Chamber and committees

I would like to thank the cabinet secretary—I should have done this in my opening speech—for his contribution and the constructive discussions that we have already had about how we progress priorities in this important area over the parliamentary session. I share his vision of a faster, fairer and more effective justice system, and although I am sure that there will be much that we disagree on—particularly, perhaps, in relation to the focus of and approach to how we deliver that—I am pleased to hear his commitment to restorative justice, mediation and arbitration, and to genuinely trauma-informed services. Never again should a survivor of rape be told by a police officer that

“the sex might have got rough, it doesn’t mean you had to enjoy it”.

I welcome, too, the constructive approach taken by Jamie Greene—almost uniquely, perhaps, from his side of the chamber. For there to be any agreement between Greens and Conservatives on justice issues is quite something. Surely this will be the parliamentary session in which we abolish the not proven verdict.

I look forward to future conversations over the session with Pauline McNeill, Katy Clark, Liam McArthur and others in the chamber on tackling gender-based violence, investment in communities, the overuse of remand, timely resolution of fatal accident inquiries, improvements to legal aid—and so much more.

I am one of the new kids on the justice block, and sometimes fresh eyes on seemingly entrenched issues can help shift things in different directions. I am keen that we use the opportunities provided by the context of this debate at this time—recovery, renewal and transformation—to consider what a justice system based on human rights and equalities really should look like.

I alluded to this in my opening remarks, but I think that it bears a bit more focus. What the Netherlands has achieved in reforming its prison system is remarkable. It has closed more than half its prisons, and yet it still cannot fill the prisons that it has—its crime levels are such that it now imports prisoners from other countries. It has achieved that by taking a mental health approach to justice. Rather than focusing on punishment, the first response is care: identifying what mental health interventions are needed by people who are accused of breaking the law, and treating that first. We know that prisons, as they are currently set up here, increase reoffending, and they are also where many offenders start a lifetime of dependency on drugs. We must change that.

There is a lot more that I want to say about reforming our police system and its accountability, its use of force and surveillance, how it engages with communities and how it understands power inequalities and diversity. Those big issues will have to wait for another time, but there is work to do to ensure that our police are genuinely part of and reflect the communities that they seek to protect, and that they understand the issues that are faced by different survivors and victims.

If we do that work, make the transformations that we need to see and shift resources into prevention work, education, social care, early intervention and so on, we will—at last—bring the recommendations of the Christie commission into the justice system in a genuine way. That will allow us to tackle some of the often overlooked crimes that damage our communities, such as corporate and environmental crime.

Justice at all levels can be achieved only by a collaborative and inclusive approach, in partnership and solidarity with civil society and local voices. I look forward to working with colleagues in the chamber, and with those in third sector and other organisations across Scotland, to deliver a justice system that is genuinely based on human rights and equalities.

I express my heartfelt thanks to all those who have been involved in supporting survivors and victims of all forms of violence throughout the pandemic.

As recorded in my entry in the register of members’ interests, I have spent my most recent pre-election life working for a rape crisis centre. I have seen the consequences of lockdown and social isolation on people trapped in violent, abusive and unhealthy environments.

We still live in a deeply patriarchal society in which the abuse of power causes life-changing—sometimes life-ending—physical and mental harm. We should not accept that as inevitable.

I have also seen the mind-blowing resilience of many survivors and the mutual support that they can give one another when adequate resources allow for safe and confidential sharing of stories in spaces where they are believed and not judged. I pay tribute to the work of all those who provide safe spaces and support survivors of gender-based violence, often putting their own wellbeing at risk. Vicarious trauma is real. Workers who support survivors of gender-based and, I dare say, other forms of violence are subjected to the risk of vicarious trauma every day. Those workers do phenomenally important work and are incredibly resilient. However, we should not have to rely on the resilience of individuals. Gender-based violence—indeed, most violence—is not inevitable. It is a product of oppression. It is a consequence of often intersecting inequalities. It is a direct result of imbalances of power.

That brings me to what I believe our justice system should fundamentally be about. Our justice system should exist to correct imbalances of power. Equality in front of the law is fundamental to any democratic society. Our justice system should focus on doing what it can to correct the power inequalities that exist in our society as a result of gender, race, employment status, wealth and other issues that so often cause division. A justice system that seeks to redress abuses of power is vital to a fair, equal, safe, secure and well society.

