Chamber and committees

Oh, no. I am sorry—I will not take an intervention from Jamie Hepburn. We have seen enough of the James Robertson Justice act this afternoon.

I also think that the internal market replaces powers that the European Union exercised. Mr Greer said he was not here in 1999, but he was not here in 2011, either, when the Alcohol (Minimum Pricing) (Scotland) Bill was coming through the Parliament. He referred to Europe. I remember that, when I was an Opposition spokesman, I went across to Brussels to argue with the European Union that its objections to minimum unit pricing, and the belief that it would contravene the internal market of the European Union, were misguided. Therefore the idea that the internal market is something completely new and that Scotland did not have to exist within a United Kingdom that, in turn, had to exist within the powers of the European Union is a nonsense.

Since Brexit, the internal market has seen more than 100—

I will give way to Mr Greer—

Martin Whitfield is not in the chamber, but he referred to John Mackintosh, and I do not want to let the opportunity pass to also pay tribute to him. As a young, active supporter of the Labour Party in the early 1970s, I was hugely attracted to John Mackintosh’s contribution to public life, and his premature death in the 1970s was a great loss to public life in Scotland. He had a lot to contribute and a lot was lost when he was no longer there to do so.

I have come to the debate at my time in life as a fair-minded man. I have no speech with me; I have notes that I have been making as I went along. I have heard the argument from Mr Brown and many others in the SNP and the Greens about the assault on the powers of the Scottish Parliament. I thought, “Well, I’ll come along this afternoon, because maybe there is something to it, and I would like to hear what the contributions of those who advocate this view are.”

I have always regarded Mr Hepburn as a fair-minded man. We came into this Parliament at the same time, and I have been very impressed with the work that he has done on skills and other areas of Government for which he has been responsible. However, this afternoon, he has done more of an impression of James Robertson Justice when he was playing the part of Sir Simon Sparrow in the “Doctor at Large” films, bouncing up, wiggling his finger and throwing his arms in huge gesticulation at the Opposition. For a minister who has so little to do in his portfolio not to have come with a better-articulated argument and to have been shown up by Clare Adamson, who made a better speech than he did on behalf of the Government department that he leads, was rather embarrassing. I looked beyond that to see whether more would be said from within the chamber.

I remember having arguments with Edward Heath, who used to go on—interestingly, I thought—about sovereignty. He said, “What is sovereignty? I keep hearing people in the Conservative Party talking about protecting sovereignty, as if it’s a little blue flame in a cupboard somewhere that we can all go to and pray before—as if sovereignty is something tangible you can touch.” He said that we were sharing sovereignty with the European Union, and I agreed with that view. We share sovereignty between the two Parliaments in the United Kingdom: the Scottish Parliament and the UK Parliament.

During the debate, I repeatedly heard Scottish National Party speakers stand up to talk about the need to respect, yet not one of their contributions gave any indication of when they respect the authority of the UK Parliament—not even when it is exercising responsibilities that are contained in the Scotland Act 1998 on which this Parliament is founded.

I was disappointed, too, in the contribution of Mr Bibby—and a little in that of Martin Whitfield, who gave one of his statesman-like addresses while dancing on the head of a pin. Mr Bibby did the classic Labour routine with which we are now becoming familiar. It is Keir Starmer’s and Anas Sarwar’s everyday chant: “Scotland and Britain need change. We are the change.” That is until we ask them what the change is, and then we are met with a great big blank canvas. In fact, in so far as we know what the change was going to be, Keir Starmer keeps abandoning it and then not replacing it with something else. When he was asked if he was in favour of something, we got, “Well, we hope to have a bill on all that.”

Mr Whitfield even said when challenged by Mr Robertson on the Sewel convention that the bill would allow us to have a discussion. We do not need the bill to have a discussion—we could have one this afternoon. When Mr Whitfield was asked what he thought personally, he was not able to tell us.

Neil Bibby said that Labour wants to protect the internal market and it accepts the argument for it. When Stephen Kerr asked,“Well, how?” he simply said, “We are going to have a discussion on it. We do not really know.”

It would be churlish of me not to respond. I believe that the convention is a convention and should be respected as such. So I hope that—

Jamie Hepburn rose—

But the point is that the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. I was not one of them, as Mr Greer knows. I was a J K Rowling fan before and always will be—it is just a shame that I can be consistent in my support for things whereas Mr Greer cannot.

