Chamber and committees

I do not think that it is necessary.

The SNP had already let Scotland down when it first delayed the bill—dropping it entirely from this parliamentary session is more than a disappointment, and stripping the most serious content out of it will please only the new climate-change deniers on the political right. To blame anyone else for that decision, which is entirely of the SNP’s making, adds insult to injury. To do all that while mouthing platitudes about climate leadership turns this statement into a sick joke. Does the SNP understand that it will be held accountable for locking people into dependence on costly and polluting fossil fuel for years to come and for failing to back what should be a thriving clean heat industry in Scotland?

If we were to move the question about an element of direct democracy element away from the issue of secession or independence, and towards how the people of Scotland assert their right to make a decision on a matter of importance, that is a question that the political process is failing to engage with. Is that not one way of putting a clear mechanism into the hands of the public, which allows them to force the political process to respond?

I appreciated Adam Tomkins’s frankness about “We will know it when we see it” being clearly inadequate but the best we can do. It might be that, in the interface between the legalities and the politics, it is not possible to have a position that is free of contradictions.

I want to pick up a couple of points in Adam Tomkins’s paper about the use of referendums more generally, and I am interested in everybody’s views on this. Several referendums that are not about secession are mentioned, and you make the case that we should use referendums not to determine or to find out people’s views on an issue but to establish what we think we already know. Among others, you gave the example of the alternative vote referendum as one that successfully settled the question. I would push back against that a bit, because it did not settle the question of whether electoral reform is necessary. The Lib Dems are not here, and they might push back against this, but they skilfully negotiated a coalition agreement that gave them a referendum on a voting system that nobody wanted. The AV system was not anybody’s choice, so it was almost designed as a scheme to put electoral reform on the back burner, but it did not settle the question of whether it was required, and, with the genuine prospect now of a far right Government in the UK, that should send chills down all our spines.

I would ask for your reflections on the experience of other countries that use referendums more frequently on non-secession issues. For example, Ireland has had a range of referendums on issues on which it was not really known how the public would vote. Common sense might have said that the public would have supported doing away with some of the misogynistic language in the constitution in the recent referendums on family and care, but those expectations were confounded, and the public voted quite comprehensively for what I would consider to be archaic language. Therefore, there is surely a case for using referendums to ask, genuinely, what the view is and to establish whether there is a 50 per cent plus one majority, rather than to confirm that there is an overwhelming settled majority that we already know about. Should we learn from Ireland’s experience of having a level of direct democracy as the trigger point for putting those questions to the public? Ireland used citizens assemblies in a number of instances to determine questions that the political process either could not resolve or was in deadlock over.

I see that others want to come in, but, first, one part of what was different between those referendums was that in 1997 there was a very clearly defined proposition being put rather than a general one, and I would suggest that one of the reasons why the EU referendum in 2016 resulted in such chaos was that every flavour of Brexit imaginable was on offer, not a clear, defined and solid proposition. However, had the result been no, I do not think for a moment that the Brexiteers would have gone away and spent the next decade saying, “Oh well, we lost that one. Let’s talk about something else instead.”

I do not think so.

There was one on Scotland’s future that was a bit vague and undefined. There was another on climate, which perhaps fell into the category that Stephen Tierney was talking about, in the solutions that it came up with.

I have taken quite a lot of time on this, convener, but I just want to acknowledge that, when I talked about having some element of direct democracy, I did not necessarily mean a citizens assembly as the format for that. However, it is something that I would like to explore further.

Yes. Aileen McHarg wants to come in, too, so I just want to remind everyone that I finished my first question by asking whether there should be discussion of the potential for a direct democracy element—some way in which the public themselves can assert that they, or a substantial body of people, are ready to have the question put, in order to do an end run around the political deadlock.

The question suggests what I am implying, which is that there is no clear and easy way to set out rules that do not give rise to contradiction and mixed expectations.

I was about to say that we make remote participation available to members. If we choose to do so—and I think that we should—it is surely for the Presiding Officer rather than anyone else to determine whether a member is using that facility appropriately; it should not be for the law to say what the consequences are.

Finally, on criminal offences being a trigger, I note that the bill includes criminal convictions anywhere in the UK, but not anywhere else. I am baffled as to why that is a consistent position. In relation to the comments that have been made about historical examples of criminal offences that are ethical, principled acts, that is not just a matter of ancient history. In the UK, people are regularly subjected to long prison sentences for legitimate, peaceful protest. For example, climate campaigners have been subject to substantial prison terms, even simply for the act of taking part in a Zoom call to discuss political protest. I do not think that we should invite a situation in which a recall would be triggered by such acts or, for example, by someone holding up a sign saying, “I support Palestine Action.”

I am not convinced that the bill is fixable, although I am willing for it to go through the parliamentary scrutiny process. The Green Party will abstain on the motion on the bill’s general principles at decision time. I am not convinced that it will be in a fit state to pass by the time that it reaches stage 3.