Chamber and committees

During the Easter holidays, at least eight ferries were out of action at the same time. Every Scottish island faced disruption. Those communities are overdue serious compensation, and I hope that the First Minister will finally extend that to the coastal communities that are affected, too. Businesses there are now looking to the summer holidays and wondering what this situation will mean for them.

Last week, technology of the 19century came to the rescue of passengers of the 21century when the Waverley paddle steamer stepped in for a stricken Caledonian MacBrayne vessel. John Swinney must have winced with embarrassment at that reality.

Is Scotland’s ferry fleet ready for the summer?

I am grateful for that reply, but it is no wonder that the people of the Western Isles sent the First Minister and his party packing. Lots of coastal and island communities are turning away from the SNP because of this issue. Remember that The New York Times told its readers that, while our Scottish islands are beautiful,

“Good luck getting on or off.”

Scotland’s islands are a great option for a summer getaway—they are beautiful—but only if we can get holidaymakers over to their hotels and to cafes and distilleries.

The ferry fleet is more prone than ever before to breakdown and disruption. It is not resilient. Everyone who lives in those communities knows that all too well. Has the First Minister picked up the phone to ferry operators and Governments elsewhere in the United Kingdom and Europe to find extra vessels to keep those routes operational and our island communities profitable?

Members will be delighted to hear that I do not plan to take all of my time this afternoon. I intend to cede some of it to Duncan Dunlop, who will be making his first speech later.

In the time that I have, I remind members that debates such as this used to be marquee occasions. There were times when the galleries would be full, the press gallery would be absolutely stuffed and we even had the cameras of the world trained on this Parliament, because the question of Scotland’s future in the union was so unpredictable. However, there is a muscle memory now—a performative element—to debates such as this, because a section 30 order will be requested this afternoon and it will be declined. Why? Because John Swinney has manifestly failed the test that he set himself just a month ago. I will quote from The Scotsman what John Swinney said—he could not have been clearer—on 28 April:

“I’m … saying that we need to make sure we get an SNP majority to make sure we can take forward an independence referendum”.

Presiding Officer, 59 per cent of the public—the voting public—disagreed with that assertion and voted for parties that did not back a second referendum. It is only because of the vagaries of our voting system and the gaming of the system by the parties of independence that we are now in this situation.

Will the member take an intervention?

I do not disagree with Mr Arthur that Brexit has been a disaster for social care, but it would be a lot easier to fix social care if his Government paid people more to work in social care or gave them key worker housing to address the shortage of housing in the Highlands and Islands that he discussed, so he has got a nerve to raise that with me.

We need to get Scotland moving again. Just last week, the nation was embarrassed when the technology of the 19th century came to the aid of passengers of the 21st century—the Clyde paddle steamer, the Waverley, had to rescue passengers because a Caledonian MacBrayne vessel had broken down. That is a microcosm of the inadequacies of the SNP Government, and taking time for parliamentary debates such as this one does nothing to serve our constituents. It is no wonder that they do not pay the attention to, or have the trust in, the Parliament that they used to, because they just do not believe that it can deliver for them.

I move amendment S7M-00105.1, to leave out from first “welcomes” to end and insert:

“notes that the Scottish National Party’s stated objective prior to 7 May 2026 was to secure an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament elections in order to pursue independence, but that the party achieved fewer votes and seats than in the previous elections, whereas the Scottish Liberal Democrats achieved gains across Scotland from the Borders to the Highlands, and believes that the Scottish Government must now focus on fixing the NHS and care, helping people with the cost of living crisis, fixing the roads and the ferries and getting Scottish education back to its best, in order to deliver the change that Scotland deserves.”

Ross Greer is celebrated as one of the brightest members of this Parliament, yet basic arithmetic seems to be escaping him; 59 per cent of the public is bigger than 41 per cent. I think that he should consult his maths teacher.

Because the SNP failed in that effort, the covenant that the First Minister tried to establish with the people must be set aside, because a section 30 order is not going to build a new hospital in Shetland; 18 months of campaigning around the constitution is not going to dual the lethal A9 any faster; identifying offices for embassies and high commissions overseas for a future independent Scotland is going to do nothing to reduce child poverty; and the interminable debates about what currency an independent Scotland would or would not adopt are going to do nothing to instruct an independent review that is so vitally needed for maternity services in the far north of Scotland.

In all truth, as a chamber, since the SNP came to power, we have never fully flexed the muscles of devolution—as one of the most empowered devolved nations in this world—to address the things that all our constituents have decidedly sent us to Parliament to discuss.

