Chamber and committees

Earlier this year, I attended an event at the University of Stirling, which is in my constituency, for the official launch of Fighting With Pride in Scotland. Fighting With Pride is a veterans charity that works closely with veterans organisations across Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom to improve the support that is available to LGBT+ armed forces veterans. I am grateful to all the members who signed the motion to enable the debate to take place, and I welcome those in the public gallery from Fighting With Pride.

In my constituency, Fighting With Pride has worked with veterans organisations such as the Wee County Veterans and with LGBT organisations such as the Forth Valley Lavender Room, and it has supported LGBT education in schools such as Dollar academy. Fighting With Pride also works symbiotically with national veterans groups such as Legion Scotland and Poppyscotland to better support LGBT+ veterans across the country.

Fighting With Pride’s mission statement is to improve the support that is available for LGBT+ veterans. One of the most critical aspects of doing that is campaigning to right the wrongs that were perpetrated on LGBT+ armed forces members during the so-called gay ban—the ban on LGBT+ service members in the UK armed forces, which ended only in 2000, just 23 years ago.

In my view, the so-called gay ban and the way in which it was implemented discriminated against LGBT+ members of the armed forces in our society, notwithstanding the difficult social and legal situation that all LGBT+ people faced at that time. Although homosexuality—to use the term of the time—was decriminalised for civilians in England in 1967 and, shamefully, not until 1980 for those in Scotland, the ban on LGBT people being members of the armed forces remained in place until 2000.

That meant that LGBT+ members of the armed forces—and they alone—were prevented by statute from loving those whom they chose to love or from living a life in which they were true to themselves. It was for that exact reason that Fighting With Pride was set up in 2019. As I mentioned, a number of Fighting With Pride’s members and supporters are in the public gallery today. That includes the charity’s operations manager for Scotland and Northern Ireland, Dougie Morgan, who is a resident of my constituency.

I have met Dougie a few times and he has described to me in his own words—not least at my first meeting with him at the event that I mentioned at the University of Stirling—how he had felt very different from a young age, although he did not, at that time, recognise that as being gay. Although he did privately know of his sexuality when he joined the armed forces in 1979, he had no concept of there being such a thing as a gay ban in place.

However—again, to use his own words—Dougie quickly came to realise the treatment that LGBT+ people could come to expect in the armed forces during that time, such as homophobic bullying, jokes and mistreatment and, in the most extreme cases, violent physical abuse, unfair detention or predatory sexual behaviour. That was not necessarily a direct result of the ban itself but a result of the culture that was aided and abetted by the ban’s presence.

After almost all instances in which someone was outed as being LGBT+, their time in the armed forces was ended, almost always with immediate dismissal from the service. That meant a sudden end to their chosen career, simply because of who they were attracted to, who they loved or how they identified themselves. As a result of that experience, after leaving the forces, Dougie—in his own words—lived his life as someone else, masking his sexuality and pursuing a life that he felt would be socially acceptable in a way that being gay at that time simply was not.

During that period of his life, and because of what he had witnessed in his time in the forces, Dougie lived with complicated psychological issues, which were compounded by a challenging relationship with alcohol. I understand from my discussions with Fighting With Pride that Dougie’s story is, unfortunately, far from unique.

After being forcibly outed in 2009, Dougie met his husband. Both of them were subject to a significant homophobic attack in 2016, the same year in which they were married. I mention that because Dougie’s story shows not only how far we have come in terms of LGBT+ rights and acceptance in a comparatively short time, but how far we still have to go. It was in the aftermath of that attack that Dougie felt that it was necessary to do something to ensure that others would not be forced to hide their sexuality and live a parallel life that was not true to who they were, and he wanted to support LGBT+ veterans specifically. From that point onwards, Dougie began to share his experience in schools and with other groups. That eventually led to his involvement with Fighting With Pride, which, as I said, was founded in 2019.