However, the system that we have inherited is one that acts in the interests of the powerful in too many instances. The unjust use of power leads to people being killed in the workplace, as happened in the Stockline disaster in 2004, when nine people died and 33 were injured because a corporation did not take health and safety law seriously enough. Its penalty was a £400,000 fine—just less than £45,000 per person, or per life.

There is a woefully low rate of prosecution of men who rape and sexually assault women, and there is a lack of trauma-informed support for traumatised survivors. Abuses of power mean that black, Asian and minority ethnic people are shamefully overrepresented in prisons and are often disproportionately the victims of hate crime. Abuses of power result in prisons being used overwhelmingly to incarcerate the poor while failing to reduce offending.

Communities, such as those living in the shadow of Mossmorran, have to live with the negative consequences of environmental injustices. People in that community have had their lives ruined by continuous flaring that is visible from the other side of the Forth, by sirens and by dangerous hydrocarbon pollution. Although the Health and Safety Executive has finally submitted a prosecution to the procurator fiscal, do we really think that, had an individual caused that level of social damage, they would have been left unprosecuted for all these years?

We have shamefully high levels of suicide and self-harm in our prisons. I know that I am not the only one to have been affected by the death, just over three years ago, of Katie Allan, who was a victim of bullying. Since Katie died, there have been more than 20 suicides in our prisons. We urgently need to transform the culture of our prisons so that they can focus on reducing offending. We have to right those wrongs.

We must take a preventative approach. Prevention produces better outcomes for individuals, families and communities. Education, youth work and social work can play key roles in crime prevention. They also help to create social capital and social solidarity and to build community, but they need to be adequately resourced. Communities should also be involved in the planning and delivery of those services.

Spending resources on early intervention and education is vital and is a crucial part of any justice and crime prevention programme. We know that early intervention can identify risk factors and explore ways in which people can develop to their fullest potential.

Supporting interventions at the points at which people come into contact with the criminal justice system is important. For instance, women in prisons are vulnerable. Many are there because of a history of abuse and substance dependency. They often need support and treatment, not incarceration.

I will send Pauline McNeill the information on institutional violence. There is a lot of such violence, particularly in women’s prisons, which we need to address. The Netherlands has done interesting work in that area. It has reduced crime by taking a radical stance against prisons. In fact, it has closed more than half of its prisons. That has freed up resources that can be used to prevent crime rather than to simply deal with its effects.

I have already spoken in the chamber about care and how the care ethic should form the foundation of our economy. I have also spoken about holistic approaches that take account of underlying causes of inequalities. Both are vital to our justice system. I look forward to working with others across the chamber to deliver the transformation that our justice system needs and our country deserves.

I move amendment S6M-00294.4, to insert at end:

“; considers that the transformation of the justice system must take a human rights and equalities approach to address the disproportionate impact of punitive procedures on BAME communities and other marginalised people and the retraumatising of victims and survivors; acknowledges the urgent need to identify and increase enforcement action against corporate and environmental crime; recognises that an holistic approach to crime reduction and restorative justice that addresses the underlying causes of crime and focuses on rehabilitation, rather than punishment, reduces reoffending and delivers better outcomes for individuals and communities and tackles unacceptable levels of institutional violence, self-harm and suicide, and calls on the Scottish Government to explore opportunities to implement such approaches, including directing more resources towards prevention and reforming policing and prisons.”

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I am sorry that everything has frozen. On this final vote, I would have abstained, and, if I can correct the record, my previous vote should have been a yes.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. My vote thing froze. I would have abstained.

I, too, welcome the cabinet secretary to her role; I look forward to working with her in the coming months and years.

At the heart of our collective wellbeing must be social security—not as a system or an idea but as a fundamental right. The societies that guarantee their citizens’ social security are those that perform best—they have the longest life expectancy, the lowest levels of crime and the highest levels of innovation and economic performance. We know that poverty has a lifelong scarring effect—the damage of child poverty is felt for decades—and we as a society pay for it, as people die younger, lose the opportunity to fulfil their potential and suffer the consequences of life chances denied.

