Chamber and committees

Thank you, Presiding Officer.

We could work co-operatively with others, large and small, to address global problems and, crucially, we could resist being dragged into yet more military interventions, adventures from which wealthy corporations somehow inevitably profit while disposable children die.

Does Dave Moxham want to come in on that and, in particular, on what the committee and the Parliament need to think about with regard to the intersection of labour force wellbeing and economic resilience?

I thank the panel of witnesses for their comments so far. To build on Fiona Hyslop’s question, I am interested in how we look at economic recovery in the context of our broader and wider economic strategy, with a view to the wellbeing focus that Fiona mentioned, and in the intersections of worker wellbeing in all that, because we cannot have a resilient economy if our labour force is not fit and able to do the work that it needs to do.

In Rose Marley’s opening remarks, she mentioned that, generally, co-operatives have fared much better than other forms of business. Could you say a little more about that and, in particular, how that relates to employee wellbeing and employee mental health? I am also interested to hear from Dave Moxham and possibly from Carolyn Currie, as well.

We know that vaccination does not prevent all infections or transmission of the virus. We also know that many young people will not be fully vaccinated by the time that colleges and universities are due to resume, in just a matter of weeks. Many college courses, in particular, require students and lecturers to be physically present, because of the high proportion of practical learning, yet they still do not have the information that they need to plan effectively. Safety should be the top priority, but how can lecturers prepare to return and run courses safely when they do not even know whether their whole class will be able to attend at the same time? When will more guidance for our colleges and universities be available?

I am aware that people are keen to get out of this place, so I will just move the motion.

I move,

That the Parliament agrees to the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body’s proposal to appoint Daniel Johnson, Colin Beattie, Sharon Dowey and Mark Ruskell to be members of the Scottish Commission for Public Audit.

I am still employed by Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, which might be relevant to the programme of work that we will discuss later, but that employment will end on 30 June.

I thank the cabinet secretary for advance sight of her statement and the report.

In the cabinet secretary’s statement, she referred to the Scottish child payment as a game changer in the fight against child poverty, but it will not be a game changer for the children who are eligible for the payment but do not receive it because their families are unaware of it, not supported to claim it or put off by the toxic demonisation of benefits claimants.

In January, the Scottish Fiscal Commission projected that by 2025-26 around 99,000 children will be eligible for but not receiving the payment. That would be nothing short of a national disgrace. What is the Scottish Government doing to ensure that all families who are eligible will receive the payment?

I agree that there is a particularly Scottish problem that we need to get to grips with. It speaks to a range of issues around the ways in which we police and criminalise particular communities, which I do not think are mapped across the rest of the UK. The problem deserves much wider discussion. Alex Cole-Hamilton talked about evidence, and we need to understand better why the position in Scotland is so distinctive.

We know that the right response to drug deaths and drugs misuse is to approach them as a public health and social justice issue—not as a criminal justice issue. We must stop criminalising those who suffer from addiction, and we must stop enforcement action that we know disproportionately affects people who are already marginalised.

An example is the practice of stop and search. Two years ago, Police Scotland stopped a seven-year-old girl on suspicion of being in possession of drugs. She was just one of more than 3,000 children who were stopped and searched in a 15-month period. Although one in 20 searches involves a strip search—almost always for drugs—women are more likely than men to be strip searched, even though detection rates for drugs are significantly lower for women who are strip searched.

Unfortunately, we have a Westminster Government with significant powers over drug policy that sees drugs as an issue to be dealt with through the criminal justice system, but only for the poor—we know plenty of UK Government ministers who have got away with their drug use. We have more than 40 years of evidence demonstrating that the criminal justice approach fails. One curiosity of the devolution settlement is that although laws relating to drugs are Westminster’s responsibility, enforcement of those laws is up to the Scottish Government.

That is why Scottish Greens asked the previous Lord Advocate to use his powers to ensure that safe drug consumption facilities be exempted from legal action, and, as I mentioned earlier, we will ask the new Lord Advocate to do the same. Enforcement is not in the public interest. Professionals in places such as Glasgow, as we have heard from Paul Sweeney and others, are taking the lead on providing those vital facilities, but they are doing so at risk of prosecution. We have also been arguing for a care-based approach to public policy that would ensure that drug users get the social and medical support that they need.

Dundee City Council has responded to the situation with a commission to seek solutions to the problem of drug deaths. The commission has made a set of strong suggestions about how to deal with drugs at a civic level, which include seeing the problem as a whole system and seeking whole-person solutions, increasing the accessibility of mental health services and taking an approach that is based on kindness, compassion and hope.

