Chamber and committees

Will Jackson Carlaw give way?

I was going to talk about the virtues of a written constitution, as many of my colleagues have done, but it is important for the chamber to realise exactly what the Opposition members, who are all looking at their phones just now, support when they support the current unwritten constitution. Rather than quoting Dicey, Edmund Burke, Montesquieu or any of the other thinkers they would normally cite in defence of an unwritten constitution, they have just made a puerile attack on the SNP. I do not know how many times Neil Bibby mentioned the term “SNP” in his speech.

Let us look at what those members support. What do we get with an unwritten constitution? First of all, we get the proroguing of a Parliament when it becomes inconvenient—just stopping the Parliament, and then lying to the head of state about the proroguing of Parliament. The proroguing of Parliament stopped it working altogether. What the Opposition members are doing in the empty benches that we see in the chamber is walking away because they have no arguments to counter our proposals for a written constitution.

We also have the situation in which you can make international agreements and then break them immediately once you have made them—it may only be in a “specific and limited way”, but you have lied to people you have made an agreement with and trashed the reputation of the state that you support in the process of doing that.

Or, of course, you can stuff to the gunnels the House of Lords—that paragon, that mother of Parliaments, where there are 800-plus cronies of the Labour and Tory parties and people who have donated to those parties—and then call that a democracy. It must be the only legislature in the world where the majority are unelected, yet there is not a word of condemnation from any of members of those parties in this Parliament.

You can also lie to Parliament without a word of condemnation being said by the people on those benches in this place about the liar himself, Boris Johnson.

For years, we had the fiction that we had a separation of powers within the UK Parliament but, of course, there was a person with the title of Lord Chancellor who was a member of the executive and the justiciary, as well as the legislature—the embodiment of the fact that there was no separation of powers, with all the attendant problems that that brought, as well.

When we put all those flaws together with the fact that we have an unwritten constitution, and with the presence of the constitutional vandals that we see in Westminster just now, that is where we get some of the major breaches of that constitution. It would have been much more difficult for those constitutional vandals to have done that had there been a written constitution with protections for individuals and groups within society. However, it is easy to go through that constitution and make those breaches if there is the thin veneer of respectability of an unwritten constitution.

It has been a source of shame to me for many years, having studied political science, to see some people put the unwritten constitution up on a pedestal as some fantastic, almost mythical, virtue of the UK state. It is anything but.

An unwritten constitution also allows for democratic denial—a rewriting of what most people understand as the basic principles of democracy such as the idea that, if you win an election, you get to implement your manifesto. That has been ditched. The idea of the mandate, a cornerstone of democracy, has been ditched by the Opposition parties in this chamber, and, of course, there is the devolution mess that we are seeing just now, whereby parties that simply do not like our party can change their mind and act with caprice to stop our legitimate aims of exercising devolved powers within the devolved settlement.

Before Labour gets too comfortable, I point out that there can be illegal wars as well—you can consign many people to death in those wars at the same time as going straight past their normal democratic processes.

There is also the point that Paul McLennan made—we can have an Act of Union that we are told is voluntary, but you just make sure there is no way that people can exercise their right to leave that union, even if that was the deal that they signed up to in the first place.

Therefore, it is quite clear to me that the virtues of a written constitution will appeal to people. Despite what others say about fantasy, I think that it will appeal to the people of Scotland, not least because the curtain has been pulled back from the unwritten constitution. I think that the idea of a rights-respecting Scotland that looks after the rights of individuals in the way that we have heard will prove to be very effective in making sure that people vote for independence for Scotland.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I would have voted no.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I seek your guidance. We have had a number of amendments tonight that were debated at stage 2 but not moved following the debate on them. We have also had a number of amendments that were debated at stage 2 and defeated, yet they returned at stage 3. We considered an amendment that, had it been agreed to—it was not—would have resulted in a cost of £59 million a year plus expenditure of several hundred million pounds to construct a new prison. Can you provide any clarity on the criteria that are used for the bringing back at stage 3 of amendments that were considered at stage 2?

Will the member accept an intervention?

