Chamber and committees

I congratulate my friend Liam McArthur and everyone who has worked with him to get us to this point. I am proud to add my voice in support of the bill.

When my mother was growing up in Canada in the 1960s, she had a school friend called Merry. They lost contact, but travel and technology brought them back together many decades later. Very sadly, in 2019, Merry received a diagnosis of a rare, incurable form of brain cancer called glioblastoma. She knew about the terrible pathology of the disease because, tragically, her husband had died of the same cancer just a couple of years previously. She had seen him robbed of his personality, control of his bodily functions and ability to maintain his very sense of identity, so it was immediately clear in Merry’s mind that she would not go in the same way. And so it was: within just a few months, she ended her life in a hospice rooftop garden, in the Vancouver sunshine. At that moment, my mother, and many of Merry’s school friends, thousands of miles away, held her in the light of their love as she freed herself from that illness.

In Scotland today, we in the Parliament strive to give everyone rights and agency in their adult lives—except for one part, which is our departure from it. Too often, people with do not resuscitate orders in place have them ignored and find themselves being resuscitated. People are asking—they are actively begging—clinicians to allow them to die, yet the law requires that we sustain them so that they can live. Indeed, the only point of mercy that is available to clinicians when a patient is near the end of their life is the removal of sustenance, which makes for a lingering death. That is not at all to criticise our amazing clinicians who work in end-of-life care, many of whom perform daily miracles—sometimes on their knees—and who fight valiantly to give comfort and peace to their patients and the families around them. However, the weight of law, expectation and culture often means that we see clinicians being forced to fight for extra days, as they would for yards in a battlefield, only to see the line behind them collapse as it was always going to do.

Edward Mountain and Jackie Baillie have spoken passionately about the need for better palliative care. I agree with them, and I support Miles Briggs’s attempts to bring a bill to the Parliament to that end. The issues of palliative care and assisted dying are not mutually exclusive, though. They have walked hand in hand in the jurisdictions that have gone before us in considering such issues. We have seen that palliative care is but the final tool in the drawer, and it provides much-needed reassurance to people in those vital last days of their lives.

I was struck by the words of a palliative care nurse who has been working in end-of-life care for 25 years. We met on a panel at the Royal College of General Practitioners that was talking about this very issue, and he told me afterwards that he supported Liam’s bill. In 25 years, only five of his patients had had breakthrough pain that he was not able to master, but it was for each of those five patients that he supported the efforts of Liam McArthur to change the law.

No, I have to make some progress and I recognise that time is short.

That speaks to the fact that very few people will avail themselves of assisted dying. Statistically, only one of us in the chamber is likely to need it by the end of our lives.

We know that because we are not pioneers in this. Thirty-one jurisdictions have already gone ahead with such a law. They have amassed as much as 30 years of best practice, which we are leaning into. I am gratified that Liam has chosen the narrower scope of terminal diagnosis and mental capacity to ensure that there is no chance of mission creep.

Not being a pioneer in this area means that we can rest our proposals on the weight of evidence, and there is sufficient academic research to enable us to legislate with confidence. We have already heard about the briefing from Professor Ben Colburn, who has studied every jurisdiction where assisted dying takes place as it relates to disability. He has found that no people with disabilities are harmed by the change in the law unless they avail themselves of it through the normal processes. They do not face foreshortened or forestalled delivery of care, and the vast majority of disabled people in those countries support assisted dying, as they do in this country.

That support is mirrored in our constituents. In the polling that has been undertaken on this issue, we have been very careful to ensure that people understand what they are being asked, and by a country mile they support the change. Our constituents are telling us that, if they get to a point where they are beyond the reach of palliative care, they want the right to say, “This far and no further.”

I close with the words of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who said near the end of his own life, and in reflecting on the sad and overly prolonged passing of Nelson Mandela,

“For those suffering unbearably and coming to the end of their lives, merely knowing that an assisted death is open to them can provide immeasurable comfort.”

I hope that this Parliament will listen to the words of Archbishop Tutu and agree to the general principles of the bill tonight.

I am loth to interrupt Daniel Johnson’s eloquent exposition of what happened to the structures of global unity after the war so that there would never be a war again, but does he recognise that the first treaty of the European Union established the European Coal and Steel Community, so that no country could ever again build a war machine without an EU signatory country knowing that?

