Chamber and committees

The past 21 months has taught us much about resilience: our resilience, or otherwise, as human beings, and the resilience, or otherwise, of the systems and structures that support us. We have had some uncomfortable truths laid bare, too. Our economy does not currently support everyone in the way that it should, our politics often fails to provide security and safety to everyone, and our society is profoundly unequal. As we plan and develop an economy that is robust in the face of future shocks, while supporting individuals and communities equitably and fairly, we must address at least two significant issues, both of which speak directly to addressing the problem of labour shortages in different parts of our economy.

First, we must make work fair. I do not disagree with the calls from Labour for a focus on fair work. We must all work with employers and trade unions to secure genuine improvements in pay and conditions. We must address low pay, in-work poverty, poor flexibility and inequalities in the workplace. No worker should suffer precarious contracts. We need better sick pay; Covid has made that very clear. We need strong trade unions with real bargaining power. I remain disappointed that it was Labour, back in 2014, during the Smith commission, that vetoed the devolution of employment law.

However, there are things that we can do, and have started to do, in Scotland. I believe that our social security system will support people better. I just wish that we had the powers to introduce things such as a universal basic income—but we will have them, one day. We need to ensure that all workers have access to the training and development opportunities that they want and need, both to deal with issues such as the much-needed just transition to renewable energy and to allow workers to adapt and be flexible as technological innovations and automation remove some aspects of their roles.

Secondly, we must have the right data and information about the things that we need to understand, and we must use that to plan effectively. We must better understand the differences and intersections between skills shortages and labour gaps. We must also better understand workers’ expectations about their employment, how things vary geographically and regionally, what impacts demographic changes will have and so on. We need institutions and organisations that understand those data and can turn them into effective planning and actions. For example, we have known for many years about the challenges that we face in social care due to demographic shifts, yet we have not always effectively planned for those changes and challenges. Similarly, we know that our future economy will be reliant on jobs in green industries, so we must ensure, now, that we provide the right education, training and skills development for people to fill those jobs.

However, it is not just about having the people with the right skills. Our planning must take account of other issues, too: where people will live, where their children will go to school, where they will be able to access healthcare, and so on. We hear, time and again, across different sectors, that the limiting factor for recruitment is affordable housing. In addition, there will be shifts and shocks in the future that we still need to properly identify. That is why we should explore the creation of a foresighting centre—one of the recommendations of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Post-Covid-19 Futures Commission—to provide an important contribution to the industrial strategies of the future.

There are many more issues that I would want to address in the debate, but I will make my final point about immigration. It seems to me that, for many Conservatives, Brexit was about stopping the world so that they could get off, but they dragged us off, too. With the other awful immigration changes that we see coming at us from Westminster, I urge all those in the chamber with any influence in the UK Government to press this point wherever possible: Scotland deserves so much better than Westminster is currently providing.

To ask the Scottish Government what mechanisms are in place to ensure that the views of victims and survivors are considered by Community Justice Scotland and the justice board for Scotland and its sub-groups. (S6O-00560)

What more can be done to restore victims’, witnesses’ and survivors’ confidence that their feedback is valued and that their voices are being heard and acted on in a way that is not wasting their time and retraumatising them.

I would like to explore in more detail how victims’ voices are taken into account in strategic and operational discussions. The victims task force recently discussed victims’ voices. There is concern among support organisations that, on the rare occasions when views or feedback are sought from the people whom they support, there is little follow-up. There is no communication about what is done with those views or what has happened as a result of feedback. I know that the recover, renew, transform advisory group has also—

I thank Sarah Boyack for bringing this debate to the Parliament, and I acknowledge and thank all the organisations that she referred to that are campaigning against vaccine apartheid.

As someone who is double vaccinated and boosted by the bells, I am grateful to all those involved in the development, distribution and giving of the vaccines. However, I am aware that I am in a hugely privileged position, and of how easy it is to take all this for granted. I have not always had the comfort of access to healthcare free at the point of need or the certainty of preventative medical care when needed, and every time that I speak to family and friends in southern Africa, I am reminded of just how lucky I am and how unequal the world is.

I refer to luck, but luck really has very little to do with it. The global health inequalities that we see are a product of political and economic decisions, of colonialism and empire. As we have already heard, they are a product of capitalism and greed.

Why do we accept a world in which generic life-saving drugs, such as those for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, which the World Health Organization includes on its essential medicines list, can be sold at prices that are up to 150 times the cost of producing, packaging and taxing them, and then a 10 per cent profit is added? Those are the generic medicines. Brand-named drugs can be much more expensive. Emma Harper outlined the cost to price differential of Covid vaccines. Why do we accept that?

We know that the global health inequalities that we see are not inevitable. That means that, if we seriously believe that no one is safe until everyone is safe, we need to change the unequal and unjust system.

