Seòmar agus comataidhean

I begin by reminding members of my voluntary register of interests, and I thank the committee for doing its job and inquiring into this most critical question of our times.

Let me state right at the very outset that I do not believe, on the evidence that we have seen so far, that the transition to net zero in the north-east and Moray and in Grangemouth is a just transition at all. In fact, the workers at Grangemouth are furious. They tell me that they feel betrayed, and no wonder. After the Petroineos announcement, the Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero and Energy took to the airwaves to say that the jobs transition that she wanted to see will have

“as little a gap as possible.”

A gap? If it is a just transition, there should be no gap. There should be full income protection, access to sustainable jobs, access to free education and training and new and substantial economic support for these impacted communities.

Then, when the cabinet secretary came to Parliament, she described the closure of the Grangemouth refinery as a “commercial decision”. That is a phrase that, I regret to say, I have heard Labour ministers use as well. Is closing down Scotland’s only oil refinery not a strategic decision affecting the nation’s energy resilience and security? Is it not a strategic decision of national economic importance? Would the conversion of the site from a major source of export earnings to a terminal for imports not be a matter of national economic interest? Does the minister not care about the impact on the balance of trade, and therefore on the balance of payments? Are these not manufacturing jobs? Are these not workers? Are they not worth more than that?

Last week, the 45-day redundancy consultation began. I remind everyone that the purpose of that consultation is to examine the alternatives to redundancy, and so to prevent closure. That is the purpose of it: to consider how redundancies can be reduced or avoided altogether. I hope that everyone will get behind the workforce, and will get behind Unite the union, which has explained, time and time again, that this refinery is not making a loss—it is making a profit—and which is demanding that the new Labour Government takes out a transitional stake to keep the refinery open.

Let me pay tribute to the new local Labour MP, Brian Leishman, who has been outstanding and outspoken, calling for both Governments to intervene, and for both to go further, up to and including nationalisation, to extend the life of the refinery.

Now the minister is twisting my words. What I said was that Unite was demanding that the new Labour Government takes out a transitional stake, but if Gillian Martin, on behalf of the Scottish Government, wants to volunteer to intervene in that process, I do not think that anybody would object.

This is a company that has, in the past, secured £90 million of public money from this Parliament, and has benefited from a £300 million underwriting by the UK Government. It is a company that is now seeking more money—seed capital—through the freeport initiative for land preparation at its Grangemouth site.

Where we have a corporation that is preparing to steal these workers’ jobs with one hand while reaching out to grab public money with the other, it is about time that we started using the leverage that we have. It is about time that we started standing up to PetroChina, Ineos and the other oil multinationals, and it is about time that we started holding to account the Jim Ratcliffes of this world.

Finally, the Grangemouth future industry board was set up four years ago, but what has it achieved? Where is the economic planning? What have the Scottish Government and the previous UK Government been doing for the last four years?

That is not all. While it is true that, in recent weeks, the Government has finally published its green industrial strategy, what about its energy strategy and just transition plan? Delayed. What about the regional just transition plans? Delayed. Its climate change update—delayed. Its sectoral just transition plans due out in the summer—delayed.

It is not just delays. At the very time when we need investment, we are witnessing big budget cuts: employability spending—cut; flexible workforce development fund—cut; college budget—cut; Scottish Enterprise budget—cut; Highlands and Islands Enterprise budget—cut; and even the north-east and Moray just transition fund—cut.

As members of this Parliament, we are not onlookers; we are participants. The Grangemouth refinery is the first real litmus test of our commitment to a just transition. So, why should any worker—out on the North Sea or at Peterhead, Burntisland, Aberdeen, Sullom Voe, Mossmorran or any other site—have any confidence that there will be a just transition for them when, on this first test, they see so much delay and so little ambition?

We have got to get this right. It is the destiny of these workers that should be uppermost in our minds.

I say to the minister that there is no time. We need to confront this directly. We need an economics where people matter and we need to build an economy not in the interests of the billionaire tax exiles but in the interests of working people.

