Chamber and committees

As a parliamentarian, I am asking you to persuade me to pass this particular provision. What can you tell me about the conditions? I would not be happy if I did not know that both the Crown and the courts system would have a specific place or a designated set of circumstances. Without that, how can I possibly be satisfied that a trial will be fair? Do you see what I mean?

I have no difficulty agreeing with Alex Cole-Hamilton’s point.

It is unbelievable how many people who would never have dreamed of using private healthcare are now being forced to use their life savings to put their health first. However, many other people cannot do that. For basic operations such as hip operations and knee replacements, people are now anxious about calling their GP for a simple appointment. When people are ill, they have to go through the 8.30 phone queue and they have deep anxiety when the countdown starts.

That must change. Scottish Labour would openly say that it is something on which we will work with the Government, but it must change and there must be reform. Although support for the NHS remains unwaveringly high, satisfaction levels with NHS performance are at a record low.

GPs themselves are crying out for reform. They have asked the Government to help them to reform the system. They are willing to do more to broaden out the primary care services that are the cornerstone of our NHS. If they are given the power and resources to do it, they will. GPs are natural problem-solvers. A study in the British Journal of General Practice shows that GPs can reduce mortality by up to 30 per cent if people get to see their own GP regularly. That speaks for itself.

However, reform seems stagnant. There is really no excuse for not planning a decade ago for some of this. We might not have predicted a pandemic—albeit that some people did—but we knew that there was an ageing population and a mental health crisis. The short-term and piecemeal approach to investment and workforce planning has meant that NHS Scotland has paid a heavy price, and it will take more than money to turn things around. In a fresh report, Audit Scotland has said that the Government has

“No clear plan”

for NHS reform, while

“commitments to reducing waiting times have not been met”

and

“the number of people remaining in hospital because their discharge has been delayed is the highest on record”.

I emphasise that point. The chairman of the BMA, Dr Iain Kennedy, said:

“At this stage, we still lack the detail and comprehensive vision needed to make any plan a reality.”

The Government needs to convince the general public not only that it has a plan but that people can have confidence in the detail of that plan and in the 800 GPs that it says that it will deliver to transfer the NHS that people love so dearly.

We have heard that the Scottish Government is going to overhaul NHS waiting times and improve access to GPs, but it has already been criticised widely for recycling old pledges. That announcement is an admission that we cannot go on like this: it is the same old promises from a tired Government, with no detail. It is not a detailed plan for progress or reform.

We have heard other members talk about how, every day, patients are failed at every level of care, because the Government did not plan effectively for known challenges. In its 17 years in power, it has known about a lot of them. People now worry about the times when they might be ill and need acute care, an ambulance or a life-changing operation, because, all the time, in their own communities, they witness ambulances that cannot get patients into hospitals when they have rushed to get there.

Public confidence in our NHS is diminishing. It is not the fault of the dedicated workforce who have worked tirelessly in the hardest of circumstances.

Will the cabinet secretary clarify the capacity of the new HMP Glasgow? The Criminal Justice Committee was told that it is 1,344.

His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons for Scotland’s most recent annual report stated that, although the rising prison population remains a concern across the Scottish Prison Service estate, it has a particular impact on HMP Barlinnie, which has a capacity of 1,400. Is it planned that the new HMP Glasgow will have surge capacity built into its design? What will that look like?

Holocaust memorial day is without parallel in importance. I commend Jackson Carlaw for his leadership in that regard. Through his eloquent speeches—not only today, but every time I have heard him—he has been very important and influential. The work that he has done on Holocaust remembrance is to be commended.

The theme of Holocaust remembrance day is dignity, human rights and the importance of collective action to prevent the spread of hatred and of denial of the Holocaust. In his opening speech, Jackson Carlaw talked about other genocides, including in Bosnia. That gives me the opportunity, as others have done, to mention my visit to Srebrenica at the tail end of last year.

In Bosnia, Serb nationalism of the past remains omnipresent. The genocide against the Muslim Bosniaks happened in the 1990s. I spoke to mothers whose sons and brothers had been murdered, and I was alarmed when they described how, today, the denial of that genocide still exists. The Sarajevo hills are, for those who are old enough to remember, better known for the winter Olympics and Torvill and Dean. Eyes were closed when Serbs put Bosniak neighbours into concentration camps—and that was not that long ago.

The motion notes the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It will be appreciated that there were many other concentration camps, as members have mentioned, including Treblinka in Poland, where around 800,000 people died, and Belzec, where 600,000 died. While waiting to be sent to their death, many people starved, died of disease or were worked to death. It is unbelievable that those horrific events took place a relatively short time ago.

Across German-occupied Europe, 6 million Jews were murdered for being Jewish, by an ideology that was based on hatred and which began its journey in a democratic country. It is difficult to read and learn about humanity’s worst period in history and the evil that humankind is capable of, but it is important that we remember it.

