The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
There are two types of keyword search:
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
If you search by an individual session, the list of MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
Displaying 474 contributions
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 September 2025
Patrick Harvie
Good morning to the witnesses. I will touch briefly on the sentencing issue that others have mentioned, but most of my questions will be about the scope of the bill.
I welcome the fact that, in your answers so far, you have placed some emphasis on lower-level penalties, such as community payback orders, which might often be appropriate. However, I am concerned about the upper limit of 10 years’ imprisonment that you have suggested. There are people who have been convicted of multiple offences of trafficking class A drugs and who have received shorter sentences than that. You might generally have a view that sentences should be longer—I do not know, but maybe you do. Is that a fair comparison? Is there not some concern that your upper limit is too high?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 September 2025
Patrick Harvie
Thank you.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 September 2025
Patrick Harvie
Thank you for that answer, which perhaps relies on the idea that high sentences are an effective deterrent to crime in general. I would question whether there is robust evidence to support that across the criminal justice system, but that is perhaps something that we can explore as the bill proceeds.
I will ask about scope and what the offences in the bill would apply to. First, you have very clearly articulated—you used the word “trauma”—the emotional impact and the social, cultural and emotional significance of the memorials that you are talking about. I hope that it goes without saying that the whole committee and, I suspect, the whole Parliament, take that very seriously and very much respect that.
It seems to me that the same argument applies to a wider range of memorials, structures or entities—call them what you will—than the ones that you have covered in the bill. The bill says:
“something has a commemorative purpose in respect of armed conflict if at least one of its purposes is to commemorate one or more individuals or animals, or a particular description or category of individuals or animals, who died in armed conflict”.
The second world war was clearly an armed conflict. The Holocaust, specifically, was one of the greatest atrocities in modern human history—it was an act of genocide—but, in isolation, would it be seen as an armed conflict? Would a Holocaust memorial be covered in the legislation or not?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 September 2025
Patrick Harvie
Is it your view that a memorial to the battle of George Square, which was surely an armed conflict between striking workers and the British state, would be covered?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 September 2025
Patrick Harvie
I am sorry, but I have to challenge that. You have mentioned the Spanish civil war memorial in Motherwell, which has been desecrated with fascist graffiti, and I think that the Glasgow one has also been attacked in the past. Those were not people who fought for our country or for any country; they were recruited by the Communist International to fight fascism. It was not about one country or another. Your definition is about those who died in armed conflict.
09:45Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 September 2025
Patrick Harvie
Your answer, in which you described where you got the definition from, reinforces my worry that, perhaps, you decided at the beginning to focus specifically on war memorials, and you have not explained why that is specifically the definition. For example, we have seen antisemitic attacks on Jewish graves. If the individuals did not die in an armed conflict, their graves would not be covered by the definition, although I think that most people would recognise that the very same trauma and emotional impact are involved, and the cultural and social significance of those memorials is the same.
I will ask a few comparison questions. I am aware that there is a danger that this is going to sound as though I am trying to create a hierarchy of importance, but I am actually trying to suggest that there should not be a hierarchy and that all these things matter. There is a campaign to raise funds to create a memorial for LGBT veterans—people who served in the armed forces. Many of them died in armed conflict, but some of them would have been persecuted and even tortured by or expelled from the British Army, and some of them are still serving. If it were created, an LGBT veterans memorial would not be covered by the bill, although, if the memorial was to a specific individual from that community who had died in armed conflict, it would be covered.
There is also a campaign for a memorial to those who fought against apartheid. Clearly, that was an armed conflict. Although, at the time, not everyone in this country would have agreed, most people today would recognise that the African National Congress were freedom fighters who were taking up arms against a profoundly evil white supremacist regime. If a memorial was built specifically to Nelson Mandela in Scotland, it would not be covered because he did not die in armed conflict, but if a memorial was built to Steve Biko, who was tortured to death in a South African prison, it would be covered.
Do you understand the point that focusing specifically on war memorials seems to create a lot of anomalies and to cover only some monuments? For example, you mentioned the Boer war. Some would point to the atrocities—the war crimes—that were committed by the British Army in that war. Therefore, the bill would cover monuments and memorials to individuals or groups of individuals who most people today would not say require the same degree of respect as those in living memory or those who fought against fascism. However, it would not cover some monuments or memorials—either those that already exist or those that people are seeking to create—that most people would recognise relate to the very same trauma and have the same social and emotional impact but which would not be covered. There seem to be a lot of anomalies.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 September 2025
Patrick Harvie
I am aware that I have taken up a lot of time, but I have a final question, which is about a potential alternative approach. The policy memorandum talks about non-legislative approaches as alternatives, but it does not consider an alternative legislative approach that seems fairly obvious to me, rather than broadening the bill.
In relation to hate crimes against individuals, we have the concept of aggravated offences. If it is shown in the court that the offence that has been committed was motivated by prejudice on the grounds of race, sexuality, transgender identity, disability or another protected characteristic, the court treats it as an aggravated offence and is required to take that into account in sentencing. It seems to me that, if we want the courts to take into account the real trauma that is experienced by those for whom war memorials or other memorials have a special emotional significance—those memorials might have a special cultural and social significance to the whole country—requiring aggravated offences to be considered in relation to vandalism, desecration or whatever damage was done would be a much more flexible approach. The courts would be required to consider all the circumstances in relation to the meaning and importance of a memorial and the motivation of the offender. Did you consider that alternative approach? If not, would you?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Patrick Harvie
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?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Patrick Harvie
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.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Patrick Harvie
Are there any other comments on what I asked about?