Chamber and committees

Will the advice that is being worked on be a pamphlet or an online directional guide? How would people know that that advice is available and find a route to access it?

It was a Conservative Government that transferred taxation powers to this Parliament, which is now able to diverge from the rest of the United Kingdom in the tax policies that it implements. Is the member completely oblivious to that?

The Deputy First Minister’s point might be more effective if the Government paid attention to divisions in this Parliament when it loses a vote. Instead, it carries on regardless and completely ignores the fact that it does not have the support of Parliament for the actions that it is taking.

I am coming to the end of my speech, and I want to be constructive, in as much as I can be. In response to Kate Forbes’s question to the Labour Party, Neil Bibby replied that it takes two to tango. Well, I think that Labour is well and truly Tangoed, frankly, in respect of the position that it took. Why did it make the commitment that it did? It is because fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

How do we hope to proceed in the next session of Parliament? Given that this session has had the Calman and Smith commissions, which, as far as I am concerned, resulted in an extension of powers—the Parliament simply did not have those powers in 2007—I say to the Presiding Officer and party leaders that in the next session, Parliament needs to think very carefully. The more mature we have become in age, the less mature we have become in performance in this Parliament. It is a watershed: the galleries are empty at First Minister’s questions and the ratings for Scottish Parliament television have absolutely collapsed. The public are falling out of love with this institution because it is not delivering. In the next session of Parliament, we will have to work collectively to pull together in a way that actually delivers for Scotland, and not just have rhetorical, empty debate.

Will the member take an intervention?

It is, I suppose, always a pleasure to follow George Adam. He said that the UK Government seeks to protect the British state, and I might observe that that is, in fact, what the people of Scotland voted for in 2014.

This debate is something of a pretty kettle of fish. When Kate Forbes stood to speak, I was reflecting that, when I first came to the Parliament, Ms Forbes was 17, had just left school and was off to the University of Cambridge. Of course, she has been the repository of a great deal of hope among many that she will bring a more enlightened view to the Parliament.

Angus Robertson and I were both fiery redheads in those days. He now has a slightly depressing grey look, but I have maintained a slightly strawberry blonde colour. Notwithstanding that, at that time, he was at Westminster, aggressively campaigning for a referendum on Europe, as I recall.

However, neither Kate Forbes nor Angus Robertson was here in what was, I think, the SNP’s best parliamentary session—the one from 2007 to 2011. I will characterise why I think that, why things went wrong after that and why I think the focus of this debate is so wrong.

In those days, the business manager, Bruce Crawford, and the late Brian Adam—for whom many of us had a great deal of affection and respect—worked the corridors of this Parliament and engaged with all the other parties, because the Government was a minority Government. That Government recognised that the chamber is shaped like a horseshoe—there is not a divide as there is in Westminster—and it understood that, in order to deliver policy, it required to achieve agreement across the parties. The 2007 to 2011 parliamentary session was all the more effective for that.

Alex Salmond, the First Minister, Jim Mather, the business secretary, and John Swinney, the finance secretary, all engaged with other parties to achieve policies, some of which are still the longest-lasting and best-remembered policy achievements. When SNP members list their achievements, they are often the achievements of that first Administration.

That is a fair point, and let me address it. What has changed? I think that, since then, in effect, the electoral system—which is what sends us all here—has not produced the same proportionality in the Parliament that encouraged engagement and agreement between the parties in order to achieve policy. The system has produced a Parliament that has allowed one party to be much more dogmatic and definitive in the way in which it has progressed legislation, without having a record of achievement.

Unarguably, all our public services are now in a position of which none of us can be proud, because they are less effective and less successful than they were back at that time. When the Parliament passed my colleague Margaret Mitchell’s no-fault public apologies bill, I do not think that we thought that it would be the Scottish Government that took the greatest advantage of it. How many times do ministers stand up and apologise but then say, “It’s nae my fault”?

Next, we have the “Let’s thank our public services but actually do nothing to improve them” bill. Our public services are fed up with being thanked without there being policy changes to improve those services. That is our central failure.

I will in a second.

I looked at waiting times this week. In 2011, when there was a majority Government, a total of 784 people waited more than 12 hours in emergency departments. By last year, that number had risen to 76,346. Who in the Parliament can be proud of our collective achievement if that is the end result? What is the Deputy First Minister’s response? She has fallen into the habit of every one of her predecessors of saying that the real threat is that the Tories or those at Westminster are set to privatise the NHS in Scotland. For goodness’ sake—is that really the level of our debate? How much more effective would things be if the parties in this Parliament operated more effectively, as we did during the first SNP-led Administration, and sought to find a workable and collective solution to the problems in Scotland’s NHS, rather than using childish and simplistic slogans?

To ask the First Minister whether he will join His Majesty the King and other world leaders in commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz extermination camp and offer his reflections on the theme of this year’s Holocaust memorial day, “For a Better Future”. (S6F-03762)

I welcome the First Minister’s participation in tonight’s event, which I will co-host with my Labour colleague Paul O’Kane.

I commend the First Minister and the Scottish Government on their work to ensure that Holocaust education schemes across Scotland are second to none in comparison with those available in the rest of the United Kingdom. It is a real tribute to the efforts of the Scottish Parliament, and the various Governments that have presided within it, that Holocaust education in Scotland is as remarkable as it is. If this year’s theme is “For a Better Future”, we must surely realise that that future depends not on us but on the generation that follows. Fundamentally, such education programmes are critical to the understanding of the next generation. Will the First Minister commit to ensuring that the funding of such programmes continues in perpetuity?