I will give him credit—the First Minister touched on the cost of living emergency. This was a cost of living election, but nothing about 18 months of debate around the constitution is going to make people’s homes warmer by instructing the emergency programme of home insulation that we need. It is not going to address the crisis in our social care system, which is keeping 2,000 Scots in hospital who neither need nor want to be there but who cannot get home for want of a social care package. It is not going to lift up education, and it is not going to—

Okay—I will take an intervention from Tom Arthur.

I do not have time—

Nicola Sturgeon stated yesterday that she knew nothing of the £125,000 camper van parked in her mother-in-law’s drive until the police informed her of it, yet an SNP source quoted in the Daily Record the week that the camper van was seized passed it off as a legitimate SNP resource for a Covid election, describing it as a “mobile campaign room”. I hope that Police Scotland has unravelled the inconsistency of those two positions.

If we are to believe the narrative account of the former First Minister that this was not a criminal conspiracy, it follows that it was, in fact, a catastrophic failure of financial oversight. Therefore, I ask the First Minister, if his party leadership cannot steward the accounts of the Scottish National Party, why on earth should our constituents trust it with the finances of our nation?

Thank you, Presiding Officer. I welcome you to your new role.

I rise to speak to my candidacy for First Minister of Scotland in an atmosphere of hope rather than expectation. Elections are a time of choosing—this election was no different from the previous one in that regard—and the Scottish election that we have just been through was, in itself, a time of choosing. It was an inflection point at which all of us were offered our instructions by the people who send us to this place.

The election also represented the final spoke in the wheel of revival for my party. I am heartily glad of that, coming as it did after the best general election result for our party in 100 years and big council gains across the country. The Scottish election represented a massive leap forward for the Scottish Liberal Democrats, in terms of both vote share and the number of seats returned. When looking at the constituency map of Scotland, we see that we are the second party of Scotland: we have won in places where we have never won before, and we have taken a massive leap forward, with the best result for my party in nearly 20 years.

The measure of that achievement was summed up well by The Times when it wrote:

“In the final analysis it was the Lib Dems who perhaps did more than any other party to thwart the nationalist march to 65 seats.” [Interruption.]

Do not take it from me. That is the story of the election.

As much as I respect John Swinney, he has known only regression during his time as party leader of the Scottish National Party. He has gone only backwards in his efforts and has experienced electoral decline. As the old Parliament rose and we were gavelled out of session, he could not have been clearer: he stated for the whole country to hear that, if he was to achieve the mandate necessary to call for a second independence referendum, he needed the public at large to award his party an overall majority. He fell well short of that. In large part, that was because Liberal Democrat gains in the villages and towns of this country rendered him unable to deliver what he asked the people to give him.

As such, I ask that we, as a Parliament, now lay those divisive issues aside, put talk of the constitution in the deep freeze and, instead, focus on the instructions that the people who sent us to this place have been manifestly clear that they want us to focus on. That includes the crisis in our health service, which is not just a crisis in our hospitals but is born of the fact that there is such a paucity of social care in our communities that, on any given night, 2,000 of our fellow Scots are stuck in hospital, including Margaret MacGill, whose case I raised many times in the previous parliamentary session. Such people are well enough to go home but are unable to do so without adequate care to receive them. They are stuck in that awful limbo that leads to cancelled operations or to corridor care in our accident and emergency departments because people cannot be discharged into the wider hospital.

There is the fact that we have all had constituents come to see us, sometimes in great distress, because their young person or they themselves have been unable to get access to the diagnostics that they need, particularly to diagnose things around child and adolescent mental health or neurodiversity—in parts of Edinburgh, some have been told that they will have to wait seven years for that. People come to see us because they are receiving care in crumbling hospitals that are no longer fit for purpose and are in desperate need of not just refurbishment but renewal in their entirety.

We want to focus on lifting up Scottish education. We heard just this week the awful results of an Educational Institute of Scotland survey that shows that far too many of our teachers at primary and secondary level are assaulted on a daily basis in their place of work. We want to support them by taking mobile phones out of classrooms, putting in 2,000 pupil support assistants and making sure that newly qualified teachers have a stable, permanent job to go to.

We want to drive down the cost of living by instructing an immediate programme of emergency home insulation to make sure that the coldest homes in Scotland—the households that are most at risk of fuel poverty—are ready for the increase in the fuel price cap that we heard about today, and that those who are already at risk of fuel poverty, because they do not have a price cap to protect them from an increase in costs for heating oil, are protected with as much insulation as we can provide.

We need to get Scotland moving again. The early days of the election campaign were bedevilled by a ferry crisis that brought our island and coastal communities to their knees at a time when they needed our support.

Elections are about a choice. We offer a vision of hope and change with fairness at its heart. I humbly submit my candidacy for First Minister.