Chamber and committees

Mr Carlaw makes an interesting point. [Laughter.]

Shares were available to the community, but I declined to take them up, primarily because I felt that it would limit my ability to lobby the Home Office for a licence, and the Scottish Government for the financial support that is needed, to build what is an incredible facility that will bring jobs and opportunities to the community.

I turn to the past, and to some of the customs and traditions that make Langholm special. The most notable of those is undoubtedly its historic Borders common riding, which is truly Langholm’s greatest day and a spectacle to behold. It is best experienced on horseback, and it remains one of my own personal achievements to have successfully ridden the common riding, including the gallop up the Kirk Wynd, as a member of the Scottish Parliament. I have committed to doing so again, but only on the condition that Emma Harper takes part too. This seems an appropriate point to thank her for supporting my motion; I know that she had wanted to speak tonight, but she is away on British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly business. I am sure that if Emma had been here, she would have been willing to confirm her willingness to take part. I will make sure to catch her later in the week.

Langholm has another major claim to fame, as the ancestral home of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. The town remains very proud of that, and it was honoured to make Neil Armstrong a free man of Langholm during his very special visit to the town in 1972. The relationship has continued through Neil’s sons and their families, who were back in Langholm recently.

That was followed by a proclamation of kinship from Armstrong’s birthplace of Wapakoneta in Ohio, which was unveiled a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps ironically in the context of this debate, Armstrong’s famous 1972 visit even resulted in the Chicago Tribune publishing a front-page story featuring a map of the United Kingdom that showed only London and Langholm.

That fact takes me neatly on to the key ask of the debate. For all its many attractions and accolades, Langholm appears to have been forgotten when it comes to road signage. Anyone on the near one hour’s drive between Longtown and Hawick, or, equally, on the whole of the M74 motorway, would be forgiven for thinking that Langholm does not exist: it is absent from major directional signage and there is very little to tell people about the visitor attractions and facilities that are clustered around what is a major population centre for those who live and work in the Eskdale valleys or in Langholm itself. To someone sitting behind a desk in Scotland’s urban central belt, Langholm might be small in terms of population numbers, but it matters to the people who live there, and it has so much to offer.

The Langholm Alliance, which I mentioned earlier, and many individuals and other organisations have worked tirelessly to promote the town. They are represented in the public gallery by Anthony Lane, who has worked hard alongside Sharon Tolson to drive forward the road signage project. Although there has been some progress south of the border in delivering some new signs between the M6 and Langholm—and there is a solitary new sign near Annan—efforts on the A7 in Scotland and on the M74 at junction 21 have hit a roadblock.

We have been told that Langholm is not a primary destination so it does not get to go on the signs. That characterisation is insulting and, even if it conforms to technical guidance, seems overly officious when there is plenty of room on the signs in question. It is not as though we are awash with other primary destinations between Longtown and Hawick; nor are there other communities between Kirkpatrick-Fleming and Langholm that are championing the case to be put on motorway road signs.

When we consider the disruption that is associated with having a trunk road roar through the high street of a small town, it does not seem that big an ask for the responsible authorities to be willing to acknowledge that the route goes through that community. What is more, I believe that there is an obligation on Transport Scotland and operators to get more involved in promoting such communities as somewhere to stop, visit and return to. It is not good enough to punt that on to the communities themselves and expect them to navigate the bureaucracy that VisitScotland has created around brown signage on the trunk road network.

As I close, I ask the minister to reflect on what more can be done to get behind Langholm to remove those roadblocks. Our smaller, more rural and remote communities have every bit as much to offer as other destinations—they are primary destinations for those who live there and the many visitors that they attract.

As the minister said, part of the site is now available and in the hands of South of Scotland Enterprise. Alongside a cross-party group of local MSPs, I have been working hard to support a company that is called ReBlade, which is interested in setting up a wind turbine recycling hub on the site. I have raised the matter before, but there has since been a change of cabinet secretary. Is the minister interested in meeting the MSPs that are involved in the cross-party group to see what more can be done to ensure that the project becomes a reality?

To ask the Scottish Government what steps it is taking to support the creation of new jobs at the Chapelcross site near Annan. (S6O-03261)

Thank you, convener. I want to place on the record that I remain strongly opposed to the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021. I think that the legislation undermines free speech and I believe that it should not be subject to commencement when serious concerns remain about how it will be policed in practice.

Then we go back to what the previous Deputy First Minister said, which was that people would be believed and that that was going to be the core of this whole process. Now we are hearing that that is not the case, and that cannot be right. I cannot sign up to that—I am sorry.

With due respect, at the point at which this matter was being considered, the second most senior person in the Scottish Government believed that these people would be eligible to apply. Also, the more they found out about the situation, the less credible they found the outcome of the report that you are now pushing as providing closure.

John Swinney—his words are there, and I am sure that he will correct them if he has changed his mind since—did not accept the argument that parents had chosen to take their children there as if it were a holiday camp.

The guidance can change.

How can I have confidence in the scheme, though, if the people that those who introduced the scheme thought would not face a barrier to accessing it cannot access it? Confidence works both ways. It is a challenge that the records do not exist, but to say that, on the balance of probabilities, there is insufficient evidence that people were somewhere they say they were—when lots of other people say they were there and seem to understand that as being how those things worked at the time—is also a challenge.

I do not think that people have any expectations—

I concur with Fergus Ewing’s comments because, in large parts of rural Scotland, taxis and private hire cars amount to public transport. They ferry people to hospital appointments, and they provide a lifeline in the absence of bus services. I can certainly understand the petitioner’s aim, but I do not think it is possible to fulfil the outcome.