Chamber and committees

You may. Thank you, Mr Ewing. Are members content to incorporate all those suggestions?

Members indicated agreement.

I thank Meghan Gallacher for attending the meeting and supporting the petition. I agree that the petition is useful in terms of the on-going conversation that needs to take place, but for the reasons that have been given directly to us, we will close the petition. Do members agree?

Members indicated agreement.

I begin by thanking, through clenched teeth, my colleagues for keeping me up past my bedtime before we have been able to start the debate this evening.

Before I do anything further, I immediately indicate that the debate is very much a joint effort by me and Paul O’Kane. He came to me and suggested that, given everything else that was happening in relation to the international situation, it would be nice for the Parliament to talk about something positive involving the Jewish community in Scotland, which raised their effort and contribution to society above all the division elsewhere.

That is the reason why we are having this debate. I mused to my team today, rather shooting myself in the foot, “Do you know, I hadn’t actually realised that Calderwood Lodge was founded only in the early 60s?” They said, “Well, that’s why you’re moving a motion congratulating them on their 60th anniversary,” which I suppose is a very obvious fact.

However, I said that more because—having commented before in the chamber that, when I was growing up, so many of my neighbours were Jewish—I can remember, as a five-year-old, that some of them went to Calderwood Lodge. Imagine my being told, as a five-year-old boy who was reading Enid Blyton at the time, that my friends were going to a place called Calderwood Lodge! It sounded very exciting, and it was in a place apparently called “New Lands”.

One of my friends said that they had met a very important man who was a teddy. I thought, “This is where I want to go.” That was Teddy Taylor, who had apparently visited the school. Whether people now—or then, or at any other time—would think that that was a highlight is a matter of conjecture. To me, however, my friends had a teddy, they were in a place called “New Lands”, and it was a lodge. It sounded so much more exciting than the school that I was at—Belmont House school—which was notorious for being the childhood home of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll. As members who know their history will understand, her reputation was slightly more racy than anything else.

Calderwood Lodge primary school was founded in the 1960s in Newlands, in Glasgow, and it was the first Jewish school in Scotland. One can imagine how small it must have been, because, at its inception, there was just one year group in one class. It took a number of years, with each year adding to the numbers, before it had a school roll.

The 60th anniversary celebration was delightful. It was much more modern, I would say, than the 50th anniversary celebration—that was a black tie dinner in the constituency, in the now-defunct Newton Mearns synagogue, which has since merged with the one in Giffnock. The 60th celebration was a morning tea party with the families of those who had been at the school. What was so nice was that it was not just the original pupils who were present—it was their children and their grandchildren, who were also going to the school.

There were a lot of activities and things going on to celebrate the occasion. Among those who were there was the former headmistress Dianna Wolfson, who had been a teacher and who spoke at the event. I have to say that it looked to me as though a shiver still went down the spine of some of the former pupils; I do not know how formidable an entity she must have been, but they certainly sat upright, with posture straight, and listened carefully when she was speaking.

Among the former pupils who were there was Gillian Field, who is the daughter of Henry and Ingrid Wuga. Henry Wuga, who will be known to many members, is 99 years old and heading for his centenary—he is the last of the Kindertransport survivors whom we have in the community.

The school has been absolutely central to the lives of so many of my constituents. Paul O’Kane will know more about this, because he was, in his former guise as a councillor in East Renfrewshire Council, responsible for education, and he actually opened the school when it moved to its new campus. The old school in Newlands has now been converted into flats. There are a few remaining—Patrick Harvie might want to know about that, given the housing crisis. The remaining flats are available from £415,000 to £575,000, so I do not know whether they are immediately available for access to everybody. The school buildings there are partly demolished, but the original house lives on.

The important thing, however, is that the school has now moved to the new campus. The tales of the people who were at the old school were much the same as the tales of any of us who have gone to school over the years. They had fancy-dress parties. I do not know whether this is true, but apparently it was suggested, for one such party, that the rabbi should come in fancy dress—rather imaginatively, he came as a rabbi, perhaps not entering fully into the spirit of the occasion. Those tales all featured the same kind of colour and activity.

