Chamber and committees

I was proud to speak alongside Gillian Mackay in her members’ business debate on the issue, joining members from all parties in our shared belief that somebody’s right to freedom of speech does not trump somebody’s right to medical privacy or the right to seek intimate medical care without molestation. The minister shattered that consensus by saying that the Government was unmoved.

If the minister is determined to state that there is a difference of legal opinion, I note that the opinion that the Society of Local Authority Lawyers and Administrators in Scotland received was “unequivocal” that byelaws could not be used by local authorities to create buffer zones. Has the Scottish Government sought legal opinion to the contrary? If so, will she publish it?

I extend the thanks of Scottish Liberal Democrats to everyone who kept COP26 safe and made it possible.

Keeping the 1.5°C goal alive will require concerted action both at home and abroad, which means we cannot wait for COP27 or COP28. As we have heard a number of times today, Scotland has repeatedly missed its own targets in that vital area.

The First Minister says that she wants to be challenged to go further and faster. I invite her to consider some of the proposals that my party has laid out to give new hope in the climate emergency. One is an end to the reliance on fossil fuels for all new-build houses. We seek a new rail-card entitlement that would allow all passengers to benefit from rail-card fares, and we seek the removal of this Government’s commitment to a third runway at Heathrow.

Will the Government explain to the children of Scotland why it withheld that information?

On armistice day, it is incumbent on us all to pay respect to people who paid the ultimate price to protect our country and our freedoms.

To ask the Deputy First Minister when the Cabinet will next meet. (S6F-00427)

There is a muscle memory to the exchanges at First Minister’s questions: week after week, Opposition members ask the Government about the crisis in emergency care and, week after week, the Government responds by blaming the pandemic. The Deputy First Minister has doubled down on that today by accusing Anas Sarwar of being in denial, but the former chief executive of NHS Scotland has said that the crisis has been years in the making and the pandemic has only hastened the date.

I ask the Deputy First Minister to put himself in the shoes of our hard-working emergency care staff—the call handlers who answer repeated calls asking again and again when an ambulance will come, and the paramedics who attend calls knowing that, behind the door, there is somebody who has been waiting in pain for hours on end, which must be traumatic.

I have with me a response to a freedom of information request, through which we learned that the number of ambulance staff hours lost to mental ill health is up 300 per cent since 2017 and represented 40,000 hours between July and September alone. One paramedic told the Daily Record today:

“We feel as if we are failing the public even though it’s not our fault.”

It is not their fault, so I ask the Deputy First Minister to stop grasping at straws, stop blaming the pandemic and accept that his Government is letting down those vital staff.

It gives me great pleasure to speak for the Liberal Democrats in the debate. I pay tribute to the speakers who have gone before me and give them our thanks. Each of them is a veteran and I am profoundly grateful for the service that they have given to this country.

In France and Belgium every year, farmers unearth from their fields barbed wire, shell casings, shrapnel and bullets. The “iron harvest”, as it is referred to, is the product and material of a war that was fought more than 100 years ago. Although the memories of the men who served in that war have now passed, it has always been very striking to me that the land still gives up the product and material of that war. It has almost been metastasised into the very ground on which that war was fought. The word “metastasised” is very appropriate, given that Wilfred Owen described the mechanised slaughter of the western front as being “Obscene as cancer”. It is from Wilfred Owen’s words that we learned much of what life was like in the trenches in that difficult time. He also wrote that not even poetry was “fit to speak” of the sacrifices made and the lives lost.

As we know, Wilfred Owen was one of his generation’s finest poets. He was treated for his injuries not far from this building, at Craiglockhart hospital, where he wrote some of his most famous poems and discovered his immense potential as a literary master. That potential was tragically dashed shortly after he returned to the front line, only a week before the armistice was signed. He was only 25 years old, and therefore typical of many of the young men who lost their lives in that conflict. He was not alone in having his life cut so tragically short.

I am very grateful to the cabinet secretary for such a considered intervention. I had not known that about Tynecastle, and I am grateful to him for telling me.

Unfortunately, the combat stress that Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and many others felt—they were described at the time as being shell shocked—is a condition that has been replicated down the ages. Many soldiers are still fighting the conflicts that they participated in many years after those conflicts came to an end.