Now the minister is twisting my words. What I said was that Unite was demanding that the new Labour Government takes out a transitional stake, but if Gillian Martin, on behalf of the Scottish Government, wants to volunteer to intervene in that process, I do not think that anybody would object.

This is a company that has, in the past, secured £19 million of public money from this Parliament, and has benefited from a £300 million underwriting by the UK Government. It is a company that is now seeking more money—seed capital—through the freeport initiative for land preparation at its Grangemouth site.

Here we have a corporation that is preparing to steal these workers’ jobs with one hand while reaching out to grab public money with the other, so it is about time that we started using the leverage that we have. It is about time that we started standing up to PetroChina, Ineos and the other oil multinationals, and it is about time that we started holding to account the Jim Ratcliffes of this world.

Finally, the Grangemouth future industry board was set up four years ago, but what has it achieved? Where is the economic planning? What have the Scottish Government and the previous UK Government been doing for the last four years?

That is not all. While it is true that, in recent weeks, the Government has finally published its green industrial strategy, what about its energy strategy and just transition plan? Delayed. What about the regional just transition plans? Delayed. Its climate change update—delayed. Its sectoral just transition plans due out in the summer—delayed.

It is not just delays. At the very time when we need investment, we are witnessing big budget cuts: employability spending—cut; flexible workforce development fund—cut; college budgets—cut; Scottish Enterprise budget—cut; Highlands and Islands Enterprise budget—cut; and even the north-east and Moray just transition fund—cut.

As members of this Parliament, we are not onlookers; we are participants. The Grangemouth refinery is the first real litmus test of our commitment to a just transition. So, why should any worker—out on the North Sea or at Peterhead, Burntisland, Aberdeen, Sullom Voe, Mossmorran or any other site—have any confidence that there will be a just transition for them when, on this first test, they see so much delay and so little ambition?

We have got to get this right. It is the destiny of these workers that should be uppermost in our minds.

I say to the minister that there is no time. We need to confront this directly. We need an economics where people matter and we need to build an economy not in the interests of the billionaire tax exiles but in the interests of working people.

I begin by reminding members of my voluntary entry in the register of members’ interests.

I thank Sharon Dowey for lodging the motion for today’s debate. She is one of the members of this Parliament who bring real-world experience to bear on issues and so deserves to be listened to.

There is no question but that violence, theft and the abuse of shop workers is on the rise: the Scottish Retail Consortium tells us; the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers tells us; and the front-line workers I speak to tell me.

Today’s motion echoes the calls that we have heard from the industry for the Scottish Government to

“provide the police and courts the necessary direction and resources to prosecute offenders”.

Well, the fact is that the police are not routinely arresting offenders at all. According to shop workers I have spoken to, Police Scotland will only charge people for shoplifting, for example, if they have a previous record or they are known to the police, which begs the question, “How do you get a previous record if you are never cautioned, never charged, never prosecuted and never sentenced?”

But conversely, the other side of this approach is that, for some people, there is a revolving door in and out of prison for minor offences, often including shoplifting and the non-payment of fines. I spoke just recently to one bright, engaged and engaging young person who told me in his own words that he was an addict and he had spent most of the last few years in and out of prison for minor offences related to his addiction, including shoplifting. In my view, he clearly needed a helping hand, not an iron fist, so I do think we need to have balance in this debate.

USDAW, in its 2023 annual “Freedom From Fear” survey, describes

“a shoplifting epidemic driven by the cost of living crisis and organised crime.”

USDAW reports that, among its retail membership, seven out of 10 respondents reported verbal abuse, 46 per cent received threats of violence and, as Daniel Johnson said, 18 per cent were physically assaulted. We know that the biggest single cause of retail crime occurs when somebody is being confronted for shoplifting, and shoplifting has risen by over 40 per cent in the last decade. The annual crime in Scotland report also records that almost a quarter of retail crimes occurred in one of Scotland’s top 15 per cent most deprived areas, and that 41 per cent of perpetrators resided in Scotland’s most deprived areas. So, there is clearly a link to poverty and inequality, to hopelessness and to powerlessness.

