Seòmar agus comataidhean

Will the member take an intervention?

I note that free lateral flow home testing kits can be made available online, but not everyone is online. The statement says that tests can be collected from community pharmacies, but I have a constituent who is unable to do that. Is it possible to provide a list of the community pharmacies where people can uplift those tests for themselves, rather than having to go online?

I noted the Deputy First Minister’s response to Mr Marra’s question about the eligibility criteria. I will press on with that issue.

I have a constituent who was abused when he attended school as a weekday boarder. Because he returned home at weekends, he does not meet the eligibility criteria. It is my view that, during those weekdays—I am paraphrasing the legislation—the institution took decisions about his care and upbringing and was morally responsible for his physical, social and emotional needs in place of the parents, in which it totally failed.

Are the eligibility criteria completely closed to any extension of the definition of “residential care”?

I congratulate Monica Lennon on securing this evening’s debate on an extremely important, sensitive and, indeed, heartbreaking issue.

I want to contribute to the debate as one of the few female members of the Parliament who was around as a teenager and a young woman in the 1960s and 1970s. I want to put the issue in the context of the time. Contraception was top secret. Young men would go to the barber’s to be offered “something for the weekend”. Contraception for women was not publicised or available except in the context of marriage and, even then, it was difficult to access. Parents—mine, at least—told their children nothing about sex. Indeed, it was almost a taboo subject. In my day at school, there was no sex education. We had to pick up bits of information from magazines, science textbooks and friends, and much of what friends said was often simply wrong.

“Good girls” did not have sex out of wedlock but, for boys, it could be put down to “sowing their wild oats”. Those terms were much in currency then, but how odd they sound now. The consequences of becoming pregnant for an unmarried girl were drastic, particularly for those for whom there was adoption under duress, of which I knew nothing then. The girl was labelled cruelly as “a slag” and her child as “a bastard”. Those are not terms that I endorse, but they were common and accepted parlance at the time.

In most cases, the girl’s options—the boy was not usually held to blame—were limited. If the family was supportive—some were—there could be a shotgun wedding to the father, who was usually young, too. Alternatively, as others have said, the child, once born, could be presented as the child of the grandmother and the child’s mother as a sibling. The other options were adoption, often under family pressure or what later became known as institutional duress, and, of course, illegal abortion and all the ensuing dangers.

That was the culture of the day, to which I, like my peers, subscribed. The contraception that was used by most girls and young women then was fear of pregnancy and that alone. It was only with the introduction of the contraceptive pill that women were able to take control of their sex lives and relationships, and when and if they had children. That had a huge liberating impact on them. As I look back on those days through the prism of retrospect, I say now that it was so wrong and so unfair to women, who often paid a huge price: entering too young into marriages that were unhappy for both parties; masquerading as a sister of the baby; abortion; or forced adoption.

This is more controversial. Do I think that current Governments should apologise? The wrongs that were committed were not wrongs against the pervading culture but wrongs that were in tune with it. In general terms, the question is whether it is relevant to ask those who are in power today to apologise for historical actions that society willingly accepted at the time. That is why I hesitate to support what are known as official apologies. I recognise why women seek them, but I sometimes wonder what their value is in real terms.

As I said, I want us to examine how far back we should go and who else will come along, but by no means am I diminishing what happened to those women. I want to separate the pain and anguish caused by institutions and individuals from the general question of official apologies, where we are going with them, what they mean, how far back we have to go, which cases we take up, and so on. This is an important matter to explore, and I have threaded it into this debate because I feel a certain discomfort when we say that we will just badge everything with an official apology. I think that that is worth discussing.

We should seek apologies from those individuals and institutions that were to blame. Thankfully, today we have different values. Women and their rights have come a long way, although there is still much to do. Adoption laws have moved on; I remember it happening when I was a lawyer. The biological parents in an adoption can retain rights to contact with their child. They used just to be wiped away, and that was bad.

We must recognise the awful pain and guilt that these mothers, who were often young, endured then and endure to this day. As a mother of two, I cannot begin to understand how awful it must feel for them. We need to help them to reconnect—if they wish, and if it is appropriate, to do so—through the various agencies with their children, who are now grown-ups. That is what Governments today should do, while recognising so much that was wrong all those decades ago by initiating an inquiry, supporting and helping those mothers when such support and help are needed and requested, and calling to account those who are to blame.

That is an interesting debating point, but we would then have to decide how far back to go and what particular wrongs that we now recognise as wrongs should be apologised for. Do we rank them? There is a big philosophical debate to be had here and I had to say what I have said because I have always had issues with us taking this route without proper consideration.

This is a personal view and nothing to do with the Government. Even in that case, I thought, “What is this about an official apology?” What we need to do is right the wrongs of today. In my view, if we go back through history, where do we stop? What things do we apologise officially for, and what do we not apologise for?

Do not think for one minute that I am diminishing the position of the women. I knew that it would be a difficult point, but I felt that it is necessary to say it. Sometimes we use an official apology as a solution when it is not.

