St Andrew’s Day and Scottish Affairs

Stephen Gethins Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Gethins (Arbroath and Broughty Ferry) (SNP)]

I thank the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) for securing the debate, and for the very constructive way he approached it. He focused on young people, migration and those who make our country so much richer, which I thought was a useful thing to debate on St Andrew’s day. In that spirit, can I be the first to wish the hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) a very happy birthday, and thank her for her speech? She touched on some really positive aspects of the cross-border element of the debate, which I will come on to in just a moment. I thoroughly enjoyed her speech, and I hope that she manages to enjoy the rest of her day.

The hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar talked about history, and touched on this point very effectively. It is sometimes useful for all of us, regardless of our political allegiance, to reflect on the fact that history, like politics, is not black and white, but various shades of grey. There are things we get right and things we get wrong, and sometimes we do not do nuance as effectively as we could. Sometimes that is a debt we owe. On that point, we should talk about migration, which the hon. Member talked about very effectively. In recent times, we have talked about migration in very black and white terms, forgetting, as the Chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson), set out very effectively, the rich tapestry that makes Scotland, as McIlvanney described it, “a mongrel nation”.

I represent Dundee as well as Angus, which had an even higher proportion of Irish people in its population than Glasgow. I am a product of that—I am a Stephen Patrick, after all—but to this day, I am very proud of my Scottish heritage. I will not mention any one individual, Madam Deputy Speaker, but when we debate migration, that includes the question of emigration from Scotland. We all know people who have moved away, and we have a rich diaspora around the world who will be celebrating this day, along with Scots in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK. We have benefited from that, but we have also benefited richly from those who have migrated to Scotland. Dundee is a richer city and Angus is a richer county as a direct consequence of that.

I would like to reflect on how our predecessors have talked about the subject. The hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) is not in her place, but of course Ming Campbell was my immediate predecessor in North East Fife, which was my previous seat. He sadly passed away this year; the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) mentioned others who have passed away and contributed so much. I may not have always agreed with him, but he contributed so much, as did others who represented my constituency. There was Winston Churchill, but there was also, of course, former Labour MP E. D. Morel, who did so much on the slave trade and on what was going on in Congo, along with Roger Casement. I encourage anybody who is not aware of Morel’s fine work to read up on it. As we are talking about that, I also pay tribute to my predecessors, Gordon Wilson and Andrew Welsh, who contributed so much to this place and to the broader debate. It is a debate that it is right to have.

We talk about young people. We parliamentarians—this is a good thing on which to reflect on St Andrew’s day—have a responsibility to leave the world a little bit better than we found it. We should leave more rights for young people than we enjoyed, but unfortunately, we do not always get that right. For example, our immigration debate does not benefit our higher education sector, which thrives when it is international, and when it brings students in from around the world. Scottish students benefit from sitting in the same classroom as students from elsewhere around the world. Scotland thrives internationally as an energy hub—others rightly talked about that—yet we are the only country that has found oil and gas not to have implemented a future generations fund. Norway’s is now worth £1.5 trillion. That is not the fault of the current Administration, but it is worth all our while to reflect on that.

[Torcuil Crichton]

The hon. Member mentions a national sovereign wealth fund, which the SNP called for, to be funded from oil revenues, in the ’70s and ’80s—

[Stephen Gethins]

And the ’90s.

[Torcuil Crichton]

And the ’90s, and maybe until today. The SNP Government had the opportunity to put one in place when they auctioned the ScotWind licenses for offshore wind for £700 million—they would have done it for £70 million, but were given guidance on that. They had the opportunity to either invest that £700 million in a sovereign wealth fund, or to give it back to the coastal communities from which those revenues flow, but they did none of that. They have used half of that £700 million in day-to-day expenditure, have they not?

[Stephen Gethins]

We focus an awful lot on the Scottish Parliament. I have no problem with that, but Members who sit here choose to be part of a Parliament that has powers that far outweigh those of the Scottish Parliament. I do not like that, but other Members here do.

On the future generations fund, since we are having a biblical debate and there has been biblical reference, I say to the hon. Member—he will not mind—that, to paraphrase Matthew’s gospel, sometimes you talk about the speck in my eye and ignore the plank in yours. Some £1.5 trillion, and 1.5% of every share on earth from the top 5,000 companies, is now in Norwegian hands, and Norway can use that, with transformative effect. If he thinks that Westminster control over oil and gas and other aspects of energy—it still has that responsibility—has been positive, I encourage him to think again. It has not been wholly positive; things have failed. As he has prompted me, it should be reflected that the failings of Holyrood are dwarfed by the gargantuan failings of Westminster. There has been Brexit, austerity—the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale was part of the Cabinet who brought that in—the Truss Budget, which put up all mortgages, and our relationship with the rest of Europe. Those failings have now been brought to bear.

[Patricia Ferguson]

rose—

[Stephen Gethins]

I will give way one more time, out of respect for the Chair of the Committee, if she can tackle the issue of our relationship with the rest of Europe.

[Patricia Ferguson]

There is something that has always perplexed me about the arguments around Brexit. I remember campaigning very hard to try to stop the UK leaving the European Union, but I do not remember seeing many SNP members out campaigning. Records show that the SNP spent less money campaigning against Brexit than on a local authority by-election. I have always wondered why that was; perhaps the hon. Member can tell us.

[Stephen Gethins]

I fought hard against Brexit in this place, and I continue to fight hard against it. I worked in the European institutions. I was an Erasmus student whose life was transformed by our membership of the European Union. The hon. Member’s party has removed, or refused to take decisions on, those opportunities for young people, having embraced a hard Tory and Reform Brexit.

