Seòmar agus comataidhean

I do not like to say it to such a nice man, but Alex Rowley should stop shooting himself in the foot. He knows perfectly well that our capital budget is dictated by what Westminster divvies out to us. He knows it as well as the rest of us and is too clever to pretend otherwise. I know, however, that he has to try to fight the corner for the Labour Party, no matter what.

We have a shortage of workers in important areas. Brexit has contributed significantly to that situation.

We come to levelling up. Broadly speaking, that funding is money that used to come directly from the EU to Scotland for projects. It now comes from London, bypasses the Scottish Parliament, which has responsibility for infrastructure, for example, and goes straight to local authorities, thereby deliberately undermining devolution.

We were told that there would be no border down the Irish Sea. Well, there is. Although I welcome the probable return of power sharing in Northern Ireland, which is certainly for the good of the people, what is the £3.3 billion that has been offered? Is it an enticement or a bribe? Details are to follow.

On cross-border issues between England and Scotland, I say to Neil Bibby that he should look over the North Sea to Sweden and Norway. Both countries are members of the Schengen area and, therefore, there are no immigration controls. Sweden is part of the European Union and, crucially, the customs union. Yes, there are customs checks between the two countries. Those checks are performed by the Norwegian customs and excise authorities and the Swedish customs service. They are sporadic along the Norway-Sweden border. Cars are not usually forced to stop and, to combat smuggling, use of closed-circuit television surveillance has been increased, with systems using automatic number plate recognition. It works—it is not a problem.

The reality is that Brexit has been an unmitigated disaster for the UK, let alone Scotland, but the scales have fallen from the eyes of many people who were deceived by false promises and, in Scotland, by that threat in the 2014 referendum—a threat that we would have thrown out if Scotland had voted yes. It is no wonder that we are being denied a referendum now.

The sense of Brexit progress can be measured in the latest UnHerd study, which found that, UK-wide, 54 per cent of people now feel that it was the wrong decision, while less than 30 per cent now mildly or strongly agree that it was the right move.

If I have time, Deputy Presiding Officer, I will turn briefly to the amendments.

Labour’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has ruled out rejoining the EU or the single market if his party comes to power. He has steadied the Labour ship by veering into soft Tory territory—as the managing director of Iceland, Richard Walker, let slip recently. Once, Richard Walker sought to be a Tory MP, but he is now happy that Sir Keir Starmer has moved into central Tory territory.

The Tory amendment is pretty pathetic and tedious. It was a Tory Government that, by a whisker of leave votes UK-wide, caused a constitutional earthquake, and we are still suffering the aftershocks.

The Lib Dems’ very wordy amendment—that is typical of a Liberal amendment—says at one point, in line 6, that

“these essential steps ... to EU membership will help restore the economy”

and so on. I am pleased to see that the Lib Dems’ long-established skills at fence-sitting remain undiminished. Rejoin or not? Who knows? Do they?

I go back to the beginning. As members know, people often say when they are faced with the results of bad decisions, “Well, we are where we are.” I say that to Mr Rowley. If I was given a wrong turn and ended up facing a precipice, I would put the car into reverse gear in the blink of an eye. An independent Scotland will do just that and rejoin the EU.

First, Mr Rennie, I found your contribution exciting and riveting. You should not have stopped me from intervening, given that I was going to compliment you, but will you please explain to me whether the Liberal Democrats are in favour of rejoining the EU at some point in the future?

Will the minister be kind enough to acknowledge the position of the Deputy Presiding Officer, who is unable to take part in this debate but often speaks in debates in support of mining communities?

Will Willie Rennie take an intervention?

I, too, congratulate Richard Leonard on securing the debate, and I welcome Mick McGahey’s family to the Parliament.

I am pleased to speak to commemorate this extraordinary individual, not only because I have mining areas in my constituency in Midlothian—Penicuik, Gorebridge and Newtongrange, where the National Mining Museum Scotland is—but because my mum was the English daughter of a Welsh miner who mined in the Derby pits. He died in his late 40s after a pit prop fell on him, causing a severe head injury from which he never recovered. He left behind a large family of orphans, including my mother. She was all her days a formidable advocate for the miners and their communities, and never more so than during the miners strike in 1984-85, which I witnessed.

I saw the charges on the miners by mounted police, the women manning barricades at the picket lines and collecting for their communities, and communities—and, indeed, some families—being torn apart. I listened to Arthur Scargill and Mick McGahey in those days, and there was a world of difference between the capabilities and, I suspect, the strategy of both men in disputes with the UK Government.

Thatcher was out to avenge the demise of her predecessor, Edward Heath, who took on the miners—with the resulting three-day week—failed and lost an election. That brought in a minority Labour Government under Wilson. When Thatcher then came in, she was hellbent on emasculating the unions, starting with the miners. To some extent, it was handed to her on a plate. Why strike in the summer, when the coal was piled high?

During that long strike, the voice of Mick McGahey was more measured than that of Arthur Scargill, although, right to the end, Mick McGahey insisted that the 1984 strike was unavoidable and that the union’s tactics had been correct under the circumstances. I understand, however, that there was a failed attempt to solve the dispute, involving secret talks between Lord Whitelaw, the Tory deputy leader, and Mick McGahey. The talks were facilitated by Bill Keys, the leader of the print workers’ union. The negotiations, which began over a bottle of Chablis in the House of Lords—my goodness!—are revealed in the hitherto unpublished diaries of the late Keys. The initiative collapsed when Arthur Scargill ruled out the deal because it would lead to pit closures. Maybe he was right—maybe not.

