Chamber and committees

Thank you. We go back to Fulton MacGregor.

The question is quite wide, so we will hear from all the witnesses.

Thank you very much, Nicky. I now call Robert Young.

Good morning, and happy new year, everyone. Welcome to the first meeting in 2022 of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee in session 6.

The first item on our agenda is consideration of a negative instrument. I refer members to committee paper 1. Do members have any comments on the regulations?

No member has indicated that they have any comments to make. That being the case, are members content not to make any comments to Parliament on the Scottish statutory instrument? I can see everyone nodding, so we agree not to make any comments. Thank you very much.

We now go to Richard Leonard.

Thank you. That concludes members’ questions. I thank everyone on the panel for their insight. I was about 17 or 18 around the time of the strike. Although I did not live in a mining area, I was old enough to know that a great wrong was happening in our nation. It is important for us to hear directly from you about the continuing implications of that.

I suspend the meeting briefly before we move on to our next panel of witnesses.

We will now hear from our second panel. I welcome to the meeting Jim McBrierty, the immediate past president of the Retired Police Officers Association Scotland, and Tom Wood, a former deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police.

I invite each of our witnesses to make a short opening statement, starting with Jim McBrierty.

Welcome to the 12th meeting in session 6 of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. There are apologies from Pam Gosal.

Item 1 is to agree whether to take in private item 4, which is consideration of today’s evidence. Are we agreed to take that item in private? As we are meeting in virtual session, I ask members please to just nod or give a thumbs-up.

I see that we are agreed.

I thank everyone for their contributions. We will now open the floor for a bit of discussion. As I said at the start, we will try to get a mixture of views from committee members and our witnesses.

Thanks, everyone. That brings us to the end of the session. We have gone over time by quite a bit, but we could have kept discussing the topics, because they are so important. I am sure that the committee will come back to some of the issues in our future work. I say a huge “Thank you” to all our witnesses for attending.

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 11 January. It will be a fully virtual meeting, at which we will begin taking evidence at stage 1 of the Miners’ Strike (Pardons) (Scotland) Bill.