I will come to Monica Lennon’s point about homosexuals. Just as homosexuals were once pilloried, even criminalised, the blame does not lie on those today or even on those in the past—not if society willingly accepted those moral rules, wrong and cruel as we now correctly say they are. We cannot apologise for everything in the past that is rightly seen as wrong today, even though it was very wrong. Each generation must be responsible for the mores by which it lives and regulates its citizens, if it is done by the consent of the citizens.

However, when historical actions breach the laws and morals of that society, there must be accountability. Forced adoption, by its very terms, was morally and legally wrong. That is why I support a UK-wide inquiry into which institutions are responsible for those actions. It is they who should be held to account and from whom apologies, at the very least, are due. I am talking about continuing institutions.

I understand the delayed publication of the review of physical distancing, but it is impacting on businesses in my constituency, including the Pavilion cinema, which is family owned and run, and on amateur performers including pipe bands, silver bands and choirs, none of which can even rehearse outdoors. Will particular consideration be given to businesses and the performing arts—amateur and professional—when the review is published? Can I be given some guidance on when it will be published?

Keith Brown’s offer is rejected.

That was a good speech from Mr Choudhury, although I would not have used the word “enlivened” about Neil Findlay, but there we go.

I want to focus on civil business. Most of the debate has rightly been about the criminal process and courts but, for most members of the public, the interaction that they have with the court process will be in the civil courts, whether that is to contribute in contractual disputes, delictual actions or matrimonial disputes, or to cases involving divorce, contact, residency, confirmation of an executry, interdicts and so on. Of course, there are also cases in our commercial courts.

Much in the process has already been simplified, which I welcome. I welcome the fact that we are moving to more online work, which will reduce costs, as will the electronic transfer of documents. However, delays matter as much to the individuals involved in civil court business, whether they are the pursuer or the defender, as to those involved in criminal proceedings. Of course, in the sheriff court, criminal proceedings rightly take precedence, because they involve issues of custody, loss of liberty and criminal records. However, to the pursuer or defender in a civil case, it is urgent.

Even when viewed impartially, some cases would seem urgent to anyone. For example, interim interdicts against a bad neighbour or when something else is going on are needed pretty quickly. Interim orders in relation to children, and young children in particular, are another example. If a parent or carer does not get to see a child for a while, the whole relationship can disappear into the mists. We have talked about domestic abuse in the criminal setting but, in the civil setting, exclusion orders to prevent an abusive partner from getting into the home are important.

In passing, I say to Pauline McNeill that I am sympathetic to domestic abuse courts and to specialist courts more widely, such as specialist sheriffs in family law and specialist sheriffs and judges in commercial actions. It is important that we take an interest in that.

It might seem to members that commercial cases in the Court of Session are not something that we should bother about, but we should bother about them. Such cases often require timeous action, too. A pursuer might have a choice of jurisdiction in which to bring a substantial court case. If they are to choose Scotland to bring a large commercial case that has legal ramifications and involves a large amount of money, they will want to know that the case will progress timeously. If the case does not progress timeously, they might take it to another jurisdiction. There are ramifications for our senior courts in progressing such cases timeously. That is important to progressing Scots law and maintaining its status.

There has been reference to mediation. I do not know where we are with that, but it seems like decades since, as convener of the Justice Committee, I went to Baltimore with a whole lot of high-falutin’ justice people to look at the way that mediation operates there.

Mediation was used there not just in family cases but in large commercial cases. The pursuer and the defender, who are the big guys in those cases, knew that, at the end of the day, there had to be a resolution and that it is better to get it done through mediation, without all the ramifications of huge expenses. As we know, when people go to court, they might get judicial expenses, but they will not get all their expenses.

I make a clear distinction between mediation and arbitration. Arbitration is when a decision is made by the arbiter, and mediation is when the parties who are engaged in a dispute come to a mutual agreement. I would like to see mediation pursued. A very robust mediation service would have ramifications, not just in matrimonial and family law cases, but in commercial cases, where disputes are brought in Scotland. I do not know where work on that has got to, but perhaps the cabinet secretary can tell me how it has developed over the years. I think that it is sometimes like pushing a great big rock up a hill and it rolling back, quite often to land on our toes.

I turn to civil legal aid. I appreciate that funding is not a bottomless pit and that the criminal legal aid system has to take priority. The funding must go there, because there is the possibility of criminal conviction and loss of liberty. However, if we use more efficacious ways of progressing civil court cases—such as working online, with electronic transfer of documents—which used to cost money in court process and documentation, is there a potential for savings, so that we could better fund the civil legal aid system? For example, we could raise the bar on the earnings and capital that people have. If they are very poor, they can use the civil legal aid system and, if they are very rich, they can afford to go to court, but a lot of people are jam-packed in the middle, so they have to make a decision about whether they go to court—because their contribution might be very high or they might even be excluded from legal aid. Justice should not depend on the depth of people’s pockets.

I will be brief—well, not that brief, because I have spoken for five minutes. Although I understand that the majority of focus is on criminal matters, I think that it is important to shift the balance and remember that it is in the civil courts that most people out there meet justice.

I thank Mr Mountain; I know that he borrowed the pen gesture from me, but it is not necessary, because I conclude my speech. [Laughter.]