Chamber and committees

I will start by offering my congratulations to the young people who passed their exams this summer. Their years in education have been more disrupted than any in living memory, and they can be proud—rightly—of their achievements. The legacy of Covid will take many years to filter through our education system. Unfortunately, Covid has intensified problems that have existed for years.

I am, therefore, dismayed by the motion, which is the sort of motion that we have come to expect from the Scottish Government. It is mostly self-congratulatory, with only occasional reference to the idea that not everything is rosy.

However, we are only 18 months down the line since the joint report from the Auditor General for Scotland and the Accounts Commission, which found inconsistent progress in the national improvements. Although the Scottish Government is content to pretend that all the problems started with Covid-19, the report also said that the poverty-related attainment gap remains wide and that inequalities have been exacerbated by Covid-19. Those problems were not created by the pandemic; we know that those inequalities have been there for many years and we know that they have repercussions right through our society.

The Scottish Labour amendment highlights the scale of the poverty-related attainment gap this year, but we should not be tempted to believe that it ends with this school year. We know that those inequalities filter through society and that they entrench themselves geographically and generationally. The more those inequalities persist, the more Scotland will literally and figuratively be poorer. It will be poorer in the lost human potential of people who could have gone on to greater things but who were held back by the circumstances of their birth. It will be poorer as the effects accumulate and blight particular areas and communities across Scotland.

We know that poverty and race are closely correlated in Scotland. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation says that poverty levels among people in minority ethnic communities in Scotland are double the national average, and rising. The Scottish Government always has warm words on matters of equality, but when we see educational inequality being repeated year after year, even in the years before Covid, we should be aware of exactly what that means for marginalised people across Scotland. By allowing the poverty-related attainment gap in education to become entrenched, we are limiting the life chances of people in ethnic minority communities. Therefore, we are also continuing the cycle that leads to poverty becoming entrenched in those communities.

Surely we can hope for better than that. In so many ways, Scotland has come so far. Here, in Edinburgh, we have recently had the slavery and colonialism legacy review group, chaired by my friend Sir Geoff Palmer, which has done much to help our city to come to terms with its past.

I am sorry—I have a lot to get through.

What good is coming to terms with the past, however, if we are entrenching inequalities in future generations? That is partly why I strongly believe in anti-racist reform in our education system. As I have said in the chamber before, I praise the Scottish Government for setting up its race equality and anti-racism in education programme, but, the last time I raised the issue, I was promised that we would hear more about it over the summer. What happened?

I firmly believe that we need an education system that addresses both the inequalities that ethnic minorities in it face and the injustices of Scotland’s past. It must address the inequalities that I have mentioned, it must contain curriculum reform to address the legacy of colonialism and wider racism, and it must work to create an actively anti-racist Scotland. Only then will we start to make social progress that is worthy of the warm words of the Scottish Government.

The Government’s motion does not express the reality of the inequality that Scottish education faces. I will support the Scottish Labour amendment.

In its justification for the cuts to concessionary travel, the Scottish Government cited

“Forecast reduction in patronage numbers and fare levels.”

Given Scotland’s commitments to net zero, would it not make more sense to address the reduction in numbers instead of using that to justify cuts? Is that not another false economy from the Scottish Government?

Good morning, panel. I will put Dr Hosie in the spotlight again. The committee has heard again and again, particularly when discussing equalities matters, that there is not enough data or that data is not collected. How much progress has been made in improving data sources on equalities?

The committee has been made aware of the impact of the cost of living crisis on single-parent families. Is there enough concern about the vulnerability of that group to poverty, including child poverty?

How effective are impact assessments as an exercise? How can we better ensure that they are taken seriously and not seen as just another hoop to jump through?

First, I express my condolences to the royal family on the loss of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. She will be greatly missed.

I had the honour of meeting the Queen when I was a kid, when my sister and my cousin presented flowers to Her Majesty. She made us feel at ease. Such fond emotions resurfaced when I met the Queen again at a royal garden party with my wife and, after that, as a politician. I am very grateful for those memories.