The world wars are responsible for some of the greatest losses in the history of our islands. Each one sent aftershocks through families and communities, just as they would, in turn, send aftershocks through global politics, some of the reverberations of which are still felt today.

My first speech in the Scottish Parliament fell on a particular anniversary for my family. On that day a century previously, my great uncle, a private in the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles out of Saskatchewan, was killed at the age of 23, along with 80 per cent of his battalion, on the first day of the battle of Mont Sorel. His name was Alexander Bennet, and I am named for him. I cannot imagine the horror with which he greeted his final hours. In that battle, the Canadians were gassed and undermined. It was also one of the first occasions on which the Germans used flame-throwers as a front-line weapon. I cannot imagine the horror that he would have experienced. His body was never found. His name appears on the Menin Gate, along with those of so many others.

One million British Army personnel died during the first and second world wars. While we remember their sacrifices today, we must also acknowledge the global nature of those conflicts. Soldiers from across the Commonwealth fought—soldiers from countries such as Australia, Canada, Africa and India. More than 4 million Indian soldiers and 3 million African soldiers fought during the world wars. Although they fought under the British union jack, they were often paid significantly less and treated worse than their white counterparts. The crucial efforts and sacrifices of those forces in securing allied victory is often omitted from our history books. That is why Anas Sarwar’s motion on securing Scotland’s first permanent memorial to the soldiers of the British Indian Army, which I have signed, is so important.

Last remembrance Sunday, we could not come together in our communities. Instead, we were confined to commemorating remembrance within our households or on our own at cenotaphs. I did so with my family at the Davidson’s Mains war memorial on the green. This year, I look forward to returning to Davidson’s Mains, this time with our community. I will also attend at South Queensferry, where I will lay wreaths on behalf of the Parliament.

This Sunday, we will be united once again, whether in laying wreaths or attending services, in remembering those whom we lost. We are reminded of the sacrifices that were made for us every day, whether by walking past the national war memorial here in Edinburgh or driving across the Churchill barriers up in Orkney. Across Europe, there are constant reminders of the wars that were fought.

In remembering the victims of war, we remember the cost of that conflict. Margaret Atwood once said:

“War is what happens when language fails.”

In recent times, nationally and internationally, we have been divided. As a result, our language has often failed. The events of the last century have taught us that peace is a fragile matter and is upheld only through communication and co-operation. We must all make an active effort to encompass those values in our daily and political practices. We owe that to everyone who lost their lives due to the absence of those values.

The first world war gained its name posthumously. It was known at the time as the great war; it was also originally known by some as the war to end all wars, because people at the time struggled to conceive that humanity would once again resort to such mass desolation and destruction. I, too, find that hard to reconcile. I am reminded of the old adage that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. That is at the centre of why we remember. We must learn the lessons of history.

The importance of conflict resolution and finding peaceful solutions to friction is one of the key reasons for my being a Quaker. Although I am a Quaker and believe in non-violence, I still carry the utmost respect for those who take up arms in harm’s way and try to defend this country and our values for the greater good. Despite the fact that more than 100 years have passed since the war to end all wars, hundreds of thousands continue to lose their lives to conflict across the world. We need to continue to recognise the courage and sacrifice of those people, whether in the context of world wars that were fought decades ago or—Paul Sweeney summed this up beautifully—in how we treat our troops and our veterans today.

As time moves on, the first-hand accounts of those who gave their todays for our tomorrows will slip away, but age shall not weary their memory or their spirit. What they sacrificed must never be in vain, and they must never be forgotten.

The Government talked about moving with urgency and being bitterly disappointed, but it could have foreseen that what happened would happen. During the bill process, Whitehall officials informed Government officials that there were problems, but Opposition members were never told of those problems during the transit of the bill. They could easily have been remedied at that stage.

To ask the Scottish Government how many unemployed teachers there currently are in Scotland. (S6O-00353)

The issue is still a major problem. In the past 24 hours, I have had a flood of complaints from newly qualified teachers. One was so desperate, she was spending £400 a month travelling from Edinburgh to Glasgow for a teaching job. Another had retrained to become a teacher but is now back with her former employer. One said:

“I’ve had enough. My mental health has been affected. My life is on hold until I get a permanent post but there are none for any of us.”

The education secretary’s complacency is crushing the careers of newly qualified teachers. When will she get this sorted?