Chamber and committees

I am about to conclude.

If we want to have a real debate, we should all start from the same place—understanding the financial pressures and not pretending that they do not exist, or that they exist in Wales but not in Scotland. We must start from an honest place if we want the sector to thrive.

On the subject of being honest with ourselves, does the member agree that cheering to the echo the cuts to the Scottish Government’s budget from Westminster and then demanding more money for every area of spending would be the very definition of rank hypocrisy?

We have had quite a number of round tables, and I have found this to be the most interesting that we have had, because of the contributions.

There is a kind of false debate going on about how good or bad Brexit might be but having heard about the practical examples of additional costs, markets being closed off, firms being stopped from doing things that they were doing before or doing things in Ireland rather than Scotland, as well as the other additional costs and confusion, I think that the situation seems pretty horrendous. I am happy to be corrected, but I am assuming that all the examples that have been given demonstrate how things have changed from the base, which was pretty much seamless. Going back to the samples that were mentioned earlier, I would say that everything used to be done pretty easily; now we are talking about new costs and loss—that is, loss of control or innovative capacity in Scotland. That is really worrying.

On the question of how you actually deal with the situation, I remember going to Canada a few years back to ensure that haggis was able to go on sale there. That was not possible in the US, as the Americans would not accept it. I remember the US authorities in New Jersey and New York saying that they were fed up to the back teeth of people trying to export to the US who did not have regard to their certification and standards. People kept on saying that they had certification, perhaps from the EU or Italy for cheese or whatever. The US authorities said, “We’re not interested. We just want you to comply with what we need.”

This might be a gross simplification of what is required but, in that context, would it be helpful for industry to have somebody—whether from the Scottish Government, the UK Government or both together—who was able to explain to a firm what it could export, and to which countries, if it did all the things listed on a certain page? I know that requirements are dynamic and that they can change over time—indeed, even while your products are sitting on the quayside—but I wonder whether it would be useful to have that kind of simplified list of all the things that firms have to do to satisfy the requirements.

By the way, I do not share the optimism that the EU being subject to some of the same constraints will make it change its attitude. The EU made it plain throughout the debate that we would not feel as comfortable after Brexit as we did before—although I hope that we can. Is that sort of simplified support from Government worth having, or would that be too complex? Might the industry be required to do that itself, because only those in the industry know everything that they have to do?

Does the Deputy First Minister agree that it is also a fact that, whether we have a Labour Government or a Conservative Government, we will have at least five more years of austerity? The Institute for Fiscal Studies has outlined that the UK Government’s spending plans amount to a real-terms cut to net public sector investment of £18 billion between 2024-25 and 2028-29. Will the Deputy First Minister outline what assessment has been made of how much that equates to per person? Will she outline how an SNP Government would prioritise investment if it had the fiscal levers of other, independent nations?

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. My app would not refresh. I would have voted no.

Thanks very much for your contributions so far.

I was interested to hear what Joël Reland had to say about the administrative bandwidth constraints on political ambitions. However, I think that it is also true, certainly in my experience, that politics drives those things. On the idea that the EU is a rules-based institution that slavishly follows the rules—we were discussing animal feeds and so on—Brexit happened and blew all that away.

On the accession of an independent Scotland, it will be politics that drives it, not any rules. Ukraine has climbed up the league table very quickly to accession status, which is a response to the politics rather than to anything else. Could you say a bit more about that?

Neil Bibby quite rightly asked about a Trump presidency. It would be interesting to know whether a future UK Government would stick with a Trump presidency that was encouraging Russia to attack a European state. Would the UK Government be driven to work more closely with Europe?

I will mention two other things. First, in relation to the European Parliament elections, can you see anything on the political horizon that might make it more difficult to effect changes to the TCA—for example, a particular party in any country having a very strong view on something that might impact on the TCA? I know that that will require a little bit of crystal-ball gazing.

The second matter relates to defence and security. Again, are there things in that respect that might happen that would have a substantial impact? It is obviously difficult to say how things in the middle east or further developments in Ukraine will play out in relation to the EU’s response. Can you see on the horizon any defence and security developments that might impact on the ability to change the terms of the TCA in relation to the interests of one or more of the 27 member states? That is for Joël Reland, first.

To ask the Scottish Government when it last received an update on NHS Forth Valley’s assurance and improvement plan. (S6O-03194)

I acknowledge that progress is being made and that Forth Valley royal hospital performs well in, for example, elective care. As the local MSP, I continue to get a steady stream of very positive messages about the care that people are receiving, and we should acknowledge the work of the staff in that regard.

The cabinet secretary will be aware of the challenges that smaller health boards such as NHS Forth Valley face. Will he outline any further measures that the Scottish Government is taking to address that?

We know how Labour treats Scotland, given the way in which it treated the McCrone report in the mid-1970s. Hide Scotland’s wealth from Scotland—that is the way to do it.

Labour now proposes to take more of Scotland’s wealth to fund nuclear developments in England. The Labour Party is no friend to Scotland or to the Scottish economy; it has proved that time and again. It has lied to, and failed, Scotland, not least—as I said—by saying that “there is no money” left.

Let us not go back to that. If we want to see the management of a regional economy under the Labour Party, we can look at Birmingham City Council, which has a 20-odd per cent increase in council tax and hundreds of redundancies. That is what Labour mismanagement does. We should have had a serious debate today, but we are not going to get that from the Labour Party. The serious option for the Scottish economy is independence, to give us the full powers that we require.

It is worth noting that Goldman Sachs’s latest report indicates that the UK’s GDP per head currently stands at only 4 per cent above its 2016 figure, compared to 8 per cent for the eurozone and 15 per cent for the US. That proves what everyone who is living in Scotland knows, which is that the UK is the stagnation nation of the developed world.

I will address some of the points that have been made. On tax, it is worth pointing out that the Tories will not acknowledge that the majority of people in Scotland pay less tax than their counterparts in the rest of the UK do. The Tories object to that—I think because those who pay less tax are the lower paid—and the Tories like to turn that on its head, as we see in their proposals. On economic mismanagement, we have the highest ever debt of £2.65 trillion under the Tories—