Finally, this Parliament passes legislation on alcohol minimum unit pricing, on vapes and tobacco, on the shelving and display of alcohol and on fireworks, but the enforcement of those laws that we pass invariably falls to those low-paid shop workers out on the front line, which is why they need protection, which is why we passed a law in this Parliament to do just that. But, like any other piece of protective legislation, it needs to be enforced, and that places a requirement on retailers to take their duty of care to their staff seriously; that demands the police treat these incidents not as occupational hazards but as crimes; that means we as a society need to get to the root causes which lie behind this rise in retail crime; and it underlines the important role of trade unions in enforcing the rights of working people, which also means we need to challenge those employers, amongst them some of the biggest supermarket chains, which continue to resist trade union membership and organisation.

So, this is about dignity at work, but it is also about democracy at work. This is about workers’ rights, but it is also about human rights.

To ask the Scottish Government how it plans to support the retention of Scotland’s public libraries. (S6O-03722)

Today, the SNP is using this Parliament to go through the motions and to reheat the old arguments. For all the talk of constitutional conventions and, rather bizarrely, the result of the 2026 Scottish Parliament regional list vote—in my view, that is insulting the intelligence of the people of Scotland—nobody really believes that there is any appetite now for another referendum. Yet the Government asks us this afternoon to suspend reason and fall for the notion that a rerun referendum and, resulting from that, a victory for nationalism is the only way to win a modern, diverse and dynamic Scotland. Well, the Government is entitled to its opinion, but we are entitled to ours.

I have never believed that the sky would fall in with an independent Scotland and, when people ask whether I am a nationalist or a unionist, I say that I am neither—I am a socialist. Neither have I ever believed that the real division in society is between Scotland and England. The real division is between those who, through their hard work and endeavour, create the wealth and those who end up owning the wealth. That is the real division.

The truth is this—under John Swinney and Kate Forbes’s independent Scotland, there would be no redistribution of wealth and no redistribution of power. The same people would still be in charge. Jim Ratcliffe would still be in control of Grangemouth and still holding the Government to ransom—or, as we saw just last week, ignoring it completely.

Today, the First Minister tells the party faithful that he wants to concentrate on what he can do and not on what he cannot. However, his problem is that this SNP Government has been in office now for 17 years. After its 17 years in charge of land reform, what is modern, diverse and dynamic about Scotland’s feudal pattern of land ownership? Half of our land is still owned by just 343 wealthy individuals, aristocrats and not-so-noble families.

What is modern, diverse and dynamic about a Scotland that denies the dignity of the migrant workers from central Asia who work on Scotland’s farms, whom I met over the summer? They are exploited and are living in inhumane accommodation on Scotland’s farms, today and tonight. What is modern, diverse and dynamic about that?

Just a few days ago, in the programme for government, the Government said that it wanted

“a stronger, inclusive economy”

that was

“tackling inequalities faced by women and marginalised groups … helping people into work, and supporting diverse businesses.”

So why is it that actions taken directly by the Scottish Government—and by the NHS under the Scottish Government’s direction—are threatening 60 jobs at Haven Products, a supported business in Larbert that provides useful work for people with disabilities? If this factory is not part of an “inclusive economy”, I do not know what is. I am sure that the First Minister will recall that this was a factory, back in 2015, that he himself opened.

So let this Parliament hear about the conditions that people are living in now—not independence in the abstract, but the independent living of those magnificent workers today. As part of his reawakening, I say to the First Minister, as you wake from your slumbers, step in and halt these redundancies.

Far from being modern, diverse and dynamic, under the SNP, control over the economy has been confined to investment through foreign direct investors and multinational corporations. Look at the ScotWind licensing round. Look at the private equity-owned tax avoidance scheme providers that the Scottish National Investment Bank is lending public money to.

I sincerely believe that the answers to the great challenges that we face—inequality, poverty, the extreme imbalance in the distribution of wealth and power, nuclear disarmament and the climate crisis—do not lie in nationalism or patriotism, but in a socialism that has democracy as its essence and humanity at its centre.