Today, we celebrate not only the Queen’s legacy in this country but her role in bringing our family of nations and their people ever closer together in friendship and peace. After reflecting over the past week on the loss of Her Majesty, I will focus particularly on her legacy of the Commonwealth.

I was an infant when the founding father of Bangladesh, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, took a newly independent Bangladesh into the Commonwealth of Nations. It was the first international organisation that Bangladesh joined, such was the offer of partnership that it presented.

Queen Elizabeth oversaw the building of that partnership. In 1953, she defined the Commonwealth as

“an entirely new conception, built on ... qualities of friendship, loyalty and the desire for freedom and peace.”

Her Majesty pledged to give her heart and soul to that new partnership of nations, every day of her life. I think that we can say that she did just that.

In her note of condolence, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, described Her late Majesty as a “motherly figure” and recalled her personal memories of the Queen. It is the loss of such personal connections that we mourn, as well as the loss of our Queen.

The dignity and grace with which the late Queen held herself have been a steadying hand across the Commonwealth for 70 years. We are thankful for her long life of service and we offer our prayers to her family and our new King.

I thank Kaukab Stewart for bringing this very important matter to the chamber.

Here we go again. Another investigation, another organisation found to be institutionally racist, and a long list of actions to be taken. In 1999, the Macpherson report noted that institutional racism is

“The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin.”

Since then, positive steps towards equality have been taken. I applaud the work of campaigns, including Show Racism the Red Card and Kick it Out, which encourage the end of racism within sport. Twenty-three years after the 1999 Macpherson report, however, racism is still present across society.

Recently, we have seen stark inequalities laid bare in the Scottish Government’s equality impact assessment of its “Scottish Government Race Recruitment and Retention Action Plan”. Now, institutional racism in sport, most recently within Cricket Scotland, has been brought to light.

Institutions that receive Government funding must be held to account and must promote anti-racist equality practice. Institutions and their boards must not be given awards while failing to uphold standards of fairness, equality and accountability for those whom they serve. It is unacceptable that Cricket Scotland was winning diversity awards while 448 cases of institutional racism were happening.

The report detailed allegations of favouritism within Cricket Scotland towards white children from public schools. I commend those who shared their lived experiences of racism within the sport, including former Scotland internationals Majid Haq and Qasim Sheikh. Their doing so has helped to expose the realities that racism does still exist in Scotland and that something needs to be done now. I hope that, in the future, it will be easier for other victims of racism to share their experiences and be supported in doing so.

I welcome reports that many clubs support diversity and equality. However, more needs to be done so that the culture of equality is present within all clubs and, indeed, across all sports. Institutional change is needed to weed out institutional racism, so the introduction of diversity officer roles and independent complaints mechanisms within sport could be a good start.

The Plan4Sport report, while it is shocking and extremely disappointing, is a wake-up call to the reality of racism in sport in Scotland today. We need to use this opportunity to influence the future for Cricket Scotland and other sports bodies and institutions in Scotland. Now is the chance for the Scottish Government to prove that it takes institutional racism seriously and that, instead of offering piecemeal recommendations that do not go far enough, it is committed to overhauling racist institutions and practices throughout the nation and within its own institutions.

This is a time for us all to work together. I am committed to joining any discussions that the Scottish Government might have to influence meaningful action that could end institutional racism in Scotland and in Scottish sport.

I am a cricket lover and have played the game, myself. Sport should be an exciting, enjoyable pursuit for children and adults alike, and we should not be allowing a culture to exist in which people feel that they cannot succeed in, or enjoy, sport because of institutional barriers against their skin colour, religion, or cultural background. I want to see strict laws monitoring methods to ensure change.

Racism in Scotland has gone on long enough. Now is the time to deliver change.

In the past two weeks, I have received many reports from constituents who are serving police officers in the Lothian region. As they are serving officers, I shall not name them. They include a single mother who has been hit hard by rising childcare, food and energy costs that she can meet only by borrowing from her parents; a young police officer who has been forced to move back in with his parents because he cannot afford rent; and police officers forced to rely on food banks. Does the First Minister think that having a police force in that state is healthy in a developed nation, and what is the Scottish Government going to do about it?

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. It is the same here—I could not connect. I would have voted no.