Labour could change everything right now, but Labour Members could not even bring themselves to vote with the Liberal Democrats, the SNP and others on entering into a customs union. It speaks to the cautious nature of the Scottish Labour party that whereas 13 Labour MPs managed to rebel, not one Scottish Labour Member rebelled, just as only one Scottish Labour Member—they were chucked out—was able to rebel on the two-child cap.

The EU goes to the heart of what we are about. Labour Members talk about devolution, yet a third of the Labour group in Wales has had to write to the UK Government about the rolling back of devolution. I would be grateful to the Minister for tackling that. It speaks to our place in the world. To go back to St Andrew, I encourage anybody visiting Kyiv—I did so on a constructive visit with the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar—to visit the church of St Andrew. It is one of the founding churches, from when Christianity was brought to Kyiv. It is beautiful, and it speaks to my vision about where we sit in the world. Hon. Members have referred to their constituency; let me make my inevitable reference to the declaration of Arbroath at its abbey, an event that has influenced other parts of the world.

I hear gripes, but I rarely hear any sort of positive vision from anybody else. Here is mine, and it speaks to the points raised by the hon. Member for Carlisle. My vision is one of normalcy—of a Scotland that joins a European family of nations. We see all our neighbours outperforming us when it comes to fairness and the economy. Why? Because they have the normal powers of independence. They have the powers that Westminster has, but that Labour refuses to use to make life better for people.

On borders, we can look at Antwerp and Rotterdam, Strasbourg and Baden-Baden, and Nice and Italy. We see borderlands across Europe that thrive because they sit within the European Union; they thrive because of that partnership. It is not for me to tell England what its future should be, but surely the EU provides a 21st-century model for union—one that is embraced across Europe—whereas ours is an 18th-century model of union, with no article 50 to allow us to get out, no equal rights, and no place for the smaller parts. The situation is different for the Åland islands, Greenland and others.

In Central Lobby, we have St David over the door above the Commons, St George above the door to the Lords, and St Patrick above the door to the way out. The old joke goes that St Andrew sits above the door on the way to the bar, but maybe St Andrew is merely taking a slightly longer way out than St Patrick.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)]

It is a great privilege to speak in this debate, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing it.

Today’s debate is timely and important because Scotland stands on the cusp of an election that will determine the future of our country. Regardless of our politics, we know how lucky we are to live in Scotland, represent it, bring our families up in it, and work for a better future for it.

Unusually for a history graduate of Scotland’s finest university, I am going to focus my remarks on the future. I am a Scotland rugby fan, a Scottish football fan, an Aberdeen fan and a Scottish Conservative, so I have to be an optimist. And I am: I do believe that a better Scotland, in a more secure and prosperous United Kingdom, is possible, but only with change—a change in Government in Edinburgh and a change of direction by the Government here in London.

Scotland has suffered 18 wasted years—18 years when we should have been focused on binding our country together, building a better economy, promoting Scottish business and building up and improving our education system. However, we were not doing that. Instead, we have had 18 years of division, constitutional obsession and the bitter and, at times, petty politics of grievance. It was Edwin Morgan who, in his poem “Open the Doors”, commissioned on the opening of the new Scottish Parliament building in 2004, wrote,

“What do the people want of the place? They want it to be filled with thinking

persons as open and adventurous as its architecture.

A nest of fearties is what they do not want.

A symposium of procrastinators is what they do not want.

A phalanx of forelock-tuggers is what they do not want.

And perhaps above all the droopy mantra of ‘it wizny me’ is what they do not want.”

I am afraid that in the Scottish National party, that is indeed what the Scottish people have had for the past 18 years—a party that leads a Government so misguided from the priorities of the Scottish people that they have allowed themselves to be distracted by narrow political fads instead of focusing on the real issues, with hard-working Scots suffering ever higher taxes to pay for them. However, those are as nothing when compared to the eye-watering social security spending, which is forecast to hit more than £9 billion in Scotland by 2030—triple what it was in 2017. For a population of less than 5 million people, that is insanity.

In Scotland, we have an economy that has lagged behind the rest of the UK ever since the SNP first took power. If Scotland’s economy had kept pace, the Scottish Government would have had £12 billion more to spend over that period. It is said that the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out other people’s money; the problem with nationalism is that you eventually run out of other people to blame.

[Stephen Gethins]

The hon. Gentleman always makes an entertaining speech. He quoted Edwin Morgan, who, after writing that poem, donated a significant sum of money to the SNP. I just thought that should be on the record.

[Andrew Bowie]

Well, it is obviously for Edwin Morgan to determine where he spends his money. I do think that the hon. Gentleman and his party should reflect on the desire of the Scottish people when they voted for a Scottish Parliament in 1999 to address the real issues facing them. He must acknowledge that far too much of the past 18 years has been spent on issues that divide Scots, rather than building our country into a better place that we all want to see for our children.

Scotland knows who to blame. They know who could not build two ferries and who let Scotland’s drug deaths become the worst in Europe. They know on whose watch it was that our education standards slipped from their once great heights. They know that today, Scotland is worse off because of the decisions taken and promises broken by the Scottish National party, from its broken promise to dual the A9 and A96, as often highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross), to its neglect of the A75 in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries and Galloway (John Cooper), long raised in this House by my right hon. Friend the Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell). Remember the SNP promise to scrap council tax 18 years ago, the promise to close the attainment gap or the promise to deliver a national care service? For 18 years, the SNP has let Scotland down with broken promise after broken promise.