Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am not going to talk about age.

It is a privilege to speak in this debate—I also spoke in the stage 1 debate—because we are the first nation in the UK to recognise in law the injustice of the time of the miners strike. I say gently to Richard Leonard that Labour was in power for 13 years from 1997 until 2010, and it did nothing—

Eight years ago, in 2014, pensioners were told to vote no or they would lose their state pensions. Does the cabinet secretary agree with me—I am a pensioner—that with one of the worst state pensions in Europe, and with each pensioner now losing £500 a year as the United Kingdom ditches the triple lock, Scotland’s pensioners would benefit from independence?

In my drop-in surgeries in Tesco, I often find elderly people who do not use or have access to the internet or have a mobile phone. Many of them live alone, with perhaps no one to assist them in completing a paper form. What was identified as a factor in non-completion when those non-returning households were visited? What recommendations will fall from that?

There were more than 50 candidates in Midlothian, and there are such small margins between the winners and the losers in these votes. I noted that some returning officers were explaining the system to each voter who walked in, even if they said that they understood it. However, that was not happening at every polling station. Will the minister consider the instructions that were given to people who were working at the polling stations about what to say to explain the system to voters as they came in?

I recognise an intervention when I see it, and that was a speech. I take no lessons whatsoever from Brian Wilson—the Tories are desperate to pray him in aid.

We have had two years of Covid, years of post-Brexit—which is not concluded and which was not oven ready—the impact of the war in Ukraine and inflation, which is set to rise to 10 per cent with desperate and destructive cost of living and energy prices. I repeat that the UK has the highest rate of inflation of any G7 country, and it is almost twice France’s rate. I have noticed that the Conservatives dance round that. Who does the UK Government attack? The independent governor of the Bank of England. The UK Government criticised him, claiming that the bank had fallen “asleep at the wheel” on inflation. Mr Bailey rightly responded:

“There’s a lot of uncertainty around this situation ... And that is a major, major worry and it’s not just I have to tell you a major worry for this country. There’s a major worry for the developing world as well. And so if I had to sort of, sorry for being apocalyptic for a moment, but that is a major concern.”

The governor of the Bank of England used the term “apocalyptic”.

The increase in food and energy prices does not just impact on individuals and families; it impacts on the cost of manufacturing, the cost of running our schools and hospitals, and even the cost of filling the ambulance diesel tanks. Those bills will land at the feet of the Scottish Government.

It is as plain as a pikestaff that we, in Scotland, face the same economic challenges as other nations worldwide, except that we do not control the macroeconomy. We do not control all the other tax-raising powers, such as corporation tax, VAT and fuel duty.

Despite that, to protect the most vulnerable, we have commendable social policies. We make choices. We have free school meals for primary 1 to P5; free prescriptions; no tuition fees; free travel for all under-22s, over-60s and certain disabled people—and so on, because that is not the complete list. To that can be added the £770 million that has already been mentioned to mitigate—I hate that word—Tory policies.

I mention waste to Liz Smith specifically. UK Government waste includes the festival of Brexit, which cost £120 million; track and trace, which cost £37 billion and was criticised by the Public Accounts Committee at Westminster; high speed 2, which will cost at least £112 billion; ferries that did not exist, which Chris Grayling ordered at a cost of £81 million—[Interruption.] I have more to come. [Interruption.] Oh, the Conservatives do not want to hear it. Perhaps they should listen.

Nine Nimrods were scrapped in 2011 at a cost of £4.2 billion; Boris’s garden bridge when he was London mayor cost £43 million and was never built; Crossrail cost £4 billion above its £14.8 billion budget; and then there were the personal protective equipment contracts that were given to cronies. There is a great big list of waste.

I could add policies to that and an economic tsunami that Scotland did not vote for. There are six Tory MPs in Scotland, with only four wanting to toss out Boris—or is it three and a half? After all, Douglas Ross could give the Kama Sutra a run for its money. Of the UK Government’s man in Scotland, we would expect nothing less of uber-loyalist Alister Jack, who I am sure is expecting a comfy seat in the best special retirement home, the House of Lords.

Here is my message to Boris as he clings by his fraying fingernails to the door handle of number 10: grant that section 30 for a legally binding referendum. After all, with your Government’s track record, a victory for the union should be a skoosh. Go for it Boris; otherwise we will know that you fear yet another unhappy result.

I say to Katy Clark that independence is not an end in itself but the right to tax fairly and to deliver a socially just society. It is time that Labour woke up to that.

The member mentioned Amazon in relation to tax, but that is not a tax over which we have power. That is the whole problem for the Labour Party.

I am delighted that we have touched on that issue, and I appreciate that media coverage has changed with the passage of time. Will the cabinet secretary congratulate journalists who are currently in Ukraine? They are dodging bullets, but they are not dodging the truth.

Reading the Tory motion and the Labour amendment, I have to wonder what planet—indeed, what UK—they live in. Some speeches reminded me of groundhog day—2014 and “better together”, when Scots were told that, if they voted yes, they would be thrown out of the European Union. We all know what happened after that—we are out.

