Chamber and committees

Official Report: search what was said in Parliament

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.

Searching by different views

The web version of the Official Report has three different views:

Report: this is the whole Official Report for a particular meeting of a committee or Parliament
Item of business: this is each individual agenda item in an Official Report. For example, Portfolio Questions would be the item of business in a Meeting of the Parliament report
Contribution: this is each time someone has made a spoken contribution to a meeting.

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.

Search by MSP

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.

Searching by keyword

There are two types of keyword search:

A keyword search without quotation marks will look for every instance of each word used and rank the results by frequency and proximity. It will also include variants of the keywords using “porter stemming”. This is when the search looks for the “stem” of a word regardless of its ending. So, for example, a search for [salmon farm] will return each instance of “salmon” and each instance of “farm” as well as potentially including results for “farms”, “farmed” and “farming”.
A keyword search with quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase used. So, for example, a search for “salmon farm” in quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase.

Combining search filters

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.

Searching by date

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:

Current session (all Official Reports since the current sessions started)
Last 6 months
Last 12 months
each of the previous sessions of Parliament. (Selecting the information icon above the “Select a time period” menu will give you the exact dates for each session.)
All sessions
You can also choose to select a custom date range, although adding a Start or End date will mean the search automatically defaults to this option.

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.

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Meeting of the Parliament

Adam Smith (Birth Tercentenary)

Meeting date: 6 June 2023

Ash Regan

As others have done, I commend my colleague Michelle Thomson for securing the debate and for her excellent remarks commemorating this tercentenary. Adam Smith’s ideas have shaped the world as we know it, and the Scottish enlightenment, of which he was a leading part, was characterised by Scottish thinkers and the intellectual leadership of Europe. It was a movement of ideas and, importantly, the disputation of ideas.

As we have heard this evening, Smith is most famous for his book “The Wealth of Nations”. Like Mr Cameron, however, I will focus my remarks on his other book, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”, which was published in 1759. That book very much put Mr Smith on the map. It brought him fame, and students from other universities—even in other countries—left their courses to come and study under him in Scotland. Further, it was considered by Smith to be his superior work.

I want to read out a passage from that book, although I will not do so in its entirety as it is quite long. In it, he talks specifically about systems and plans for how we govern, using an analogy involving chess pieces. He says:

“in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it.”

I will paraphrase the rest. He says that, if the principles coincide, the “game of human society” will go on easily but that, if they do not, it will go on miserably.

In other words, he says that Governments are most successful when they work with people rather than against them. I agree with that, and I sense that there is a bit of agreement with that sentiment in the chamber, too. It is important for us all to ponder that as we go about the work of this legislature.

Like Pam Gosal, I understand and have taken on board Smith’s belief in free speech and how that relates to society—and particularly to modern society at the moment. I think that his idea of free speech was tempered by respect for others and also by empathy for others. He might not understand our modern idea of empathy, but it is certainly based on sentiments that he wrote about in his book.

The Scottish enlightenment teaches us that we need to be free to think, to debate and even to offend, and that we need to base our thinking—our critical thinking—on facts and also on science, which is a sentiment that Smith expressed very much. I think that there is immense value in robust debate—that clash of competing opinions that benefits society and Governments.

Smith and the enlightenment continue to inspire us. They inspire us to pursue knowledge and to create an environment that encourages the free exchange of ideas, because that is how we progress.

17:52