Then we come round to the defence of the integrity of this Parliament and its powers from two parties that are emasculating the powers of local government. Local authorities that have been elected on manifestos are being starved of the funds that they need to implement them. The power is consolidated here, through the Scottish Parliament dictating to local government what it can and cannot do by starving it of funds. Not a word has been said before now in the debate about the denigration of the powers of local government. I thought that Mr Rennie gave a devastating evisceration of this Parliament’s ability to respect its own decisions.

I was hopeful as I came here. Clare Adamson raised some legitimate points.

I hope that we can find a way to address the points that Ms Adamson raised in a constructive and engaging manner. Unfortunately, that was not to be found in this debate.

—even though I sometimes think that he brings all the sincerity of Draco Malfoy to our debates.

I can speak only personally, but I think that there needs to be a point at which Parliament holistically debates the principle of what we do. I do not want to single out by exception, and I do not want to stray away from the debate, Presiding Officer; I am conscious of that. I am sure that everything that I am saying is a consequence of the creation of the patient safety commissioner, but I think that there is a danger that we will find it difficult not to agree to creating a raft of other commissioners after this, because there will be parallels with those that we have approved. That is a concern.

The SPCB has a responsibility for funding the Parliament’s decisions on commissioners but not for deciding whether they are a good thing. Our responsibility is to fund the commissioners that Parliament decides it wants. The commissioners that we have were previously estimated to cost around £3.5 million; they now cost more than £10 million. The total budget for officeholders in the past year was 8.1 per cent of our overall budget. Were we to double the number of commissioners, a thumping big piece of the Parliament’s budget would be going towards that purpose. Therefore, we have to consider not just the financial costs but the fact that, in my experience, no commissioner has ever downsized their office; they have all expanded their offices considerably.

I come back to the purpose of commissioners and my first point. If we are going to create commissioners, they must be given the greatest degree of latitude and power that we can give them. If we are going to create them, let them do what we said they would do. That is why I regret that the patient safety commissioner’s responsibility and authority has been slightly truncated from what I had thought that it would be.

I would like to make two points. The first is that I think that I have not felt the loss of my former colleagues Alex Neil and Neil Findlay more than I do this afternoon. Those of us who, over three parliamentary sessions, were involved in highlighting the torturous and disgraceful way in which women were harmed in the mesh scandal will feel today that we have fallen short. I say that with enormous regret.

Many of those women might even be in tears this afternoon, because they gave so much to the inquiry that was led by Professor Alison Britton—whom we have not mentioned this afternoon, and who expressed frustration about being unable to get information or to hold people to account during her inquiry—and the inquiry that resulted in the recommendations in the Cumberlege report. They might feel that, when we got to the high-wire act today and had to fall either on the side of cynical gritty caution or on the side of slightly more well-wishing hope, we fell on the well-wishing hope side of the argument rather than the gritty caution side.

That is a missed opportunity, and I hope that it does not come back to haunt Parliament at a later date. If it does, many members will be quite ashamed that, when the opportunity to give the commissioner the strongest possible teeth was right before us, and after everything that we had learned over the previous decade, we just did not do it. I am very sorry about that.

I welcome the fact that there will be a commissioner. That is progress, as Jackie Baillie said. Amendments from Tess White, Carol Mochan, Paul Sweeney and Jackie Baillie all advocated for things that we had agreed to in previous debates in the chamber. I do not understand why, having got to the journey’s end and having the chance to vote for what we all agreed to, we did not do so. There we go.

The second point that I want to make is that, although I am a member of the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body, I am not speaking on its behalf. When I was in my first session in Parliament, from 2007 to 2011, I was put on a committee that was looking at the principle of commissioners and the extent and growth of their numbers. That cohort of MSPs was concerned because there were five commissioners and they wanted to see that number being reduced. We made recommendations that were supported by MSPs until the recommendations went out to public consultation. The voice of the public in saying, “We want to keep that commissioner,” was so strong that we abandoned, as a Parliament, the courage of our convictions.

The moral of that for me is that, when we create a commissioner, there is no going back. Therefore, I am concerned not about the principle of the patient safety commissioner, which I wholly support, but that we, as parliamentarians, are embracing commissioners loosely and not as part of a coherent plan. In moving from seven to 14 commissioners—or 15, potentially—we would be creating by stealth a new level of Government in Scotland. In a way, we are devolving responsibilities away from ourselves as parliamentarians—responsibilities that I thought the Parliament was, in the first place, established for us to pursue and have responsibility for. We should be very cautious about the overall effect of that.

We thank the petitioner for the PE1977. There appears to be national protection guidance in place, so we thank them for raising the issue with us. Obviously, it is open to the petitioner to lodge another petition later, if we feel that the matter is still not being acted upon.

Members indicated agreement.