Chamber and committees

Thank you.

To ask the Scottish Government what steps it is taking to support local authorities and other public bodies to apply ethical criteria when deciding whether to divest from sectors such as fossil fuels, arms companies and businesses complicit in occupation or war crimes. (S6O-04875)

I welcome this opportunity for Parliament to endorse the recognition of Palestine. It is more than 50 years since the United Nations recognised the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and sovereignty. Over those five decades, the failure of the international community to make that right a reality has been one of the greatest injustices in modern world history.

The urgency is clear for anybody who can bring themselves to look. For generations, Palestinians have endured a brutal occupation, and for almost two years now, they have been subjected to war crimes on a grotesque scale. The weight of legal opinion is absolutely clear: this is genocide. The recent resolution of the International Association of Genocide Scholars provides one example. It sets out that

“the actions of the Israeli Government against Palestinians have included torture, arbitrary detention, and sexual and reproductive violence; deliberate attacks on medical professionals, humanitarian aid workers and journalists; and the deliberate deprivation of food, water, medicine and electricity”.

It also sets out the explicit statements of intent, which are genocidal in nature, from senior members of the Israeli Government.

It is unquestionable that, to achieve justice for Palestine, action must be taken. There is action that Scotland can take. During the recess, my colleague Ross Greer wrote to the Scottish Government to set out the actions that it can and should take now—on boycotts, divestment and sanctions. There are actions that do not rely on waiting for permission from the UK Government, such as disapplying part of the Local Government Act 1988 to allow councils to boycott companies that are complicit in the occupation, calling for public pension funds to divest from complicit companies, urging businesses to cease trading with Israel—exactly as the Scottish Government did in relation to Russia—and stopping giving public moneys to arms dealers that supply Israel. I very warmly welcome the announcement today that some of those steps will be taken; we will continue to press for others.

The UK Government should do the same and can do far more. The UK talks of the right of Israel to defend itself but says nothing about the right of Palestinians to resist occupation. Labour’s amendment to the motion that we are debating recognises some positive steps, so we will not oppose it, but it takes too much credit for half measures and is a reminder of just how lacking the UK Government’s response has been.

Respecting the ICC is an important principle, but there are those, including the Prime Minister, who have used it as an excuse for not describing the situation as genocide. Obviously, we support restoration of UNRWA funding, but arms export restrictions have been extremely limited. The UK has continued to provide other forms of practical and political support to the Israeli Government.

Sanctions on Israeli ministers are welcome, but the UK has not taken any steps against UK citizens who have travelled to Israel, fought for the IDF, killed a few Palestinians and returned home to face no legal consequences.

Calling for a ceasefire, aid, hostage releases and a two-state settlement is the easy bit. However, the Labour Government has not used the international voice of the UK to condemn the United States and Trump’s explicit proposals for ethnic cleansing.

This issue does not stop with state recognition. There is further action that the international community must take, including co-ordinated international sanctions. The world must work together to deliver what it voted for at the UN 50 years ago: the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, national independence and sovereignty in Palestine. The Palestinian state that emerges must have global support to rebuild what Israel’s violence has destroyed, and it must have robust security guarantees against future incursion, invasion or occupation. Recognition of the state is long overdue, but it is only the first step towards justice for Palestine.

I move amendment S6M-18686.1, to insert at end:

“, and calls on the Scottish and UK governments to immediately impose a package of boycotts, divestment and sanctions targeted at the State of Israel and at companies complicit in its military operations and its occupation of Palestine.”

I lodged the question before I was aware that there would be a statement from the First Minister on such issues. I hope that that will touch on the question, and I look forward eagerly to hearing the detail of it.

Nevertheless, there is in Scotland local government legislation—to which my colleague Ross Greer drew the Scottish Government’s attention over the recess—that places restrictions on local authorities applying ethical criteria in the way that I have set out. We are all, each of us, free to apply ethical criteria in our choices. Can the minister agree that there should be no reason in principle why decisions that are made collectively on behalf of us all should be restricted in the ethical criteria that they apply on the basis of the political views of democratically elected councillors?

My question leads on quite well from that. I will talk about food education—a lot of that is about schools, but not exclusively so. At the highest level, is there enough ambition for food education in the plan? That may include cooking skills, but I am thinking about education around our relationship with food in a broader sense, whether that is in the curriculum or through education more widely.

You mentioned training, skills and career opportunities, whether they are in food preparation, cooking, growing at a community level or in our agriculture system. We need to do a lot to make those opportunities and careers attractive, interesting and exciting, but we must also think about the current workforce, particularly within the public sector. Getting a culture change and a change of attitude is not always easy. We do not want people to feel that they are just being berated and told that they are doing it all wrong, but we do need to achieve significant change. How will the Government work with the workforce, particularly in the public sector where there is a far more direct employer responsibility, to create a sense that the existing staff feel part of any change agenda in the food culture and have a sense of ownership?

I will go back a wee bit, as I have a supplementary question on the one health issue that was raised a few minutes ago—broadly speaking, the idea that we can achieve coherence among human health, climate and sustainability, and animal health and wellbeing, and that a less meat-intensive agriculture system, as well as a less meat-intensive diet, is a positive route to achieving all three of those things.

From the last panel, we heard a call for a balanced and nuanced understanding of those issues, and a rejection of the idea that there is some kind of extreme demand for mass culls of animals that would destroy the rural economy, or the idea that there is no such thing as a healthy vegetarian or plant-based diet, because, of course, there is.

How can you convince us that the Government is embracing that balanced and considered approach to uniting those agendas, when it has explicitly rejected the advice of the UK Climate Change Committee on agriculture and land use, basically because the Government does not want to start talking about less meat production?

Okay.

I find this really interesting. Perhaps, in framing my question, I did not quite express the sense that food education is broader than cooking skills—it is not as simple as that. I was thinking back to one of the earliest bills that I had to scrutinise in the Parliament, nearly 20 years ago. We are aware that the attempt to develop the good food nation ethos is 10 years old. Nearly 20 years ago, a piece of draft legislation on public health and nutrition in schools was going through the Parliament—it was the Schools (Health Promotion and Nutrition) (Scotland) Bill. At the time, I took the view that its approach to nutritional standards was reductive, albeit that it might have represented progress at the time in many senses.

Even then, some of the best schools were pursuing that approach and going way beyond it. They were creating a food environment such that, when children were eating, it felt as if a group of human beings were sitting together around a table sharing food, whereas other schools were creating a food environment that looked like a fast-food outlet. That in itself is part of food education. In a lot of schools, food is still consumed in an environment that looks like a fast-food outlet, with disposable packaging on everything and so on. Twenty years ago, some of the best local authorities were doing something completely different—they were thinking about food culture as part of their educational role.

When I talk about food education, I am not just talking about teaching people how to cook. What is our education system really teaching about how we consume and how we eat together?

I will reframe the original question. Is the plan ambitious enough to achieve the transformation in how we educate ourselves and create a culture around food that captures the spirit of what you are talking about? As I have said, that was being done in some places 20 years ago, and it is still being done in some places, but it is far from being the norm. Will the plan deliver that kind of change? Perhaps someone who has not spoken wants to respond.