Although that is a move in the right direction, the key questions about how services would be funded and whether we can make the shift from a criminal justice focus to a social focus remain unanswered. The Scottish Government has begun to recognise the value of community-based solutions, but we need a whole-system approach to the issue that cuts across the artificial divide between Westminster and Scottish Government powers. We need to learn from countries such as Portugal, as has been mentioned, where decriminalisation has led to fewer drug deaths and fewer wider societal problems such as organised crime. Taking such an approach would change how we see drugs and begin a move from the war on drugs to a care-based approach that reduces the enormous harm that drugs cause.

On behalf of the Scottish Greens, I am pleased to support the nomination of Dorothy Bain QC as Lord Advocate and Ruth Charteris QC as Solicitor General.

Last week, I spoke in the chamber about how our justice system should exist to correct imbalances of power and about how the system should not be used disproportionately by the rich and powerful against those who are marginalised, left behind and powerless. These appointments will, I hope, allow us as a nation to shift the deeply embedded power imbalances that exist in our justice system. In the same way as this new Parliament better reflects the diversity of our country than ever before and promises to be a more progressive voice for Scotland, I hope that the today’s appointment of two outstanding women will allow us to look afresh at our justice system and reform it for the better.

Last week, I talked about the need to redress the power imbalance in our justice system and institutions that result in the woefully low rate of prosecution of men who rape and sexually assault women, and about the lack of trauma-informed support available to traumatised survivors. I talked about the fact that British and minority ethnic people are shamefully overrepresented in prisons, often subjected to a different standard by our police and courts systems and often disproportionately the victims of hate crime. I also talked about our prisons being overwhelmingly used to incarcerate the poor, while substantively failing to reduce reoffending. I am hopeful that the appointments today will allow us to act on those injustices.

I know that Dorothy Bain QC has a strong track record of prosecuting sexual offences and has done considerable work—often pro bono—on cases that have pushed forward the rights of women complainers in sexual crime cases. I am also aware of her determined work in support of victims of racially motivated violence, as exemplified by her support for the family of Sheku Bayoh, who, as I am sure that we all know, died after being pinned down by police while in custody. The choice to smear and criminalise him after his death compounds the initial injustice. Further, Dorothy Bain’s compassion, empathy and desire for justice for the families of those who have completed suicide in custody are exactly the qualities that we want in our Lord Advocate.

Later this afternoon, we will discuss how we tackle Scotland’s drug deaths crisis. I very much look forward to engaging with our two new senior law officers about a care-based approach of support and treatment rather than one of criminalisation. I hope that we as a country can focus on what is genuinely in the public interest regarding that crisis. Gillian Mackay and I will elaborate on this later today, but I hope that the new Lord Advocate will agree to roll out, as soon as possible, pre-arrest diversion schemes that do not result in a criminal record, to stop people’s lives being wrecked with such records.

We need a deep change in our approach to justice. We need to keep survivors of sexual and domestic violence safe. We need to recognise that black lives matter. We need to approach substance misuse as a public health and social justice issue. I look forward, with hope, to working with our new senior law officers.

I am pleased to speak in support of the Scottish Green amendment. We also support the Labour and Liberal Democrat amendments, and consider that, when taken together, the motion and those three amendments signal a very welcome shift in political support towards doing something very different in order to tackle our drugs crisis. Something different—something so much better—is what we desperately need. We need a culture of care, not a war on drugs.

Scotland has followed many other jurisdictions in pursuing a war on drugs. Such an approach focuses on the criminalisation of users and petty suppliers, rather than seeking a solution to the deeper problems that underpin drug abuse. The war on drugs has totally failed to restrict the use of drugs or to protect from their harms.

In opening for the Scottish Greens, Gillian Mackay talked eloquently about how the drugs death crisis is a public health crisis and about how we need to understand and tackle the underlying causes of addiction if we are to deal effectively with a crisis that should never be considered inevitable.

When it comes to the impact of poverty, drug deaths are like the canary in the mine. We know that drug deaths are highest in the places that suffer most from poverty. Scotland has been scarred by poverty over the past 50 years, so it has some of the worst drug death figures in Europe—about eight times the average. The lives scarred by drugs are, of course, concentrated in particular places. In the region that I represent, Dundee’s drug death rate of 0.23 per 1,000 people is almost double the national average.