Dougie’s story is just one of the stories from thousands of LGBT+ veterans across Scotland and the rest of the UK who have been affected by the gay ban. I am grateful to Dougie for telling me his story and allowing me to use it in my speech to illustrate just one example of the adversity faced by LGBT+ veterans who served in the armed forces prior to 2000.

In July this year, the UK Government published the “LGBT Veterans Independent Review: Final Report”. As the name suggests, it was an independent review into the service and experience of LGBT veterans who served in the armed forces prior to 2000. The report is comprehensive and detailed, and I, for one, welcome it—in fact, I contributed to it.

In my view, the most pertinent part of the report is the veterans’ stories section, which ranges from pages 51 to 142. That section presents a vast number of testimonies that set out the lived experience of LGBT+ veterans who served during the ban. Those testimonies outline a picture of homophobic attitudes and jokes exacerbated and enabled by the ban; betrayal and disownment by friends and family as a result of being forcibly outed or dismissed from the service; post-traumatic stress disorder caused by homophobic and transphobic emotional and violent physical abuse while in the service; lifelong shame and guilt for being forcibly removed from a job that they loved simply because of their sexuality; and careers, families and livelihoods destroyed, all for no good reason.

I know that some members interact with a number of elements of what we might call the defence and veterans establishment. To my mind, substantial remnants of the attitudes that I have described are still present in those organisations. This is a case that has not yet been won. I do not want to name any charities, defence organisations, parts of the Ministry of Defence and so on, but we have more to do to change those attitudes. I would like to see a much more proactive approach from those organisations across the board.

I recommend that everyone in the chamber and everyone listening to the speeches in this debate take the time to read the pages of the report of the independent review. Although such reports are useful for informing debates such as this, they are only as good as the action that they produce. The report of the independent review is helpful in that regard, as it outlines, for the devolved Governments and the UK Government, a number of recommendations and suggestions to better support LGBT+ veterans.

For my part, I have sought to bring awareness and action to the support that we give to such veterans. In bringing this members’ business debate to the Scottish Parliament, I note the suggestions and recommendations to the Scottish Government that were made in the report, and I will work, as an MSP, in pursuit of those suggestions. I encourage others to do the same.

As for the United Kingdom Government’s response, warm words have been forthcoming and an official apology has been issued, which is absolutely right and long overdue. However, one of the most significant long-term impacts of the so-called gay ban for veterans, other individuals and their friends and family, and for those in the institutions of government that are ultimately responsibility for the ban, is the harm that has been caused. The UK Government therefore has a particular obligation to LGBT+ veterans.

On Monday, I was dismayed to read a BBC report showing that the UK Government had dropped a debate on the LGBT veterans independent review in the UK Parliament, which had previously been promised by the UK Secretary of State for Defence not long after the publication of the report of the independent review. I understand that that decision has now been overturned and that there will be a debate in the House of Commons in the new year, which is very welcome.

Given the special obligation of the UK Government on the issue, I echo the words of Fighting With Pride’s open letter to the UK Prime Minister, which was published on Monday. The letter urges the UK Government to allow that debate to be held and, perhaps most importantly, it calls—as does the motion for our debate—for the UK Government to scrap the proposed £50 million cap on the fund for distribution to LGBT veterans affected by the gay ban. The obvious issue will be the amount of compensation available within the cap to individual veterans affected by the gay ban. The cap means that the more veterans who apply to the fund, the more the amount that individual veterans can obtain will inevitably decrease. That just stands to reason, given the maths. It is fairly clear that that amount will not be sufficient to compensate individual veterans properly.

In my view, the so-called gay ban is a shameful part of Scotland’s and the UK’s military history. Those who were prepared to serve their country with loyalty and distinction were not met with the same loyalty in return. That cannot be justified, and both Scotland and the UK must atone for that. I urge the UK Government to do so.

As a Parliament, we must stand united behind our LGBT+ veterans, and we call on the UK Government to do the same. We support Fighting With Pride and the immense amount of work that it does to support LGBT+ veterans. Crucially, we should implement the recommendations of the report of the independent review. Lastly, and most importantly, we should scrap the cap.