Moreover, the school did not consist exclusively of Jewish pupils; there were other pupils there, too. In particular, the school was very generous in the support that it provided, and the effort that it went to, for disabled pupils. At a time when other schools might not have given quite the same level of support, it went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that, in a small school, disabled pupils, including severely disabled pupils, had a safe and secure environment.

The 60th anniversary was celebrated, and the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, was there for the occasion. It really is remarkable. The school was opened in 2017 by the Chief Rabbi and by Bishop John Keenan from Paisley. Is it a unique example in the world? It has two faiths working on a shared campus, with shared collective resources at its centre and other aspects that appeal to each of the different faiths. Much more importantly still, anyone who visits the campus will notice that, because many members of the Muslim population value a faith-based education, there are lots of Muslim pupils there, too, and they will see Jewish children, Catholic children and Muslim children playing together. It reminds me of lyrics from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific” that I quoted in a debate, perhaps a decade ago, on a different issue and which I find extremely apposite:

“You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!”

We are teaching all these young children to live together, to work together and to be educated together. Is it not through education and the example of Calderwood Lodge that Scotland’s real hope for community cohesion exists?

Congratulations to Calderwood Lodge. I salute and celebrate its 60th anniversary and wish all those who have been educated there, and all those who will be, every success in the future.

Will the member give way?

I must say that I approached today’s debate with a tremendous sense of trepidation. I have been overwhelmed with emotion since the events on 7 October. Yes, it is true that I represent Eastwood and that half of Scotland’s Jewish population live in my constituency. However, I have an equally large Muslim population, a Sikh population, a growing Hindu population and constituents who are of no faith at all. I represent them all. Yes, I feel a special duty to the Jewish community, because few members have that population or that immediate contact and understanding, and I feel a need to speak up and represent their voice.

I took enormous encouragement from my political opponents, particularly the First Minister and Anas Sarwar, whom I respect and admire and, indeed, have an affection for. I admire the way in which they have risen to the top of their parties and, in one case, to the top of Government. When we first discussed the events in question in their immediate aftermath, I said that I had not seen the First Minister be more impressive, and I continue to believe that. I admire the way in which he approached this afternoon’s debate. In fact, I do not know that I disagreed with any of what he had to say except his final conclusion. I tried to answer the question, “What does a ceasefire mean?” when I intervened on Mr Brown. In some ways, it is an easy question to answer, but for me it is more complicated.

This summer, I read what I still think is the book of the year: “Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival” by Danny Finkelstein. I was stopped by the foreword, even before I got to the main part of book. The author is the same age as me, and he articulated my sentiments exactly when he said that, for all of his lifetime, we have said, “Never again” in relation to the Holocaust but that, for the first time in his lifetime, although he did not think that it was probable that it could happen again, he thought that it was suddenly possible that it could happen again.

That summed up my fear as well. All the optimism that I had when the Berlin wall came down and when the peace in Northern Ireland was achieved has, in many respects, evaporated. The last time there was real hope for Israel was when the Oslo accord was agreed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat and the PLO, with the involvement of Bill Clinton. It is a tragedy that we did not build on that. I will come back to that, because the Palestinian people have been betrayed and let down in so many different ways in the decades since, and in the centuries and millennia before that.

On that day of 7 October, as the First Minister said, more Jews were killed—murdered—than on any single day since the Holocaust. I do not know whether the chamber fully understands the trauma to the entire population of the state of Israel. There is not anyone in Israel who does not know somebody who was murdered on that date. Those of us—Neil Bibby referred to it—who have seen the bodycam footage recovered from the people who committed those acts will have seen the bestiality and the defilement of the corpses.