We tackle poverty because it is the right thing to do, but we also tackle it because the social and financial costs are too great not to. Austerity, which we have seen Westminster implement, is immoral, but it is also a gigantic false economy, as we have seen in the pandemic in the past few months. That is why we must find a way to end the benefit cap and with it the degrading two-child limit and the rape clause.

This Parliament has already shown itself willing to break away from a punitive benefits system, when we found a way to mitigate the impacts of the underoccupation penalty—the hated bedroom tax. We need to explore options to do exactly the same thing for the benefit cap, which costs some of our poorest families up to £2,200 a year.

The societies that have performed best during Covid are more equal. Not for them the fate of the thousands who were sacrificed to a delayed lockdown and bungled Government response. It is clear that we should have increased our statutory sick pay provision but, instead, Westminster wasted billions on the disastrous eat out to help out scheme, which did much to create the second wave of Covid last autumn. That was a clear case of putting the Westminster priority of punishing workers ahead of the health needs and even the economy of the nation.

The Scottish Greens welcome the pandemic relief payment scheme, which will supply essential additional income for families this year—right now. That is particularly important at a time when financial uncertainty has caused so much anxiety. We also call on the Scottish Government to introduce a permanent doubling of the Scottish child payment at the earliest possible opportunity. That measure would lift 50,000 children out of poverty.

Those are important fixes to a broken system, but we are actually here to fix the system, rather than to patch its flaws. We are here to make hope possible, and that requires us to be radical. Now is the time for a universal basic income: a basic commitment that could, at a stroke, eliminate poverty, and which would have helped so many through the Covid-19 pandemic. It would be a regular payment to all, to ensure human dignity, and a universal measure that would create the basis for social security, social solidarity and the care ethic on which we must base our society. That is why we call on the UK and Scottish Governments to work together to bring forward pilots and to take action at the earliest possible opportunity to introduce a universal basic income, which would end child poverty and go a very long way towards creating a society that has social security as a fundamental right.

I move amendment S6M-00263.4, to insert after “eradicate child poverty;”:

“welcomes the pandemic relief payment scheme, which will provide an essential additional income for families this year; calls on the Scottish Government to introduce a permanent doubling of the Scottish Child Payment at the earliest possible opportunity; notes that a Universal Basic Income would have helped many through the COVID-19 pandemic and calls on the UK and Scottish governments to work together to bring forward pilots at the earliest possible opportunity; commits to exploring funding options to end the benefit cap;”

Poverty is a political choice—there is nothing inevitable about it—and it is a scourge on our society. It is our duty, therefore, to do whatever we can to eliminate it, and to change the systems that cause it. That is why the Scottish Greens want the devolution of full powers over employment and social security. For that reason, I am sorry to say that we cannot support the other Opposition amendments.

However, I thank Pam Duncan-Glancy for her approach when drafting the Labour amendment. She sought cross-party consensus and was willing to give up some ground to get that consensus. There is little disagreement here about the substance of her amendment, but unfortunately we cannot support it, not because of what is there but because of what is not there. It removes the vital call for the full devolution of all employment and social security powers. We need those powers to be able to create genuine social security as a fundamental right, rather than just tinker around the edges of a system that we know to be broken. I hope that in the future we can continue to work together on a collaborative basis, and perhaps even get in place a better process that avoids the frantic scrabble that we had yesterday afternoon.

I would also like to thank all the organisations that work to alleviate poverty across Scotland for their work, and for the information that they have provided to us in advance of the debate. I look forward to constructive discussion with them all over the coming months.

I return to the topic of the debate. In many ways, a couple of hours on a Tuesday afternoon does not do justice to the profound impacts that poverty has on too many people’s lives. We have, rightly, focused on social security this afternoon, but we need to look at the wider range of public services and human rights that contribute to our collective wellbeing. As is so often the case with structural inequalities and systemic crises, we need to take a holistic approach to understand how best to create a different system that does not have inequalities built into it.