The point that the minister made about financial compensation seems to be at the heart of a lot of the debate. I agree with Jamie Greene that no Government can say that unrestricted financial resources are available. However, the minister knows that somebody who was dishonourably discharged from the Royal Air Force, for example, would have been unable to get a job with a commercial airline and to use the vital life skill that they had learned as a pilot. That kind of thing also has to be compensated for. That should be the limit—it should be about what compensation is relevant to the individual concerned. That is where we will get the cap. Does the minister agree?

Good morning, minister. Given that HES has been making more money, I was pleased to hear you say that you are looking at the idea of HES being able to keep any additional money that it makes, because that would be a real incentive for it to do more work. It is not for me to speak on behalf of the committee, but I think that, in speaking to HES and others in recent weeks, the committee was concerned that they did not exactly jump on the idea of exploiting their facilities to a greater extent as a huge opportunity. Given what you have said, and what we all know about the budget situation, surely HES should show greater vigour and urgency in seizing opportunities to maximise income from other sources. Can you give the committee any reassurance that that will be supported, encouraged and facilitated by ministers as a matter of urgency?

Thanks for that, and that is encouraging but, first of all—this might not be the view of the whole committee—the idea of public bodies accumulating reserves for no apparent purpose is not something that I am very supportive of. There will be different views on that.

However, with regard to those assets, I am keen to see a change in mindset, which is required so that imaginative entrepreneurialism takes place. I am sure that the committee will look at that in the future. Everyone talks about Badbea in the Highlands, for example—as I did last week—and the places that are important to people in North America as a result of the clearances. Parts of Scotland have Hanseatic league links, and along the road, for example, we have Picardy Place, which is a link between Edinburgh and that French region. I am also thinking about China and the presence of Scots in the banking institutions in Hong Kong and so on.

If HES did a complete audit of the important sites that it has, and some places that it does not currently have, and if it properly exploited those, that could transform the money that HES has to develop, maintain and improve access to its sites. That could also be done through fundraising—think of some of the corporate entities around the world that might be willing to contribute. It would be useful to know whether the Government would be willing to encourage HES to have a complete, fresh audit of what opportunities there might be in relation to every site. I know that it has an awful lot of sites, but it could start with a priority list, if that kind of approach was possible.

I congratulate John Swinney on bringing this interesting debate to the Parliament, and I offer my apologies for having been unable to attend last night’s event. Like John Swinney, I think that SNP members question themselves when a debate has such a subject and we are talking about a duchess. As Robert Browning might have said, this will be my last duchess debate in the Parliament, but it is a worthwhile subject for debate.

My connection is a bit more personal, and I will try not to repeat the points that John Swinney spoke about from his position of far greater authority. After the 2011 election, the current Minister for Culture, Europe and International Development and I went to Pitlochry for a break, when we visited Blair Atholl and found out about the red duchess. We were blown away by the history; we were completely unaware of the background before then.

My grandfather is from Pitlochry. He gave my father the name Atholl, which I gave my son as a second name—as it is for my brother. I have a family connection with Blair Atholl.

During the visit to Pitlochry in 2011, I learned about the importance of the immense historical figure that is Katharine Stewart-Murray and about her contribution to Scottish life. It is important to refer to that, even if it is just because she was the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons from Scotland. That was an immense achievement, when we consider that the franchise had been expanded to include only some women just five years before and would not be expanded to all women for another five years subsequent to the duchess’s election.

During Katharine Stewart-Murray’s time in Parliament, she embarked on a trailblazing political journey that was marked by a distinctively feminist outlook, although that feminism might be of a different brand from that which some feminists today would recognise. Her position was all the more difficult for that reason. As we have heard, her feminism did not stop at Gretna or Dover; it was explicitly international.