It seems quite extraordinary in terms of scheduling that we have moved from events in the middle east, which so terrify and appal us, to the commemoration of events in Ukraine, visited currently by fresh conflict from Russia, which intimidate and terrify us all over again. It is extraordinary that some 7 million people died long before the events of the Holocaust, a decade later. There were two Holocausts, if you like—genocides of respective peoples, one by fascists and one by Bolsheviks, with both sides claiming to have been on the right side of history. I call that a lazy phrase, because only history can judge those things. Ultimately, history did not favour either the Bolsheviks or the fascists.

The figure is quite extraordinary: 7 million people. The Holocaust that was visited upon the Jewish population was of Jews from the continent over—and indeed, beyond. The Holodomor was visited on the population of a single country—the working agricultural, rural workforce, which was effectively starved to death by a kind of collectivist nonsense promulgated by the Soviet, blinkered mentality of how an agricultural, agrarian community should operate, which simply led, by greater and greater degrees, to the deaths of so many.

There were higher and higher quotas that could not be fulfilled, the repatriation to the land of anybody who sought to leave, and the confiscation of the very seeds that were needed to establish and achieve a higher grain yield in the subsequent year. It was effectively a death sentence to be left to try to meet the theoretical nonsense of the Bolshevik Soviets in those ghastly years, and so many starved to death.

For decades afterwards, there was a denial of those things, and there still is. Although there is absolute condemnation of Hitler and Nazism across the world—albeit, unfortunately, there are those somewhere on the extreme far right who will still look to the Nazis—there is still sometimes a wider sympathy for Stalin. There is an effort to rehabilitate him slightly in Putin’s Russia, where some of the statues are going back up, yet that man was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions across what was his own country—never mind anyone else’s—and this appalling atrocity that was visited on the people there.

The Prime Minister visited Ukraine last year, in the run-up to the commemoration of the Holodomor.

There has been some debate about whether or not the Holodomor was a genocide. In the debate that took place in the House of Commons, my colleague David Mundell said:

“how would the UK’s standing be diminished in any way by recognising the holodomor as a genocide?”—[Official Report, House of Commons, 25 May 2023; Vol 733, c 519.]

I completely associate myself with those sentiments. I think that we can—not happily, but collectively—agree that it was a genocide visited on the people of Ukraine, and we see, with ghastly symbolism and symmetry, a shocking conflict visited upon them yet again. President Zelensky said:

“Once they wanted to destroy us with hunger, now, with darkness and cold”,

and with bombs and weapons, but the people of Ukraine will not forget and the world will not forget their actions.

The motion refers to events across our own country that are offering support. I pay tribute to the communities in Clarkston and Giffnock in my constituency that have worked so hard to make Ukrainian refugees here feel welcome. That will be the story of every member across the chamber.

It is so depressing that, in a single day in this Parliament, in this era, all these years later, we have had to debate two conflicts that have caused so much pain in the past and continue to cause so much pain and suffering today. The Holodomor was a genocide and, 90 years on, we should recognise and remember it as such.

I think that the answer to Mr Brown’s point is that, given that Hamas has said that it will not observe a ceasefire, there is a belief by Israel that today’s motion, when passed, and the campaign for a ceasefire will be meant to lead to a unilateral ceasefire by Israel. It will be held to the standard of unilaterally ceasing fire, notwithstanding the fact that the other side will not. That issue is at the heart of all this.

In a moment.

Therefore, people should understand that, to me, this is not about Palestine and Israel so much as it is about Hamas and Jews, and about the absolute resolve of that terrorist group, harboured within Gaza, on which so much is now being visited, and what it inflicted on the people of Israel on that day. That is what manifestly moves so many people of Jewish faith wherever they happen to live.

Yet, in the face of that—I will touch on this before returning to the substance of the debate—the Senior Rabbi of Scotland, Moshe Rubin, talked about his conversations with Arabs and people of other faiths at a reception last week with Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal and the hope that comes from that.

As I have said, the Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, came to my constituency to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Calderwood Lodge primary school, which is the subject of my members’ business debate tomorrow. His engagement under the leadership of His Majesty the King has been clear, with similar interfaith conversations taking place across the rest of the United Kingdom. We must pray, hope and toil to ensure that this conflict is not visited on our communities here. That must be the one thing that we can influence and determine as an outcome.