Although we have seen progress in some areas—the fair work agenda, investment in childcare, free bus travel for young people, energy efficiency, the Scottish child payment, some limited improvements to tenants’ rights—we need bolder action, because one in five people and one in four children in Scotland still live in poverty. Many of the families affected are working families, and those statistics are a damning indictment of a system that has seen the wealth of the 10 richest people in Scotland balloon by more than £2.7 billion in just the last year.

We can—we must—do so much better. I and my Scottish Green colleagues look forward to working with all members of the Scottish Government, and members of other Opposition parties, on housing, community engagement and empowerment, education, the economy, mental health support and so much more, to tackle poverty. Only when we take a holistic, mission-based approach to something that affects all of our lives will we see the transformation that we need to see.

I thank the Government for bringing the debate to the chamber. I am sorely tempted to respond directly to some of the more pointed comments that have been made by some members about the Scottish Greens and our commitment to delivering the structural change that is required to tackle the climate emergency. However, I will not respond—other than to say that I will take no lessons on “certainty and stability” from the party that has brought us the shambles that is Brexit.

I will not say more than that, because creating the kind of future that we need is much more important than any one of our political parties. We have made enormous strides in Scotland in recognising the need to reconfigure in order to transform our economy. I am delighted to see the new focus on community wealth building, on wellbeing economy approaches and on ensuring that the economy serves the Scottish people and not the dictums of some defunct economist or an entrenched, but so outdated, ideology.

I was elected in the north-east. Yes—the oil and gas region of Scotland chose a Green to be one of their representatives, because people in the north-east, perhaps unlike some of my colleagues in the chamber, recognise that the climate emergency is real, and they recognise the urgent need for a just transition from the oil and gas economy.

Covid recovery offers us the ideal opportunity to prefigure what that just transition could look like. I will speak briefly about how we will make the transition and the principles on which it should be based. It should be a transition that means that Aberdeen—including the 100,000 workers whom Liam Kerr is concerned about—avoids the fate of the coal communities that were trashed by Thatcher’s energy transition of the 1980s. It should be a transition that means that Dundee benefits in a way that it did not benefit from North Sea oil and gas, and it should be a transition that means that Grangemouth, at the other end of the pipeline, is never again held hostage by the ego of one man.

We have seen, in Covid and in past energy transitions, what happens when we fail to plan—we plan to fail—so we need a plan. [Interruption.] No, I will not take an intervention. I am sorry.

We need a plan that has broad social support and which has been produced with leadership by the workers, communities and partners who need a just transition so badly. We might think that we know what the solutions are, but we must do everything that we can do to make the transition one that is citizen led and which brings all of us into the debate—not one that is designed to protect elite interests. We need a just transition that is democratic and which includes workers, citizens, trade unions, local authorities, universities and a broad section of civic society to identify needs and to develop plans for investment and training.

We need a system that co-ordinates skills and innovation systems to provide the jobs and technology that we know we need. We need the test beds for the sorts of technology that will allow us to decarbonise heat and agriculture.

We know what the economy of the future must look like. It must be based on care, on creativity and on co-operation. My colleague Lorna Slater talked about the opportunities for care for the planet, including a renewables-led transformation, massive jobs creation in energy efficiency, innovation to deliver a net zero energy system and a transformation of our transport so that it relies on clean electricity.

However, in the time of Covid it has become clearer that we must invest in care and humanity and create a culture and an economy that put care for individuals and communities at their heart. The national care service will be a crucial part of that, but we must go well beyond such services; we need the care ethic to replace the profit motive.

We know that the economy of the future will also be built on creativity. We need to harness the technical skills of workers and academics to make Scotland the home of the green industrial revolution. We need to think carefully about how we can harness creativity so that a just transition harnesses the ideas that we need in order to reconfigure and transform our society. For example, we must not just replace a dirty and socially exclusive transport system that is based on the car with one that has the same problems but runs on clean energy. We need to build public and demand-responsive transport, and we need creativity to make that work, especially in rural areas.

We need to do all that with the power of co-operation. That is why it is important that we are democratic. We cannot leave things to the market that failed the coal-mining communities in the energy transition of the 1980s, and which has failed during the era of Covid. We need a national mission to create a zero-carbon economy that is based on care, creativity and co-operation. We need to align our public spending with that mission. We need to use the Scottish National Investment Bank, Skills Development Scotland and our universities and colleges to support that transition. We need our citizens, workers, trade unions and democratic institutions to be at the forefront, leading the just transition.