The First Minister is absolutely right to reference the European Union as establishing a charter for peace so that no nation could ever build a war machine again. Much of that fabric was built on the foundation of a cohesion of factors such as the Polish airmen coming to Scotland and fighting so bravely in the battle of Britain, many of them settling here and becoming part of an established Polish community. Will the First Minister join me in paying tribute to them, too?

It is my distinct privilege to offer the Liberal Democrats’ respects to the fallen in our armed forces and in armed forces across the world; to the dead in our civilian population and across the world; and to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust—something that we have heard a lot about this afternoon, and rightly so.

I was reflecting on what this 80th anniversary means in Germany, and I heard a fascinating radio interview with a German diplomat who was asked that question. He explained to the interviewer that, in Germany, the date is seen as a commemoration of liberation, because it was a liberation of normal Germans from, in the words of Churchill,

“the odious apparatus of Nazi rule”.

On dates such as this, we often forget the brave Germans who stood up against Hitler within the Third Reich and those who, for want of freedom, died under its regime. Today, I am thinking of those brave people, such as Sophie Scholl and Pastor Niemöller.

We are also thinking today of our brave Scottish communities who, in a singular national effort of determination, pulled together for the war effort.

I asked the First Minister about the Polish airmen. I grew up in a farming village not far from RAF Leuchars in Fife, and there was a shed at the bottom of our garden that still had telephone lines and a fireplace for the three Polish airmen who had lived in that shed for three years. Even then, there were still signs of our collective war effort.

Just last week, in the communities of Lerwick and Scalloway in Shetland, there was a commemoration of the Shetland bus. As part of that operation, merchant navy vessels took troops, ammunition and weaponry to and from the Norwegian resistance. I pay tribute to all of them.

Each of our communities played its part in certain ways, but each of us—as the First Minister very movingly told us—will have personal reflections on this 80th anniversary.

I think of my grandfather and his three siblings in particular today. His older brother, Dick, was a German linguist and, as such, became an interrogator in prisoner of war camps. His younger brother, David, who was a commander on HMS Sikh, was, sadly, killed on a troop transport, which was sunk north of Tobruk by a Stuka dive-bomber. My father is named for him, such is the enduring memory of his loss.

Their sister, Joan, was awarded an MBE at the age of 23 for her service to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the Norwegian legation that evacuated the King and the Government from Oslo as the Wehrmacht rolled in. She walked overland to a resistance farmhouse, led by Frank Foley, and was eventually evacuated by submarine. Sadly, she died in 1945, just after the San Francisco conference that set up the United Nations. Her plane disappeared over the Atlantic, and we still have a letter in my attic from Anthony Eden expressing grave concern for her loss.

It was my grandfather who taught me everything about freedom and sacrifice. He served as the lieutenant commander on a destroyer in the north Atlantic. He was one of the last surviving witnesses of the sinking of HMS Hood by Bismarck, and he lived to tell the tale. I have 19 hours of audio of his seafaring stories, which I treasure.

We have heard a lot about Winston Churchill’s remarks from the balcony of the health ministry on this day, 80 years ago. He gave a very short speech, and much of it has been quoted, but these lines have not:

“My dear friends, this is your hour. This is not victory of party or of any class. It’s a victory of the great British nation as a whole. We were the first, in this ancient island, to draw the sword against tyranny.”

With those words, he closed out a war that had endured for six years. He ushered in a long peace, and it is a long peace that it is incumbent on decision makers and parliamentarians like us in chambers such as this to safeguard for future generations, and we must also recognise those who draw the sword against tyranny in places such as Ukraine today.

Today, we commemorate the moment when, 80 years ago, the high command of the allied forces received the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich. Although war still raged in the Pacific, across these islands, for the first time in six years, the tension, grind and privations of wartime gave way to lasting peace.

In a radio broadcast to the British people and the world, King George VI said:

“on this day of just triumph and proud sorrow”,

let us

“take up our work again, resolved as a people to do nothing unworthy of those who died for us and to make the world such a world as they would have desired, for their children and for ours.”

His words ushered in the long peace that most of us have only ever known.

As we give thanks today for the sacrifice that was laid down by the generations that came before us, we must rededicate ourselves to the promise of that peace and its furtherance for our children and theirs to come.

I am pleased to speak for the Liberal Democrats on today’s programme for government. I reflect on Willie Rennie’s remarks that the chamber is almost empty. This pre-election giveaway announcement should be currying a lot more favour than it seems to be doing.