How different history might have been if Mick McGahey had led the charge. Instead, as a result of that devastating rout of the miners, trade union legislation has made it tougher for all workers, and that legislation has not been repealed by successive Conservative and Labour Governments. I cannot see Sir Keir reversing any of that—can you? I suspect that, if he had a grave, Mick McGahey would be birling in it, but, as we know, his ashes are scattered beneath this very building, which is fitting for a democrat who supported devolution long and hard. It is therefore appropriate that it was this Government and this Parliament that granted a pardon to those who were convicted during the strike, making us the first part of the UK to do so.

Richard Leonard, other members and I have also long campaigned for UK reform of the mineworkers pension scheme, which is a rip-off that has seen the UK Government benefit with no contribution while miners receive a pittance.

Mick McGahey was a bright, brave and colourful man—an orator, eloquent and educated, but with a thick Lanarkshire accent that utterly confused the boffins at MI5 who were trying to eavesdrop on what he was up to. I love that.

Most of all, he was a man of integrity and, genuinely, a man of his people. We could do with more folk of that ilk.

I thank Alex Rowley for his Labour campaign message, and I say to him that we could do more for the NHS and public services in Scotland—and in England, where strikes prevail, incidentally—if the UK economy, which dictates our economy, was not in such a mess, as even Sir Keir Starmer admits it is.

I want to go back to the better together mantra in the 2014 referendum campaign, which—there is no doubt in my mind—cost us the small percentage of votes that were needed to take us over the 50 per cent hurdle to independence. Namely, the mantra that we could guarantee Scotland’s EU membership only by staying in the UK. Well, what to do? Should we accept the current mess because some people, including Alex Rowley, say, “Well, we are where we are.”

I will come back to that, but let me start at the very beginning—it is a very good place to start. In 2016, Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU, by 62 per cent to 38 per cent. We cannot say that often enough. Every single one of Scotland’s 32 local authority areas voted to reject Brexit. We cannot say that often enough. We were dragged out of the EU, and it was done in the middle of a pandemic. Brilliant timing.

I say to Neil Bibby that, in the 1975 referendum campaign on whether to join the European Community, yes, the SNP campaigned for no but, crucially, it was, “No—not on anyone else’s terms.” We not only joined on someone else’s terms—members should check with Scotland’s fishing community—but we left in the same way.

How sensible we were to reject leave. Since the referendum, we have had food shortages, a fishing sell-out, an export crisis and workforce shortages—to name but a few impacts. Scotland, like the rest of the UK, is now forced to pay the price of the Tories’ damaging hard Brexit. What happened to the “oven-ready” meal?

Promises that were made include—not in any particular order of merit—the better together campaign director Blair McDougall telling Scotland that Boris Johnson would never become Prime Minister. The biggest and most disputed claim that was put forward by the leave camp was that Britain sent £350 million a week to the EU and that that money could be used to fund the NHS instead.

We were told that the UK provides strength, stability and international clout. Move over Liz Truss: during her tenure as Prime Minister, the pound’s value fell to the lowest level ever recorded. Instead of the UK having surplus cash to use at its leisure, its economy has shrunk. The Centre for European Reform said in December that Brexit has left the UK economy 5.5 per cent smaller than it would have been had it remained in the EU.

Donald Cameron told people to vote no to protect their pensions. The UK has a lower pension than any neighbouring country and is at the bottom of the league in the developed world—according not to Christine Grahame, but to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

We were told that Brexit was about

“taking back control of our borders”.

Net migration has been unusually high in the past two years. The Office for National Statistics estimates that net migration to the UK was 745,000 in 2022. That is up from 184,000 in 2019, which was before the pandemic. Most migrants are legal. Meanwhile, Brexit has created a shortage of workers in the UK.

From a written answer to me this week and following Westminster scrutiny of the XL bully dog regulations, it appears that there are an estimated 50,000 to 150,000 XL bully-type dogs in England and Wales. Extrapolating those numbers to Scotland would mean that there are between 5,000 and 15,000 dogs. Given those numbers, what help is available for existing owners, who are mainly responsible owners, to identify whether their dog fits that breed type? What concerns does the First Minister have of there being an influx of dogs to welfare charities, and that vets in Scotland might find themselves euthanising perfectly healthy dogs?

As the cabinet secretary is aware, there are more than 1 million Scottish residents aged over 65, and that number is increasing. Living longer can be a plus, but with age, regrettably, come more demands, as well as specific demands on the NHS. Does the weighting of the NHS Scotland’s resource allocation committee—NRAC—formula, which allocates resources to NHS boards, need to be reviewed in the light of the increasing number of older people?

To ask the Scottish Government what research it has undertaken on the impact of changing demographics on national health service services. (S6O-03005)

I remain convinced, as I have been from the start, that the proposed regulations are ill considered and unjust to decent owners. Demonising a breed is not the answer. The Control of Dogs (Scotland) Act 2010, which began as a member’s bill in my name, introduced the concept of a “deed, not breed” approach. I say to Russell Findlay that if he could just switch off the sensationalism for a moment he would see that only 2 per cent of issued dog control notices apply to XL bully-type breeds.

I am pleased to hear voices around the chamber seeking a review of and amendments to the 2010 act. I hope that those are done urgently. I hope, too, that the 2010 act is given the publicity that it deserves. The public are not aware of it, and neither are some professionals.

My final request is that we have a national dog microchipping database, because there are various databases at the moment. That way we could track both the dogs and any irresponsible owners.