Seòmar agus comataidhean

Will the member give way?

I thank Liam McArthur for his broadly constructive and positive comments. I am aware that Ross Greer is keen to press amendment 242, so I will do that. I note that, if the committee is not minded to support amendment 242, there is an intention to work constructively before stage 3. For the time being, I will press amendment 242.

Amendment 242 agreed to.

Amendment 243 moved—[Patrick Harvie]—and agreed to.

Section 15—Provision of assistance

I am grateful to the member for allowing an intervention. I take his point, and I hear his discomfort with some of the discussion, but would he acknowledge that the member in charge of the bill has indicated openness to addressing some of the issues around how, in those rare circumstances that Brian Whittle has described, the correct information can be recorded? Liam McArthur has said that he is not convinced that any particular variant of that, as has been proposed at stage 2, is quite right, but he has indicated a willingness to work towards a consensual way of capturing that information at stage 3. Would it not be reasonable for all the members who want to see change in this area to collaborate in that spirit?

I agree with Joe FitzPatrick. In addition, I make clear my strong support for the principle that the Parliament as a whole is compliant with human rights in the broadest sense. The existing means to ensure that is that the member in charge of a bill, as well as the Presiding Officer, have to satisfy themselves in relation to the human rights issues. Any legislation that we pass that is found not to be compliant with human rights is not law. That is the appropriate and strong safeguard against any impact on human rights in the broadest sense, and it is the appropriate way for us to proceed.

I do not think that it is necessary.

If we were to move the question about an element of direct democracy element away from the issue of secession or independence, and towards how the people of Scotland assert their right to make a decision on a matter of importance, that is a question that the political process is failing to engage with. Is that not one way of putting a clear mechanism into the hands of the public, which allows them to force the political process to respond?

I appreciated Adam Tomkins’s frankness about “We will know it when we see it” being clearly inadequate but the best we can do. It might be that, in the interface between the legalities and the politics, it is not possible to have a position that is free of contradictions.

I want to pick up a couple of points in Adam Tomkins’s paper about the use of referendums more generally, and I am interested in everybody’s views on this. Several referendums that are not about secession are mentioned, and you make the case that we should use referendums not to determine or to find out people’s views on an issue but to establish what we think we already know. Among others, you gave the example of the alternative vote referendum as one that successfully settled the question. I would push back against that a bit, because it did not settle the question of whether electoral reform is necessary. The Lib Dems are not here, and they might push back against this, but they skilfully negotiated a coalition agreement that gave them a referendum on a voting system that nobody wanted. The AV system was not anybody’s choice, so it was almost designed as a scheme to put electoral reform on the back burner, but it did not settle the question of whether it was required, and, with the genuine prospect now of a far right Government in the UK, that should send chills down all our spines.

I would ask for your reflections on the experience of other countries that use referendums more frequently on non-secession issues. For example, Ireland has had a range of referendums on issues on which it was not really known how the public would vote. Common sense might have said that the public would have supported doing away with some of the misogynistic language in the constitution in the recent referendums on family and care, but those expectations were confounded, and the public voted quite comprehensively for what I would consider to be archaic language. Therefore, there is surely a case for using referendums to ask, genuinely, what the view is and to establish whether there is a 50 per cent plus one majority, rather than to confirm that there is an overwhelming settled majority that we already know about. Should we learn from Ireland’s experience of having a level of direct democracy as the trigger point for putting those questions to the public? Ireland used citizens assemblies in a number of instances to determine questions that the political process either could not resolve or was in deadlock over.

I see that others want to come in, but, first, one part of what was different between those referendums was that in 1997 there was a very clearly defined proposition being put rather than a general one, and I would suggest that one of the reasons why the EU referendum in 2016 resulted in such chaos was that every flavour of Brexit imaginable was on offer, not a clear, defined and solid proposition. However, had the result been no, I do not think for a moment that the Brexiteers would have gone away and spent the next decade saying, “Oh well, we lost that one. Let’s talk about something else instead.”

I do not think so.

There was one on Scotland’s future that was a bit vague and undefined. There was another on climate, which perhaps fell into the category that Stephen Tierney was talking about, in the solutions that it came up with.