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau on the very last day of 2018. No amount of reading prepares a person for the sheer scale and horror of the camp, but it is something that I think everyone should do and face. When people arrive there they are asked by the guide not to take photographs in certain areas: one such area has people’s personal effects there, including shoes and suitcases. Visitors are asked not to photograph them because those are people’s personal belongings, with their personal stories of how they arrived in that dreadful place. That part of it all should remain personal.

Camp commandant Rudolf Höss expanded Auschwitz to construct a second camp at Birkenau for industrial murder. As others have said, if you have seen the memorial to those who died at Birkenau, you will notice that behind the camp there are houses, which were there at the time, in the 1940s. Unfortunately, people knew, and they looked on as the concentration camps murdered Jewish people and others.

The testimonies of survivors who escaped is vital, because without them we would not begin to get our heads around the horror of what happened. How could it happen at all? That is the vital question for any person who is interested in ensuring that it will never happen again. We must educate every child about the sad facts—no generation must be left out. They remind us that we must have robust policies for tackling hatred and prejudice against any group in society. Antisemitism, as the survivors have said, is far from having disappeared.

There are fewer Holocaust survivors each year when we mark this anniversary: soon, there will be none. The generations who live on and who know, and politicians like us, must ensure that it is never forgotten.

Andy Maciver was on the trip with me, and he wrote a great article headed “Moderates must rise to the challenges of populist nationalism”. It was something that only Andy Maciver could write, and it is a brilliant article.

We cannot be bystanders where we see the hatred of others. I will not stand by when I see what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza. In my opinion there is a genocide taking place there, but let the courts and the law decide whether it is or is not. Whether it is about Gaza, Bosnia or Cambodia—it is really important that Jackson Carlaw mentioned it—as human beings and as politicians, we cannot be bystanders. We need to call out what we see, without prejudice.

I am proud to be part of the debate, and I again thank Jackson Carlaw for securing it.

The minister has said that there is to be an independently led case review, but surely we must have some answers now and not in a year’s time. Perhaps she could clarify the timescale.

How could the people who were protecting the children in question, who were under 13, have missed the signs of the deep levels of abuse that were taking place in a flat when there were children screaming and there were comings and goings? Surely the minister is not satisfied with simply leaving it to a case-led review to give us some answers to that key question.

I ask the minister whether anything can be done to give us some preliminary answers now. If we are expected to wait longer than that, I do not see how the minister can say that she is satisfied that all Scotland’s children are in fact protected.

To ask the First Minister whether the Scottish Government plans to make creating sexually explicit “deepfake” images and videos a crime. (S6F-03730)

Deepfake abuse has been described as a “new frontier” of violence against women. The proliferation of sexually explicit deepfake images has grown at an alarming rate and is causing devastating harm to victims. #MyImageMyChoice, which is a campaign group that tackles image abuse, has found that 99 per cent of deepfake images are of women and girls.

One of the most unsettling features of that abuse is that it is often people who are known to the victim who are creating and sharing the images. Teenage girls have found that their classmates are using apps to transform their social media posts into nudes before sharing them. I have raised the issue before, so I am pleased with the First Minister’s answer. Does he agree that there is now urgency to close any loopholes in the law in Scotland by working with the United Kingdom Government, which is doing the same? As I said, it is the sharing of images that is illegal, so we need to close that gap. Does the First Minister agree that we, as a Parliament, and the Scottish Government need to send a clear message that dealing with that type of abuse is part of the campaign to eradicate violence against women and girls?

I thank the cabinet secretary for advance sight of the statement, which I found helpful.

This must be a turning point for Scotland’s prisons. Our system lacks accountability and transparency when there are deaths in custody. Sadly, there have been more deaths since the tragic and preventable deaths of Katie Allan and William Lindsay Brown.

Now is the time to adopt all the recommendations, which the Government has done, and to go beyond them and use them as the basis for whole-system change. For too long, the prison system, which we trust to look after people on behalf of the state, has let down families. They have been immediately shut out of a system whose first response is to defend its own interests.

Communication to families immediately after the death of their loved one has been poor. The unfettered access to information following a death in custody that families were promised by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons for Scotland in its recommendations is meaningless, unless those families have rights to their own representation.

I have one specific question. Will the cabinet secretary commit to legal aid support for all families in the first 24 hours following a death in custody so that they have a chance against the system when it comes to asking immediate questions about the circumstances of the death of their loved one? Families tell me that they feel closed out of the system during the first period after a death in custody, and such a move would go a long way to making sure that we have whole-system change.

I take your point. However, there is still a test, which is not applied automatically.

I think that you have answered my question, and I hear your position on choice. However, the bill does not give people that choice; it simply says that virtual attendance can happen when that is in the interests of justice.

You are answering yes to my question, in that the facilities that you are developing will give reassurance to the court system. It is still important that witnesses give evidence in certain conditions. Even if the bill is passed without amendment, it would perhaps meet the test that the court will have to apply, which is that giving evidence remotely can be done if that is in the interests of justice.

Adam, did you want to respond?