Eighty years ago, we were a world at war, and the consequence of that war was tens of millions of people dead around the world and the extermination of one third of the world’s Jewish population by Nazi Germany.

It was not the first holocaust of which I was aware. Despite growing up in a community where so much of the Jewish population in Scotland lived, they did not talk about it—it was just not mentioned. Members of families living next door to me had no idea that their parents had been involved in the Holocaust or that they had lost relatives in it.

In fact, the first holocaust of which I was aware was the holocaust in Cambodia: the genocide that took place there between 1975 and 1979. It was there in front of me on the television when I was growing up as a teenager. Twenty-five per cent of the population of that country were murdered by Pol Pot in the killing fields, often not with bullets but with a pickaxe through the head. Sixty per cent of those who died were executed. Many of the children who were not executed were abducted and indoctrinated and were then forced to commit the most appalling atrocities themselves.

That was the genocide with which I was most familiar. It was Dr Jacob Bronowski who first hinted, in his television series, “The Ascent of Man”, when he was allowed to visit Auschwitz concentration camp, which was then behind the iron curtain. He walked, overcome with emotion, fully suited, into puddles, picking up, as he thought, the ashes of those who died there, including most of his family. He called it “the tragedy of mankind”.

Since this Parliament first met, 1.2 million Scots have been born. The first Holocaust memorial day was in 2001. Why is it so important that we commemorate these events? It is because, for those young people, it is the testament and the determination of our generation to ensure that those events are not forgotten that is so important to them. I applaud the former Secretary of State for Scotland, Jim Murphy, and our former Presiding Officer, Ken Macintosh, who were instrumental in ensuring that there were visits to Auschwitz concentration camp for young people.

I commend the vision schools Scotland programme, promoted by Dr Paula Cowan and the University of the West of Scotland, which does so much for continuous Holocaust education and is now in every local authority across Scotland. I applaud the Scottish Government for the funding that it has made available to ensure that those educational programmes can continue. I am so pleased that nearly all our First Ministers, including John Swinney, the current First Minister, have stood, as I did, in Auschwitz and have been overwhelmed with the enormity and the emotions that will never leave any of us who have visited that place.

Antisemitism continues, which is why it is so important that such education continues. Ten years ago, there was the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Danny Finkelstein, in his memoir, “Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad”, said that, for the first time—this was prescient, because it was published in the summer of the year before last—he worried and feared that events similar to the Holocaust could be unfolding again. In the past few days, he again brought to our attention his grandmother, who, 80 years ago, died as she was being liberated from Bergen-Belsen with her two daughters—one of whom was his mother—sitting by her side on the train. She had given everything to keep them safe and alive in Bergen-Belsen, and she literally expired from that effort as the train departed the camp.

In a local context, I am delighted that St Ninian’s high school in my Eastwood constituency is in the top three places in the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s secondary schools competition. Students were tasked with creating a memorial to the genocide in Bosnia. They created a wreath made of flowers from Srebrenica to commemorate the significant 30th anniversary of the genocide that took place there. Tonight, pupils from Mearns Castle high school are at an event in my constituency, which, unfortunately, I cannot attend because I am introducing this debate. Lexie, Sam and Anna, who are Anne Frank ambassadors, will tonight reflect on their experiences, and tomorrow they will be here when they participate in the Parliament’s Holocaust memorial event.

On various occasions in the past year, I have made reference to my late constituent Henry Wuga, who was the last of the Kindertransport children to survive. Today’s young people need to know about the Holocaust because it was young people like them who stood up and did what they could against Hitler and the Nazis. I give the example of the white rose campaign group at the University of Munich, among whom were the teenage brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl, who distributed literature to try to call a halt to what was happening. They were taken by the Nazis and beheaded, facing upwards, simply for campaigning against that genocide.

As those who have been there will know, the camp at Auschwitz was designed and run by Rudolf Höss, who had previously run Dachau concentration camp—the first camp that I visited. It was from there that he took the “Arbeit macht frei” slogan, because he felt that an easier way to lure people to their deaths was to make them think that they were doing something useful. As I am sure the First Minister did, anyone who has visited Auschwitz I—not the extermination camp, but Auschwitz I—and who has stood between blocks 10 and 11 will recognise that the people of all ages who were brought there, including children, were put up against a wall, had a bullet fired through them and were murdered for no reason other than that they were Jewish.

This week, His Majesty the King and other world leaders all stood in front of Auschwitz II’s entrance gateway. We have probably all seen those images. What struck me—and, I imagine, many others—was just how few of the survivors remain and how frail they now are. However, we could still see how disturbed they were, not just by the memory of having been there but by their fears for the future. That is why we have such a duty placed on us.

In this debate, I have not rehearsed many of the stories that I have told over all the years in which I have participated in similar debates since I was first elected. I know that other members will contribute their memories. My memories of that camp will never leave me, so I echo the words of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust:

“we must become the generations who carry forward the legacy of the witnesses, remember those who were murdered and challenge those who would distort or deny the past, or who discriminate and persecute today. We can all mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2025 and commit to making a better future for us all.”

One of the survivors said something that will strike home for all of us. They did not want their

“experience of man’s inhumanity to be the experience of any yet to come of man’s humanity.”

That is why it is so important that we remember, that we stand firmly and that the young people of this country who are so engaged continue to be so and stand with us to ensure that the Holocaust never happens again.