THE ‘DEAL” SPEECH THAT WAS NEVER HEARD

Thank you Mr Speaker

And I rise to oppose this bill.

This is the concluding episode of their tortuous Brexit drama, the final slice of misery, the last indigestible bit of this big fat Christmas turkey. 

And what a stinker this deal is.

It is a disaster for every sector of our economy, for business, for our service industries, for our agriculture, for our students, but it is more than that for our fishing communities.

For them it is a total and utter betrayal, and Honourable Members representing coastal communities, and prospective Tory Holyrood candidates contesting them, can expect the full wrath of communities betrayed. 

The one thing that this rotten deal was supposed to do was make the situation better for our fishing industry. In fact, it only makes things much, much worse.

Let’s be clear, my country overwhelmingly voted against everything to do with this disastrous Brexit 

From the Bill that made their referendum a reality to the bill that will confirm the disastrous terms on which we will leave the EU.

Every step of the way the Scottish people have rejected this Brexit and Scotland has consistently voted against all parties who have supported it.

This is a deal that will make every person in Scotland worse off

A Brexit that will confine my nation to this insular Brexit island where our young people will be denied the opportunity to live, work and love freely across a continent. 

This is the Tories Brexit. This is their deal and they will own it.

Though, not all on their own.

Incomprehensibly the British Labour Party wants a slice of this mess.

By backing this deal they will share in the Brexit ‘spoils’.

Can I commend them for their bravery, and look forward to them defending this disaster when it inevitably unravels

We in the SNP will not sully or hands on the handling of this Brexit. 

We will vote against it because it is rotten, makes our constituents worse off and goes against everything we aspire to as a nation. 

Apparently, the only reason we should vote for this deal is that in somehow voting against it means we will be voting for a No deal…..!

What a load of unmitigated rubbish. 

Nowhere on this bill is any provision for a no deal.

This is nothing other than Tory spin and only Labour are gullible enough to fall for it.

We can only vote for what is in front of us and what is in front of us is unacceptable and directly counter to the interests of my nation. 

The Tories will get their way today with Labour support and this will be the basis on which we leave the EU.

Scotland therefore has only one option available to us to determine our own European future in line with what the Scottish people want 

And that is through independence.

With Labour supporting this deal this Brexit now belongs to the unionist parties. This is theirs. 

This will be their case for remaining in their UK.

When we have the next independence referendum all the unionist parties will now line up behind the flag of this Brexit Britain.

The case for independence will line up behind the view that it is the Scottish people who will determine our own future with Europe.

Mr Speaker the battle for Europe is over. They have won, and my congratulations to them. I hope they enjoy their victory.

Mr Speaker, where this battle is over the battle for Scotland now begins, and in that we will triumph. 

NOW IS THE TIME FOR RADICAL ACTION ON DRUG DEATHS

YESTERDAY was a bad, ugly, dispiriting day that appalled and sickened all of us involved in the debate about drugs deaths in Scotland. Every one of these 1264 deaths is a son, a daughter a brother, sister, father, mother. Every one of these deaths was entirely unnecessary and avoidable and we should be saying one word – enough.

We have to take the radical action that will turn this round and start to make a difference. There will always be a lot that we can do but until we do the “big” things we will only be managing the crisis, such is the scale of the task.

My Scottish Affairs Committee conducted the most extensive inquiry ever undertaken into problem drug use in Scotland. We heard from governments, service providers, the police and judiciary, the health services and those with lived experience. All agreed that the big levers of change need to be pulled in order to have this effectively addressed.

Where it is the case that the Scottish Government could and should do more (something we recommended), we have to acknowledge without the full range of powers we will always be approaching this with one hand tied behind our back.

It is the drugs laws that create the legislative environment and context that the rehabilitation and support services have to operate in. As long as our drugs legislation treats drugs users as criminals, all the rehabilitation services in the world will be severely compromised in their ability to make a difference.

And we have to look to the international examples. Portugal had a drugs epidemic roughly on the same scale as Scotland. In the early 1990s, every Portuguese family either had someone caught in heroin’s grip or knew a family affected.

What they did was something remarkable. As a nation they collectively decided this could not go on and initiated a national debate, assembling a government-led commission to address the crisis.

The result was almost as bold as it was pioneering. Portugal decided a criminal justice approach should be replaced by an exclusively health-based one. It decriminalised all drugs for personal use. But it didn’t just leave it at that … it assembled what it called a “dissuasion commission” to address all drug users brought to the attention of the authorities. Almost 30 years later, Portugal has just about the lowest rates of drugs deaths in Europe.

While this was an approach that worked, it is not an approach that is readily available to us in Scotland as we only have some of the necessary responsibilities.

Drug laws are exclusively reserved and it is the view of the Westminster  Government that will prevail. If the two governments are aligned then there is no problem, but right now they’re not. The Scottish Government takes a health-based approach to drug use while the UK Government takes an ideological view about drug use based on the personal responsibility of the drug user. For the UK, drug use is a deviancy that has to be addressed by the law not a health issue that needs to be remedied by treatment.

It is this that creates the stigma associated with the view of drug users as “criminals” and “junkies”. This stigma is perhaps the single biggest impediment to properly addressing all the societal and cultural issues around problem drug use.

The UK Government is therefore also prone to overlook the evidence base. For example, its view on drug consumption rooms is that “there is no safe way to take drugs”, so all calls for DCRs are ignored based on a deeply held view on drug-taking. It doesn’t matter that all the evidence in the world suggests that safe consumption facilities save lives and directs people to services it will always be trumped by their ideological point of view.

In our report, the Scottish Affairs Committee recommended to the UK Government that we decriminalise all drugs for personal use and that drug consumption facilities be piloted. This, inevitably, was rejected by the UK Government. Since then Peter Krykant unofficial DCR facility has arrived on the streets of Glasgow, presenting the most significant challenge to our approach to dealing with drugs issues in Scotland.

Police forces know our drugs laws make absolutely no sense. All the police forces that appeared in front of my committee had devised ingenious ways to operate at the very edge of drug law legislation. Being on the frontline, they see for themselves the absolute failure of criminalisation.

Then there are the legal powers open to us. When he appeared at our committee, the Lord Advocate could not support the concept of a “letter of comfort” for drug consumption facilities or some sort of “legal exemption” because of his responsibility to uphold and enforce the law. But with the total refusal of the UK Government to accept our recommendations the Lord Advocate should now review what is available to him under his responsibilities and look to solutions that would “allow” a facility to operate.

There is no particular reason why Scotland has such a problem with drugs deaths. In the evidence presented to us, the concentration of poverty and alienation caused by de-industrialisation were often referenced, as were issues around trauma associated with the numbers that Scotland places in care.

The fact that so many drugs deaths are men in their 40s and 50s also suggests there is some sort of historical/cultural factor at play. Lastly we can not rule out the under-funding of services and availability of rehabilitation beds.

But most of that doesn’t matter anymore. It’s how it is addressed that is important. This is an emergency and it is an emergency that needs big solutions. We now have to use everything available to address it the best we can. More than that, we need all the necessary responsibilities and powers to ensure that we deal with the totality of the problem.