During the Spanish civil war, which is intimately tied to Scotland’s history, Katharine Stewart-Murray saw the impact of the conflict on women and girls in particular and made that the focus of her book “Searchlight on Spain”, which was instrumental in persuading the British Government to accept child refugees from the Spanish civil war, as has been mentioned.

Katharine Stewart-Murray sits within the tradition of strong women who have broken the status quo of Scottish politics. We can look to many such women, including her contemporaries, such as Lavinia Malcolm, who was the first woman councillor and first woman provost in Scotland—in my constituency and in the village of Dollar, where I live. After my election in 2007, I lodged a motion about her.

There is also Florence Marian McNeill, who was a leading Scottish suffragist, a leading light of the Scottish literary renaissance of the 20th century and a founding member of the Scottish National Party. We all know of Elsie Inglis, the well-known doctor, surgeon, teacher and Scottish suffragist, and Mary Barbour, the Glasgow councillor who famously organised the rent strikes.

There are those who came after Katharine Stewart-Murray’s time, such as Winnie Ewing and Margo MacDonald, who both won stunning by-election victories against significant odds and who for the rest of their lives championed difficult causes that needed a champion, much as Katharine Stewart-Murray did. We also have our first female First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, among many more—far too many to mention in this short speech.

Katharine Stewart-Murray sits firmly within that tradition of strong Scottish women of independent mind who achieved against all the odds. That is a phrase that we use now, but the realities of electoral politics 100 years ago were that it was difficult to break the mould as a woman or as an independent, as she might subsequently have been seen.

No instance shows that resilience more than her stance against authoritarian regimes, especially her opposition to Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, the Soviet Union and, lastly, Hitler and Nazi Germany, which, as we have heard, led to her deselection from what was then the Scottish Unionist Party, because her stance was out of step with the then Prime Minister Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.

Of course, appeasing Hitler is now widely regarded to have been a strategic mistake in the build-up to the second world war, and even that is, to a large extent, understating it. However, it is a timely reminder that, even when something might not be popular at the time, it might also be the right thing to do.

Today, the Parliament and our Government are among the most representative in the world for women. I am pleased that my party has more female MSPs than males. That has contributed to a more balanced Scottish Parliament, which has one of the highest levels of female representatives in the world.

Let us see whether today’s debate is an opportunity to celebrate how far we have come in the 100 years since Katharine Stewart-Murray’s election as our first woman MP, as well as how much further we have to go. We should also use today’s debate to reaffirm our commitment to continue to work towards true gender equality, not just nationally or at UK level, but internationally.

To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has carried out regarding any impact of United Kingdom immigration policies on universities in Scotland. (S6O-02849)

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I could not access my app. I would have voted yes.

I thank the minister for his answer. At a recent meeting with the University of Stirling, which is based in my constituency, one of the issues that we discussed was the potential impact of the policy that the UK Government introduced recently that restricts many international students from bringing their dependants with them. There are real concerns that, without the ability to bring their families, many overseas students will choose to go elsewhere.

Does the minister agree that hostile immigration policies have the ability to harm the international standing of our universities and that the UK Government should devolve immigration powers to the Scottish Parliament—notwithstanding the complete silence from MSPs on the Tory benches in this Parliament—to ensure that Scotland remains an open and welcoming destination for international students, whose contribution to the economy and the social and cultural diversity of our country is very much welcomed?

The tower has been closed for at least 25 years, as far as I know.

I will ask another question later.

I will stop being parochial about my own area. I was also thinking about Badbea in the Highlands, which is pretty grim for its significance. If you visit, you are on the edge of a cliff, so I imagine that you might want to be careful about how you get people there. You could engender interest from Canada and the United States, because that is where a lot of the immigration to those countries came from.

You could make the connections that you could tap into part of the criteria for any potential new acquisitions. For example, the Americans are the biggest spenders when they come to Scotland, and they are coming back—I have seen that around Edinburgh. The potential for dramatically increased income is huge if you can tap into what interests people. It would be true of different countries as well. Is there any capacity to do that on individual sites and see what the potential is?