A week last Saturday, quite by accident, I walked right into the march on Buchanan Street. I had been out for lunch and was dressed in green and black. I bumped into a very close Muslim friend—in fact, he is the son of someone to whom I am also very close—and he said, “Jackson, you’re in the wrong colours. What are you doing?” However, when I stood there and watched the faces of those marching and the families, I saw not a campaign against Israel but a campaign for Palestine and for justice for the people of Palestine. As I said, they have been betrayed. They have been let down by broken promises internationally. There have been collapsed hopes, violent belligerence and a failure to negotiate. Since the 1990s, they have lived in hope but, in reality, the international movement has not acted collectively to resolve the difficulties. However, absent were placards that might help—placards that said, “Release the hostages” or “Expel Hamas”. Those are the conditions that need to be met for us to at least get to the first stage of moving forward.

If, for 20 years or so, international politics has been defined by the events of 9/11, I fear that, for the rest of my lifetime and for the next 30 years, international politics will be defined by the events of 7 October, Israel’s response and the trauma that has been visited on Gaza since then. That would be a tragedy, but if I am being pragmatic and realistic, I do not think that there is an atmosphere in which we can expect meaningful progress to be made. That is the biggest tragedy of all. Yes, I hope that, collectively, we can join international voices to work to overcome that atmosphere, but it stands as the greatest obstacle to progress.

Can I support the motion? There is so much on which we agree, and there have been so many speeches with which I have agreed. There have even been things said by those who have been fiercely critical of Israel that I can understand and respect. Do I apologise for everything that Israel has done? No, I do not. Do I apologise for everything that Israel has done over the past 30 to 50 years? No, I do not.

However, right now, a unilateral ceasefire by Israel, which is, I fear, the practical consequence of the motion, will not lead to a reciprocal move by Hamas but will allow it to consolidate and do exactly what members have said during the debate, which is to carry on the campaign of violence against Jews, as it has promised it will. It is that difficulty that causes me to hesitate, even though I feel overwhelmed by and somewhat inadequate to the debate in which I am participating.

I thank all those members who have taken part in the debate. As I said, it has been deeply emotional and deeply troubling. Finally, let me say that I know that my Jewish constituents feel the pain, suffering and loss of everybody in Gaza equally. They have said that. They breathe it. They live it. It unites us all. It is such a difficult debate, and I thank all those who have contributed to it.

Good morning, and welcome to the 16th meeting in 2023 of the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee. Our first agenda item is consideration of continued petitions. The first of those is PE1958, on extending aftercare for previously looked-after young people and removing the continuing care age cap. The petition was lodged by Jasmin-Kasaya Pilling on behalf of Who Cares? Scotland, and I am delighted to see that Jasmin, who gave evidence at a previous meeting of the committee, is in the public gallery today.

The petition calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to extend aftercare provision in Scotland to previously looked-after young people who left care before their 16th birthday, on the basis of individual need; to extend continuing care throughout care-experienced people’s lives, on the basis of individual need; and to ensure that care-experienced people are able to enjoy lifelong rights and achieve equality with non-care-experienced people. That includes ensuring that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the findings of the Promise are fully implemented in Scotland.

We last considered the petition back in May. Following that session, I am delighted to welcome to the meeting Natalie Don, the Minister for Children, Young People and Keeping the Promise, and, from the Scottish Government, Sarah Corbett, the care experience policy manager, and Cara Cooper, the head of the unit for a good childhood. Thank you all for joining us. As I said, we also have the petitioner with us in the gallery.

Minister, I understand that you want to say a few words in opening, before we move to questions. I am delighted for you to do that. Over to you.

Thank you all for being with us this morning.

Are members content for us to reflect on the evidence and any further submissions that we get and consider them afresh at a subsequent meeting?

Members indicated agreement.