I say this to my own party, too. It is not just where the powers lie—it is what you intend to do with them, for what purpose and in whose interests. That is the real test of any political party that stands for change and, for me, that means how we secure not just a politics but an economy that is of the people, by the people, for the people.

I thank the cabinet secretary for his reply. Since the Government came to power, spending on our public libraries is down, book stocks are down, the number of library staff is down, and more than 120 public libraries have closed for good. Does the cabinet secretary accept that libraries matter, that they are a vital part of our children’s education, that they combat social isolation, that they can help to regenerate our towns and cities, that they represent a world beyond the market—a safe space, run not for profit but for enlightenment—and that, in a digital society, libraries are not needed less but are needed even more? If he does accept that, what does the Government intend to do about it?

I thank Bill Kidd for leading the debate on a motion that celebrates the life and work of John Ainslie. Last month marked the 30th anniversary of a publication that I do not think is in the archive. It is a pamphlet that John and I co-authored—a coproduction between the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Scottish Trades Union Congress: “Trident—Not Safe, Not Economic, Not Wanted” is its title. In it, we exposed the huge hidden costs of Trident and exposed the huge safety risk that it posed to the whole of central Scotland. It is a piece of work, three decades on, that I am proud of, not only because we were on the right side of the biggest moral question of our age—and I still firmly believe that to be true—but precisely because I worked on it with John. We would meet at 15 Barrland Street, on the south side of Glasgow, and at 16 Woodlands Terrace, in the grandeur of the STUC’s offices, with its views redolent of the cityscapes of Oscar Marzaroli.

John’s job title at Scottish CND at that time was administrator, but John Ainslie was no bureaucrat. He was an activist, a thinker, a campaigner, a writer, a protester, and a man of the highest principles. Just listen to his simple, but arresting, opening line in that pamphlet:

“A Trident submarine is designed to destroy a continent and to kill 200 million people.”

In the ensuing years, he became an internationally respected authority on nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament, and no one knew more about the road convoys of warheads that were travelling through Scotland than John. Acutely aware of the dangers, the risks, the hazards—the unintended consequences—as well as the illegal and immoral intended ones, of the nuclear arsenal on our doorstep, he warned that central Scotland, from the Clyde to the Forth, could become a desert because he knew that a nuclear war could start by intent, but it could also start by accident.

The replacement of Polaris with Trident was controversial on its own terms. By 1994, when we wrote the pamphlet, according to the National Audit Office, there had already been an £800 million overspend, but Trident did not just bring about the proliferation of public money—it brought about the proliferation of public terror and, of course, it brought about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Now, 30 years later, we are drifting towards Trident’s replacement with the Dreadnought programme. We are doing that

“in conjunction with the United States”,

we are told, working closely to ensure that it is it is compatible with the Trident strategic weapon system. In other words, we remain a client state to the US, and this at a time when we know that there is a possibility of the return of Donald Trump to the White House.

Looking back 30 years ago, at the time I wrote:

“Trident is a triumph of the military complex over the needs of the impoverished. It is a triumph of foreign policy over social and industrial policy.”

I stand by those statements. I cannot think of a better time to launch John Ainslie’s archive than now, because he did ask the critical questions. He pioneered the use of freedom of information laws in search of truth and transparency. What better way to honour his memory than to continue with his work?

Finally, John knew that nuclear weapons do not bring stability; that they corrode the very foundations of our civilisation; that if we do not destroy these weapons of mass destruction, they will destroy us. I remain an inveterate and unrepentant supporter of unilateral nuclear disarmament. In John’s memory, we rededicate ourselves today to that great cause.

It has long been my view that, if we are to rise to the challenge of the climate emergency, we need to think big and act radical. It has also long been my view that the Scottish Government is flat and pedestrian when we need passion, conviction and, above all else, a sense of urgency. This is not just about legislation; it is about leadership.

