S2M-2402 Anti-racism Strategy

Scottish Parliament

Thursday 10 February 2005

[THE DEPUTY PRESIDING OFFICER opened the meeting at 09:30]

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Anti-racism Strategy

The Deputy Presiding Officer (Murray Tosh): The next item of business is a debate on motion S2M-2402, in the name of Malcolm Chisholm, on an anti-racism strategy, and three amendments to the motion. Demand to speak in the debate is high, so I ask members to adhere to the indicative timings.

15:02

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16:06

Stewart Stevenson (Banff and Buchan) (SNP): I start by addressing a few remarks to Jamie McGrigor. He suggests—and I do not wholly disagree with him—that economic growth in Scotland is the key attractor that will ensure that we retain our existing talent and bring more here. However, that sits ill with the policies of his party, and indeed with those of the Executive and its colleagues. We have talent that is currently locked up. We have people who are fleeing as refugees from oppression around the world. They have tremendous qualifications to contribute to our economy. Would the politicians I referred to see those people economically active, or would they keep them locked up? We know the answer.

The Executive has done a great deal in this area on which I commend it. We welcomed the launch of the one Scotland, many cultures campaign in September 2002. The annual report on race equality that was published in February 2004 showed progress and the many useful steps that are being taken. I assume that we will shortly see the annual update.

On the launch of the fresh talent website, Jack McConnell said:

"The biggest single challenge facing Scotland is our falling population, and if we are to succeed in the global economy, we need a constant flow of fresh talent to flourish alongside our home-grown talent."

We agree with many of the principles and policies. If we criticise the Government, it is on its commitment to delivering on the steps that it is taking. The First Minister and the rest of his team have the opportunity to prove that our pessimism about the Government's current progress is misplaced—and I hope that I am being pessimistic beyond what is reasonable.

I turn to history now because we must draw from the past some very dark and important lessons and apply them to the present. I first confronted racial intolerance during the 1950s and 1960s when we went camping at Achmelvich in west Sutherland every summer holiday. One of the people who went there was a doctor—a very talented surgeon who lived in Glasgow. He had spent much of the war in a concentration camp because he was a Jew. He could not sleep at night without a slice of bread on the table beside his bed. He would wake up in the night tormented by his experience, but if he could feel that piece of bread beside his bed, he knew that he was free at last from the scourge of fascism. However, that fear and that experience were with him for the rest of his life. We must never return to the conditions that were generated in the 1930s.

My father spent a period of time in Brussels, where he helped Jews escape from the Nazis before the war, but let me quote what some Conservative politicians said in the 1930s. In the Daily Mirror of 22 January 1934, Lord Rothermere wrote:

"Timid alarmists all this week have been whimpering that the rapid growth in numbers of the British Blackshirts is preparing the way for a system of rulership by means of steel whips and concentration camps ... Young men may join the British Union of Fascists by writing to the Headquarters, King's Road, Chelsea, London".

Further, in the Daily Mail in 1933, he wrote:

"The German nation, moreover, was rapidly falling under the control of its alien elements. In the last days of the pre-Hitler regime there were twenty times as many Jewish Government officials in Germany as had existed before the war."

We saw the fascists of the British National Party win 100,000 votes in the 1999 European elections; the 1930s continue to haunt modern society. The BNP hyenas—if I may use that word, Presiding Officer—are feeding on the carcase of emotion that has been stirred up by the Tories, who are promoting racist policies because they are becalmed in the polls down south and are desperate to trade principle for votes. No members of this Parliament—apart from the Tories—will let the BNP and its fellow travellers succeed on that matter.

On 24 September 2002, Jim Wallace said:

"The diverse ethnic make-up of Scotland's population is something of which we should rightly feel proud. However the only way in which this diversity can be safeguarded and encouraged to flourish is if we all take a stand against racism and discrimination in any form."

I agree with Jim Wallace. The way in which the Tory amendment links immigration and race relations does democracy no service of any kind.

In closing, I quote unusually the first law of epigenetics, which states that the more highly optimised an organism is for one environment, the more adversely it is affected by a change in that environment. Diversity is strength; monoculture is a risk to our very futures.

16:12