We know that one of the key reasons why omicron and other novel variants of Covid will arise is that vaccines have not been made available to the global south in anything like the numbers needed. Three billion will be needed in early 2022. [Interruption.] No, I will not take an intervention.

While we are getting third doses, many have not had access to even one dose. That creates the conditions for viruses to mutate and avoid the human immune system, just as SARS-CoV-2 has done in developing the delta and then the omicron variants. It is truly the case with vaccines that the only way for any of us to be safe is for all of us to be vaccinated.

The argument for making vaccines available to the global south is one of social justice and global justice, but it is also one of self-interest. We need to ensure that we have vaccine equality, and the proposal that we deploy the trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights—TRIPS—exclusion for vaccine manufacture is vital. The decision by countries, particularly the United States, to stockpile vaccines only for them to go out of date and be destroyed is criminal. I am sure that many around the chamber will join me in condemning such atrocious selfishness.

However, we need to do more. Even if we had the vaccines available, the global south does not necessarily have all the infrastructure that it needs to roll them out at the rate that is needed to keep us all safe. That is one function of our neo-colonial approach to the global south, but it is something that we can and must rapidly fix.

We know that mRNA vaccines will give us the opportunity to develop resistance to a much wider range of viruses. From the human papillomavirus vaccine to the potential HIV vaccine, we should offer those in the global south access to newly available immunisations by building a global vaccine programme that can quickly be switched to emergency vaccination for the next novel virus that could decimate lives across the world. Such infrastructure will offer real and on-going defences.

While billionaires are going on joyrides in space, a really fitting mission for our world would be to create a global programme for vaccinating as many people as possible as quickly as possible. It is more than time for us to wrest power from the pharmaceutical companies and their interests, and act in the interests of all so that we can all be truly safe.

I thank the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee for bringing the debate to the chamber. It will probably not be the most exciting debate of the year—no offence to the committee’s members or its work—but I really appreciate the opportunity to contribute.

How we conduct ourselves, do our business and deal with the issues that we have to deal with in this place—how we work—is really important for us to consider. How we can build on the hope and optimism of the Parliament’s beginnings, as Martin Whitfield outlined, and how we serve our constituents, our communities and our country are vital issues, because how we do our jobs is as important as what we do in our roles.

How we do what we do is about our cultures of debate, of engagement and of inclusion, all of which contribute to the culture of politics. I do not mean just the political discussions that we have in this chamber or in the committee rooms in this building, or in the exchanges that we have on email or on any of the other platforms that we use regularly. More broadly, the culture that we generate and sustain in all those processes affects the trust and confidence that the people we are here to serve have, not only in we MSPs, but in politics more generally.

I want to focus on the culture of our debate and exchanges, drawing on work done by the Young Academy of Scotland of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. YAS’s charter for responsible debate, of which I and several members in this place are signatories, aims to create a set of norms for debate that enable us to better make decisions together. It does that by setting out a number of principles that underpin responsible debate. Those principles are based on the belief that joint decision making should be informed, respectful and inclusive. They speak to issues of accuracy, diversity and honesty. They require careful, empathetic listening, the use of respectful language and acknowledgement of persuasive points. They challenge us to communicate in ways that unite rather than divide, to address imbalances of power and to seek to identify common ground.

We can all think of times when those principles have not been adhered to. We can all think of times when we, personally, have probably not met those high standards. There are many significant issues on which we need to reach agreement, perhaps not unanimous agreement, but some way of coming to a place from which we can move forward. Those issues range from the climate emergency to how we govern data, how we understand artificial intelligence and the impact that it has on our lives, our freedoms and the freedoms of those we serve. We must, therefore, create the conditions for debate in which we can interact and adapt our positions—

I thank Tess White for that intervention. She and everybody in this chamber should be well aware that we have a co-operation agreement with the Scottish Government, not a full coalition. I know that she is very fond of using that word, but that is not where we are. My colleagues in the chamber this afternoon and I remain Opposition MSPs.

We have important issues on which we need to reach agreement, so we need to make sure that we can get to that point of agreement or point of moving forward in a way that we can live with and which takes our citizens and constituents with us. That is the aim and the challenge for us in this debate.

Yes, I will.

I will take an intervention from Tess White.

Thank you for that question. Accountability is really important for us all. We have probably all been frustrated by how questions are answered and issues are dealt with. The way to deal with those frustrations, however, is not to shout at each other across the chamber, but to speak to each other with the principles of respectful, empathetic ears and open listening. Just in the past few months, there have been many examples where that has been far from what we have seen in this chamber.

Three themes can help us to think about the ways in which we can be better at the job that we have to do. We need to be informed, which means that we need a strong understanding of risk. In that context, the recommendation of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Post-Covid-19 Commission that we create an institution to help us with foresighting and futures is of vital importance. I would welcome the committee’s view on that over the course of the coming months.

Rather than seeking to reinforce our own positions all the time, we need to be respectful of different viewpoints, allowing each other to change our minds and positions and not be ridiculed for that change.