To state the obvious, for its spending purse, this Government depends almost entirely on the Barnett formula and any consequentials that flow from what the UK Government additionally spends on its domestic responsibilities. Our tax-raising powers are limited, and most people in Scotland pay less tax than people in England do. However, we all pay extra UK national insurance, which is a tax, and people on universal credit have lost the £40 per week that was delivered during Covid. Most of those people are working.

Reference has rightly been made to the Scottish Fiscal Commission but not to the fact that it has independently verified that our budget has decreased by 5.2 per cent in real terms between 2021-22 and 2022-23. The Scottish Fiscal Commission has also confirmed a further 1 per cent real-terms reduction in 2025-26. We are and will remain at the economic mercy of the UK Government until such time as we are independent of it.

I congratulate Graeme Dey on securing the debate and Stuart McMillan for his able delivery of Graeme Dey’s speech.

As you know, this is my second contribution in a short time in a debate about the Falklands war. There will therefore be some overlap.

I am pleased that the debate is focused on the men and women who went to that war—some never to return. It was a war that took place thousands of miles away and was fought over a territory that practically none of us had heard of until we heard the drumbeats of war. Was the war necessary? Did it resolve once and for all the tensions and dispute about sovereignty? I will consider those questions later in my speech.

First, let me emphasise my regard for all service personnel who found themselves in that conflict, and especially for those who were on the front line. I express sincere sadness and regret for all the lives that were lost, and for the people—British, Argentinian and the islands’ civilians—who were injured, both physically and mentally. Death and injury do not discriminate. I recognise that damage—physical and emotional—endures among survivors to this day. I also acknowledge the professionalism and courage of our armed forces.

The toll was this: three Falkland Islanders died and a total of 904 military personnel were killed in the conflict. Of those, 255 were British military personnel and 649 were Argentinian. British forces reported that 775 service people were wounded in the war, with 115 being captured between April and June. Meanwhile, 1,657 were reported wounded among Argentina’s military personnel and more than 11,000 were captured.

I recall how horrified I was 40 years ago—I said this in the previous debate—as I travelled on the bus to my law studies, to hear passengers in front of me cheering that we should “Bash the Argies!” Jingoism had a field day, which was fuelled in particular by The Sun newspaper, which took a bloodthirsty stance from the start, gambling that that would pay off in increased circulation. It did. It invited readers to sponsor Sidewinder missiles and offered free “Sink the Argies” computer games. It splashed its front poster page with “We’ll Smash ‘Em” printed over pictures of Winston Churchill and a bulldog. It even urged the Government to reject an offer of peace talks from the Argentine military regime, with the headline “Stick it up your junta”.

War is not a desk game to be played out in print and the media, distant from the reality and responsibility of the real war—the cold, the fear on a bloody and unforgiving landscape, and the junta sending young conscript infantry into battle, often unfed and lacking even basic equipment, including proper footwear.

I am glad that Jackson Carlaw referred to the press coverage, because that coverage was, as we know, highly censored. All the significant news 40 years ago, good or bad, was announced or leaked from London. Reporters in the south Atlantic had the sour experience of hearing their news being broken on the BBC World Service. Reports were censored, delayed and occasionally lost. When relations between the press and the Royal Navy on board the HMS Hermes were at their worst, Michael Nicholson of ITN and Peter Archer of the Press Association prefaced their bulletins with the rider that they were being censored—which was, itself, censored.

There was, I believe, an opportunity to resolve the dispute about sovereignty of the Falklands by diplomacy. It might have failed, but it was not given enough time and space. I know I was not alone in having grave concerns about launching into that war and about how it was conducted. There was the sinking of the General Belgrano, the Argentinian cruiser. Was it sailing to or out of the exclusion zone? That is still under dispute. The retaliation came days later, of course, with the sinking of the HMS Sheffield off the coast of the Falkland Islands, which killed 20 men. There was no going back after that.

Was there a failure of intelligence to see the Argentinian threat on the horizon? Was diplomacy exhausted? I quote from an article in The Times, which said:

“The British Government was aware of an Argentine threat to the Falkland Islands for almost a year before they were invaded.”

I return to the lives that were lost and damaged. They must not be forgotten. I have not forgotten them, but I have also not forgotten how the loss of those lives might—just might—have been prevented had intelligence and diplomacy been tested first and taken to their limits, before our armed forces were put into a conflict.

I will finish on this. They are the words of a Welsh guardsman who spoke earlier today and who was aboard the Sir Galahad, which was a troop ship that was attacked by Argentine fighter jets on 8 June 1982 as it sat unprotected. The explosion and fire on board the Sir Galahad at Bluff Cove killed 48 men, including 32 Welsh Guards, and dozens of men were injured, some being horribly burned. When he was asked whether he thought that the war had been worth while, he replied, as a soldier would:

“Ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die.”

As politicians—after that loss of lives, loss of futures, and the scars of injury and trauma on those who served—even today, as sovereignty of the Falklands remains disputed, it is ours to reason why.

Will the member give way?