I have to say this: after 17 years in office, and over five years after the climate emergency was declared at the SNP conference, it is astonishing that the SNP Government has only yesterday finally got round to publishing a green industrial strategy thst is focused on five so-called opportunity areas. I am perplexed that the Government limits its horizons in this way. Shouldn’t every job be a green job? Shouldn’t the whole economy be a green economy? Where is the ambition?

There are other elements of the strategy that I think we must debate, too. The Scottish Government’s continued overreliance on foreign direct investment means that there is no redistribution of power and wealth in the economy, green or otherwise. In fact, what we are witnessing is a growing concentration of wealth and power in the economy. Nearly two out of three workers employed by Scotland’s larger businesses already work for companies owned either in the rest of the UK or, increasingly, overseas. Yet, with this latest strategy, what the Government is growing is not a green economy but a branch plant economy—and that has consequences. The steady erosion of decision making from the Scottish economy has consequences. Just ask the workers at the Grangemouth oil refinery. That imbalance of power leaves those workers and their families, and this strategic national asset, at the mercy of a billionaire tax exile and an overseas Government.

Despite “Green Industrial Strategy” talking about

“Investing in strong research and development foundations”,

when it comes to business research and development, we are seventh out of 12 UK nations and regions, eighth as measured by employment generation—again, a consequence of being a largely subsidiary economy.

In the 1990s, I used to visit the oil rig fabrication yards at Nigg Bay and Ardersier. Back then, they were owned by Brown and Root—Halliburton—and McDermott, both global corporations and both, as it happens, headquartered in Houston, Texas. In its programme, the Government—and the First Minister, this afternoon, and the Deputy First Minister—talked about the redevelopment of those sites. Of course, we all want to see the redevelopment of those sites and we all want to see new life and new jobs in renewable energy as part of a just transition, but we cannot ignore the fact that Nigg Bay is being developed by a corporation headquartered in Japan and Ardersier is being redeveloped by a company that is owned and controlled by the Quantum Capital Group, which, again, is headquartered in Houston, Texas. That will make those yards vulnerable to decisions made in faraway boardrooms, and we will see all the wealth and all the profits being exported.

In the programme for government, we also read of the work of the Scottish National Investment Bank. It has, we are told,

“avoided, reduced, or removed 52,841 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent”.

How was that done? We know that one of the principal ways has been through a £50 million investment in Gresham House, which is now, incidentally, owned by a US private equity firm. The business of Gresham House is not to plant trees or to recover peatland—those are by-products. Its real business model is to help the wealthy avoid paying their fair share of tax on inheritance and capital gains.

Just look, as well, at who won the ScotWind licences awarded by the Scottish Government: Italian, Swedish and Belgian companies; Spanish, French and German utilities; and Norwegian, Dutch and Australian corporations—some of them public, but most of them privately owned. The licences were all given away at a knockdown price. If there is any colonising going on—I know that some people in the SNP like to talk in those terms—we are being colonised by multinational corporations, global capital and financial markets.

As we have learned, the proceeds of ScotWind are not being used to support a just transition or indigenous business development. Our supply chains and our manufacturing base are not being invested in sufficiently. These funds are being used simply to pay for Scottish Government day-to-day expenditure.

Even the community wealth building bill is signalled in the programme for government as a matter for local government, when we all know that, if we are to see transformative change, it must be a matter for the Scottish Government, for national Government agencies, for the Scottish National Investment Bank and for public sector pension funds. It requires a boost to agencies like Co-operative Development Scotland.

We can grow Scotland’s green economy, but if it is in the same hands as the existing economy, with the same distribution and concentration of power and the same gross inequalities that arise from that, then in my view we will have failed. It is high time that we had economic as well as political democracy. It is high time that we steered a different economic path. It is high time that we did think big and act radical.

Does the Deputy First Minister accept that the Scottish Trades Union Congress has read “Green Industrial Strategy” as it was consulted about it? If so, how does she respond to the STUC saying that

“This is yet another example of government strategy that talks up potential without matching it with the necessary policy”?