in the chamber. For my part, I am contributing as a new MSP, with what I hope is a fresh pair of eyes.

The Parliament was created 22 years ago to address a perceived democratic deficit in Scottish politics. I, too, was interested in the reply from Maggie Chapman on culture. A different kind of deficit exists now. As my colleagues have pointed out, rather than having spontaneous debate, too often the process is scripted, with the First Minister reading out prepared answers to planted questions from Scottish National Party back benchers, and responses are often drawn out to fill the time.

Just a few weeks ago, when the First Minister read out the wrong pre-scripted answer twice in two weeks, the Presiding Officer said that the content of MSPs’ contributions is not a matter for her. MSPs are often pulled up by the Presiding Officers on the relevance of their contributions to parliamentary debates. It should therefore follow that a representative of the Scottish Government who fails to answer a question that has been posed to them should also be reproached.

As we have been reminded this week, the threat of Covid-19 still looms large. It is more important than ever that MSPs can scrutinise the decision making and actions of the Scottish Government. We have far too frequently seen the First Minister announce new restrictions from a podium during a press conference, not in Parliament. In June this year, the Scottish Government’s decision to impose a travel ban between Scotland and Manchester had a direct bearing on the north-east of Scotland when EasyJet decided that it was no longer commercially feasible to operate a new route between Aberdeen and Manchester. The travel ban was announced by the First Minister on a Friday—a non-sitting day—during a press conference and with no opportunity for scrutiny by MSPs. That was a contemptuous move.

The Scottish Government’s evasiveness in written answers to parliamentary questions is also worrying, as is the time that it takes to respond to those questions. Those issues were highlighted in the previous SPPA Committee’s legacy report. On 20 September, I lodged a written question about the maintenance of hospital estates. That question was especially important because of what has been happening at the Queen Elizabeth university hospital in Glasgow. I did not receive a response until 15 November, almost two months later. The standing orders require that written questions receive a response within 10 working days. That response was not good enough. Parliament is too often sidelined by this SNP-Green Government. That should not be allowed to happen.

When the Scottish Government does engage with the parliamentary process, we often find ourselves debating matters outside the Parliament’s devolved remit, as part of a grievance-stoking exercise. That is not the accountability that the public deserves or expects.

My final comment relates to parliamentary privilege. It is well-known that MSPs do not have the same parliamentary privileges as our Westminster counterparts. In order to facilitate free speech and effective scrutiny, I would encourage the SPPA Committee to reflect deeply on whether it is possible to extend and strengthen parliamentary privilege for MSPs.

Will the member take an intervention?

I am in my last minute. You could have asked earlier.

Thank you for taking my intervention. Bearing it in mind that the minister is on first-name terms with an Opposition colleague, whose party is in coalition with the minister’s party, is it right that the Green Party should have the same allowances for questions and challenges in debates, now that they are all one together?

The 19th century A-listed Aberdeen art gallery recently won the 2021 Doolan award for Scotland’s best building after a transformational development project. It has, however, experienced significant damage to its exterior by the urban gull population. In the north-east, gulls do not just attack people; their droppings are a persistent problem. What action is the Scottish Government taking with local authorities and Historic Environment Scotland to conserve our building heritage and protect it from such pests?

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the investment it is making in Scotland’s cultural infrastructure. (S6O-00546)

Thank you, Presiding Officer.

We all recognise that we must take action on climate change. The energy sector is not just alive to the climate crisis; it is at the forefront of the low-carbon energy transition. Now, more than ever, we need the skills, expertise and innovation of the sector to help us to achieve net zero, yet the SNP-Green coalition, complicit with Labour, is determined to target it.

Meanwhile, thousands of hard-working people in the energy sector are getting on with the diversification to renewables that we need for net zero. It is high time that the SNP backed them—and the north-east—instead of its cosy coalition partners.

In the statement, the minister said that Scottish Government officials

“will work with stakeholders to ... analyse any lessons that should be learned.”

Given the lack of transparency around the agreement, can the minister confirm which stakeholders will be involved in the process and whether the findings will be shared fully and expeditiously with the Parliament and the wider public?

In the north-east, which is the region that I represent, the offshore oil and gas sector is worth more than £18 billion to the local economy. It supports 65,600 jobs. It might feel like groundhog day to Mr Ruskell, but a fair and managed transition to net zero is critical to those communities and their economic and emotional wellbeing.

The SNP-Green coalition spends a lot of time talking about a just transition, but it is becoming increasingly clear that it simply does not understand what that means. We need a responsible transition to net zero that takes existing energy demand into account, protects our energy security and safeguards the jobs of workers in carbon-intensive industries.

Last week, Patrick Harvie suggested that it was extreme to keep expanding oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. He seems to have succumbed to the fallacy that cutting off domestic supply means that demand for fossil fuels will disappear—and I will not take an intervention on that point. It will not disappear; instead, we will rely increasingly on imports from countries such as Russia and Qatar, losing thousands of jobs for no environmental gain. That is an odd position for the so-called Greens, when outsourcing oil and gas production overseas ignores the huge carbon footprint of doing so. Mr Ruskell might smile at me, but it is not funny.

LNG imports from abroad are far more carbon intensive than domestic energy production—more than twice as much. Let us be clear: in all UK Climate Change Committee scenarios, oil and gas accounts for between 47 per cent and 54 per cent of total cumulative energy demand between 2020 and 2050. All those scenarios are net zero compatible.

Let us not forget that the SNP made a second oil boom a central pillar of its economic policies for independence just a few years ago. “It’s Scotland’s oil”, they said. That is their narrative. Now, they have cost us the Cambo project and the 1,000 jobs that went with it. Astonishingly, the First Minister told MSPs that the new oil field should not be given the “green light”, even before the Scottish Government has completed a programme of work and analysis to understand Scotland’s energy requirements. How is that credible?

This is not a just transition. For a couple of headlines, the SNP and the Greens are recklessly pushing the oil and gas industry over a cliff edge, risking taking countless communities in the north-east with it. It is shameful.

Labour would be wise to listen to the GMB general secretary’s scathing criticism of the “cheerleaders for Cambo’s shutdown”. He said that they

“aren’t just throwing energy workers under the bus, but also our security of supply for the gas we will still need on the road to 2050.”

That was the GMB.