We all know Scotland’s wonderful heritage of innovation, which goes far beyond the inventions commonly listed on a souvenir shop tea towel. Almost every town in Scotland can point to at least one major invention or innovation that happened there or that is attributable to someone who came from there. That is important, because the past inspires the future. My constituency is no exception. Sir James Dewar, who was educated at Dollar academy, invented the vacuum flask, and George Meikle of Alloa invented a water-raising wheel that was used to drain the moss of Kincardine in 1787.

In creating that reputation for innovation, Scotland benefited from being in the vanguard of the industrial revolution—although, with the hindsight given by history, we should recognise that that period of growth was built on the backs of the working masses and often involved resource-thirsty enterprises being fed at the expense of the peoples of an empire that then covered the globe.

Our search for innovation continues, as it must, and I am pleased to be able to point to a package of investment in innovation and infrastructure that will help to drive inclusive economic growth in the area that I represent. The city region deal funded by the Scottish and UK Governments, Stirling Council, Clackmannanshire Council and the University of Stirling will invest more than £214 million over 10 years and will deliver innovation hubs specialising in aquaculture, the environment and intergenerational living, each of which will play a crucial role in addressing the challenges of the future.

World-leading technology solutions will be developed in those centres of excellence, transforming the local economy, tackling low job density through the creation of high-quality, skilled local jobs and strong regional supply chains and, at the same time, supporting community wealth building and the wellbeing economy.

Stirling University Innovation Park, which is in my constituency, was established in 1986. Its aims are to assist the regeneration of the local and national economies by providing an environment that facilitates, encourages and promotes businesses with a focus on innovation. Those are the kinds of projects that the national innovation strategy, which is outlined in the motion, can and must support and promote.

The new fields of knowledge on which the future of our planet will depend need the same explosion of innovation that the industrial revolution brought about, and it is essential that Scotland is at the forefront of this new revolution, in which we must, admittedly, play our part in repairing the climatic and economic harms that have been caused by global industrialisation.

Arthur Herman of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC wrote a book, published in 2001, entitled “How the Scots Invented the Modern World”. As the Scotsman reviewer said at the time, the

“overblown rhetoric invites a sceptical reaction. But I suggest we just accept this extraordinary compliment graciously.”

The important thing now—for us and as part of our continued contribution to the world—is that we continue our love of knowledge and our support for innovation and play a leading role in the development of the postmodern world. We could talk about the almost unique achievement of Scotland’s universities; the last time that I heard, five of them were in the top 200 universities in the world. The explosion of ideas during the Scottish enlightenment is an inspiration. Perhaps we will not see the Boris Johnson school of philosophy on the nature of truth or the political economy thesis of Kwasi Kwarteng, but there are important antecedents that should inform how we look forward and give us inspiration that Scotland can lead again.

There is a wider message here, too. If we are determined to become a world leader in entrepreneurship and innovation—I know that it will be uncomfortable for some Conservative members to hear this—we must reverse the isolationist approach that has been thrust on us as part of Brexit Britain. Scotland must use all our powers to create an economy that supports businesses to thrive. We will do that by harnessing the skills and ingenuity of our people and by seizing the economic and social opportunities that are provided, but not as part of a delusion about being a world power. We will do it best with the normal powers of an independent nation.

I support the motion.

Will the member take an intervention?

I thank the member for taking the intervention. Would the member support the Parliament, through its Presiding Officers and its structures, becoming more involved in monitoring that kind of behaviour towards MSPs where they can? I know that that has been talked about across different parties. Is that something that the member would support or is that going too far?

Laudable though I think what Martin Whitfield proposes is—I think that we should aim for that—bringing it about depends on and is interlinked with the level of female representation that each of the parties achieves. We must drive up the total level of female representation in the chamber. If we do not achieve more balance in that way, we will be asking a smaller group of women to do more and more work. I simply wanted to point out that those two things are related.

The need for additional fiscal flexibilities to allow the Scottish Government to better manage its budget is pretty clear to most of us and has been highlighted beyond doubt by the pandemic and the challenging economic conditions that we continue to face, not least the projected 14 per cent cut from Westminster to our capital budget over the next four years. Can the minister provide any update regarding the Scottish Government’s latest engagement with the UK Government on the review of the fiscal framework and can he say any more about the outcomes that the Scottish Government would hope to see as a result of that review?