I have said many times that, before politics, I was a youth worker, and that is why I am here. I worked closely with children who lived in absolute poverty. I saw at first hand the huge impact that deprivation can have on young lives and how it too often defines their futures. The fact that so many children are being born into poverty in 2025 is a national embarrassment. The SNP has had 18 years to get this right, but we are still nowhere. The fundamental way that we get kids out of poverty is by growing Scotland’s economy.

I am grateful for the First Minister’s intervention, but he is talking about what happened 15 years ago. He cannot blame events of 15 years ago for what we are seeing today, which is the mismanagement of and failure to grow the economy.

Growing the economy is how we face the issue. The world is changing. Everything that we took for granted now feels uncertain. The free global economy is being replaced by punishing tariffs. Prices are soaring for everyday essentials and the energy and raw materials to build our homes and fuel our economy.

At the same time, the quality of the services that people rely on most is under real pressure, because those services are tied directly to how our economy performs. They include fast access to a general practitioner, a good education for our children, high-quality care for our loved ones, safe streets, reliable transport and well-maintained roads.

Without economic growth, local services decline, investment stalls and opportunities dry up. For the Scottish Liberal Democrats, building a stronger economy boils down to the key levers that I referenced in my question—boosting our skills base, reforming planning, tackling the housing crisis and rural development. Without a skilled, home-grown Scottish workforce that is ready for the industries of the future, such as defence, renewables, artificial intelligence and precision medicine, Scotland risks being left behind and those jobs going overseas.

Over the past two decades, the SNP Government has presided over the quiet death of further education, which has reduced our ability to produce the skilled workforce that Scotland needs. We need to reverse that decline, and fast.

Scotland is also actively driving away investment due to a planning regime that is ridiculously slow. In parts of Scandinavia, planning takes about seven weeks from the application to putting shovels in the ground. Here, planning applications are measured in years. A faster, simpler process that still gives a place to communities would attract investment.

Housing is inseparable from skills. If we cannot offer affordable homes, especially to key workers, we will not build the skilled workforce that Scotland urgently needs, where we need it.

Mental health must also be part of the conversation. The crisis in mental health is one of the reasons why so many people are economically inactive or unable to return to their careers, yet the Government has broken its commitment to allocate 10 per cent of NHS funding to mental health and 1 per cent to CAMHS. There is a workforce crisis in mental health, too, as well as a serious lack of provision for neurodevelopmental conditions.

There has also been a fundamental failure to help the tens of thousands of Scots who are still suffering from long Covid to get back to work.

People are tired of feeling that things are getting steadily worse and of there being little or no clear plan for how to improve them. They are demanding that we do things differently. We need change that is backed by good, competent delivery. People across Scotland see the consequences of delay and drift every day. They have waited years for action on crumbling roads and overstretched public services. In the Highlands, some communities are still waiting for the A9 and A96 to be made safe—a promise that was first made two decades ago.

There are other key areas where the Government must act now, but I am running out of time. We need a serious industrial strategy to underpin all of this—not just to attract new jobs but to make sure that they stay in Scotland.

This country has so much potential, but it needs a Government that is willing to match the ambition of the people who live here. After almost 20 years, this Government has been found wanting, and it is time for it to get out of the way.

The First Minister had barely drawn breath before referencing his ambition to create a vibrant economy. In this world of war and tariffs, heightened urgency and challenges surround that ambition. The First Minister rightly referenced the key levers that are critical to fostering growth, which are: planning reform, skills development, housing, and rural development. He is not wrong, but his record on those issues should give us all pause.

Does he accept that, for nearly 20 years, his Government has presided over a planning system that takes years to approve projects that, in other parts of Europe, would receive the green light within weeks? Does he accept, too, that we are not building enough affordable houses, which in turn makes it harder for us to recruit key workers, particularly in remote and rural areas? Does he accept that, thanks to his Government’s erosion of further education, we are in no position to generate the skills base that we will need if we are to compete in the industries of the future, such as defence, renewables and artificial intelligence?

It seems that the only answers that are available to the bereaved families at the heart of the issue are in the journalism of the Sunday Post. They are getting precious little from Scottish ministers and nothing from inside this chamber.

The minister will recall that, on two occasions last year, following a spike in neonatal deaths and adverse neonatal ward events in 2021 and 2022, I asked her to make Government time available to debate those findings. First, she said that she would look at that; secondly, she told me that there were no plans. Will she now, at the third time of asking, make parliamentary time available for consideration of those very concerning events?