Only then will we have any hope of delivering the kind of economic recovery not only that we need but that all our citizens deserve.

I commend the Scottish Greens’ amendment in Lorna Slater’s name.

Thank you, Presiding Officer. Welcome to your new role, too.

Covid is one of the greatest challenges of our time. It has transformed our lives. Over 1,000 lives have been lost in north-east Scotland alone, the region that I have the huge honour and privilege of representing, and I want to remember them all now.

The pandemic is not some kind of accident. It is not a natural disaster that could not have been prevented; it is the result of a series of choices and a specific set of circumstances. To understand what we need to do to avoid another disaster of this type, we must look at what caused it. We need to examine how a virus came to leap the species barrier and how that then moved from a local outbreak to a global pandemic.

That chain of events is the result of a now dominant economic model that emerged in the 1970s, a model that seeks to drive free market relations into every interaction of our lives. It is a model that, as the north-east of Scotland knows only too well, does not care about the impact of boom and bust. It has at its core a number of assumptions: that the market is the ideal way of making decisions; that the economy is more important than other things, such as our health; that the poor must be punished if they do not work, while bosses must be incentivised to work; that the state should play a minimal role in our society; and that inequality is a good thing because it increases the power of the wealthy.

In short, that chain of events is the result of neoliberalism. The intensive extraction of value from nature, turning wild animals into profit by harvesting and selling them in a wet market, created the conditions for the virus to leap the species boundary. The global circulation of the rich, alongside the global circulation of capital—both functions of neoliberalism—turned a virus jumping the species barrier from a localised outbreak into a global pandemic. We have seen repeatedly how neoliberalism has deepened the Covid crisis.

Westminster’s idolising of the market meant a delay to lockdown at the cost of thousands of lives. Ironically, the delay meant that the economy also suffered. Countries that locked down early and effectively avoided long repeated lockdowns, avoiding economic damage. The lives of the thousands who died were sacrificed to neoliberalism—a system that was wrong, is wrong and will continue to be wrong however many more lives we sacrifice to it.

“Let the bodies pile high in their thousands”

is not a colourful turn of phrase; it is at the core of what the Prime Minister believes.

This week, we have all seen just how deeply dangerous that commitment is. The UK Government’s planning for pandemics was reduced to buying body bags. It wasted billions of pounds on an eat out to help out scheme that helped to stoke a second wave. It briefed that workers had to go back to the office or face the sack. At the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, that led to the worst Covid outbreak in the UK—at the order of a UK minister—because workers must be punished to make them work. Had money for better sick pay been made available, workers with symptoms could have self-isolated.

Westminster spent £37 billion—close to our Government’s annual budget—on a catastrophically ineffective test and trace system for England and Wales. Covid cronyism saw the UK Government funnel public money to its pals. The British state is clearly broken. Where Scotland took a different path, such as on test and trace, we benefited from the willingness to go our own way.

What is to be done? We know that the countries that did best at dealing with Covid are those that are the most equal and that value the lives of their citizens above narrow, short-term economic gain.

We know that the impact of Covid has been so much worse for those, such as black and minority ethnic people, who already suffer inequality. We need to use all our powers to create a more equal society and we need to acquire the powers that we do not already have in order to create that more equal society more quickly. We urgently need to increase social solidarity. We need to take back power and planning from the market.

The Scottish Greens will work with citizens, civil society, institutions and other political parties to identify the risks that we face, from pandemics to climate breakdown, to take those risks seriously and to put in place the measures needed to do what the market simply cannot: protect our citizens from the risks of an ever-more unstable world.

We must make a state that treats its citizens with care and not accept the neoliberal ideology that allows “the bodies” to

“pile high in their thousands”

because we know that we face a global crisis that will make Covid look like a walk in the park. We have to act now.

Before making a solemn affirmation under protest, I affirm the sovereignty of the people in Scotland and hereby declare and pledge that, in all my actions and deliberations, their interests shall be paramount.

The member then made a solemn affirmation and repeated it in Shona.