Q Manivannan
Scottish Green Party · Scotland
“He served as a minister throughout that entire period. He was appointed by Boris Johnson, reappointed by Liz Truss and reappointed by Rishi Sunak. If the “Boriswave” was a scandal, he was the minister who sailed on it—with all of his six boats, presumably.”
“The motion just mentions “non-citizens”—a category so broad that it encompasses almost everyone in Scotland who was not born here, the overwhelming majority of whom are here entirely lawfully and are paying into the system from which they are being threatened with exclusion. The motion talks about tackling illegal immigration.”
“He talks about “non-citizens” when he means illegal immigrants and hopes that nobody reads the small print. He pledges his salary to a charity that he controls with his personal assistant with £12,000 in the bank. He boasted of having six homes on live television while standing in a constituency with a housing crisis.”
“One line later, without a definition and without a distinction, the motion pivots to calling for “non-citizens” to be restricted from accessing social housing and Scottish welfare. Illegal immigrants and non- citizens are not the same people. They are not in the same legal category. They are not the same policy problem.”
“The motion calls for apprenticeships, literacy investment and diverse pathways into employment, but the Fraser of Allander Institute found that Reform’s tax proposals would turn Scotland’s income tax net position from a surplus to a deficit. There would be a recurring annual cost, not a one-off.”
“He added, with infinite scientific precision, that “The world heats up and cools down … so I don’t want to get into that argument about science.” Members in this overheated and sweaty parliamentary chamber cannot afford to take that position.”
The complete record
Every one of 40 lines we hold for Q Manivannan, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account.
“To ask the Scottish Government what progress has been made in increasing use of its new refugee doctors project, including to support medically qualified refugees from Gaza. (S7O-00128)”
“He talks about “non-citizens” when he means illegal immigrants and hopes that nobody reads the small print. He pledges his salary to a charity that he controls with his personal assistant with £12,000 in the bank. He boasted of having six homes on live television while standing in a constituency with a housing crisis. He even called his boat the Braveheart—after the story about Scottish independence—and he sailed it in the English Channel during an ongoing election campaign in Inverclyde. Hey—a man has to have hobbies. Scotland does need reform, but many of Scotland’s MSPs, and many of Reform’s own MSPs, can do so much better than whatever this is. I will not be supporting the motion. I stand for a politics of care, not a whatever-it-is of Kerr. 17:10”
“The motion calls for apprenticeships, literacy investment and diverse pathways into employment, but the Fraser of Allander Institute found that Reform’s tax proposals would turn Scotland’s income tax net position from a surplus to a deficit. There would be a recurring annual cost, not a one-off. No credible pathway is provided to fund better schools, better apprenticeships and better mental health services using those arithmetic acrobatics. Reform has no answers other than more task forces and bad economics. The subtitle of the motion is “Five Years to 2031”. In 2014, Malcolm Offord founded a campaign called “Vote No Borders”, but he now campaigns to stop the boats. He championed net zero as a minister and then abandoned it as a leader.”
“They say that they want to fix the care sector, but they want to cut health visas for skilled carers. They say that they want cohesion, but they will not support English as a second language courses for migrants. On social cohesion, Malcolm Offord and his party cower in fear of trans people, who constitute 0.44 per cent of Scotland’s population. He made homophobic jokes about George Michael and his bereaved partner at a rugby club dinner while ignoring Reform’s Aberdeenshire by-election candidate who, reportedly, made social media posts about women’s jaws hurting two minutes into oral sex. That is shameful.”
“He served as a minister throughout that entire period. He was appointed by Boris Johnson, reappointed by Liz Truss and reappointed by Rishi Sunak. If the “Boriswave” was a scandal, he was the minister who sailed on it—with all of his six boats, presumably. On immigration statistics, when Malcolm Offord appeared on “Question Time” in December 2025, he claimed that only 1 million people came to the UK in the entire 20th century. The Ferret said that that was false. A few moments ago, he said that not a single turbine blade in Scotland was made in Scotland. That is false—23 per cent were made in Scotland. Reform members say that they agree with controlled immigration, but they want me to be deported, apparently. They say that they want immigrants to work, but they do not want to give them the right to work.”
“The motion just mentions “non-citizens”—a category so broad that it encompasses almost everyone in Scotland who was not born here, the overwhelming majority of whom are here entirely lawfully and are paying into the system from which they are being threatened with exclusion. The motion talks about tackling illegal immigration. However, Reform’s proposals would actually affect legal and skilled migrants. It is not a policy for controlling borders; it is a policy for making Scotland hostile to foreign-born people in general, and members in this chamber should say so plainly. On Malcolm Offord’s record on immigration, he says that he supports controlled immigration, but his own manifesto describes the Conservative years between 2021 and 2024 as the “Boriswave” of destructive mass immigration.”
“One line later, without a definition and without a distinction, the motion pivots to calling for “non-citizens” to be restricted from accessing social housing and Scottish welfare. Illegal immigrants and non- citizens are not the same people. They are not in the same legal category. They are not the same policy problem. Conflating them is not just an oversight; it is Reform’s entire political strategy. The people who would be most affected by further restrictions would not only be those who arrived here illegally; they would be EU nationals with settled status, migrant NHS workers, care workers, teachers and skilled workers on a visa— the people whom, as Malcolm Offord’s own manifesto acknowledges, Scotland needs. No definition is offered.”
“He added, with infinite scientific precision, that “The world heats up and cools down … so I don’t want to get into that argument about science.” Members in this overheated and sweaty parliamentary chamber cannot afford to take that position. The world is heating up, and a man who disowns his own words the moment that they become inconvenient is not really a reliable guide to evidence-based policy. On the immigration passage of the motion, the contradiction is just embarrassing and shows a degree of inefficiency and ineptitude that even the most hard-pressed migrant would not be guilty of. The motion begins by expressing concern about illegal immigration and calls for action to “reduce incentives” for illegal immigration.”
“That is a striking position from Malcolm Offord, who, in his maiden speech in the House of Lords, in January 2022, declared that “COP 26 proves that our leadership still counts”, as it shows that “it is possible simultaneously to grow our economy while cutting our emissions.” He said that the UK had “the capital, the brains and the political will to meet the climate challenge.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 January 2022; Vol 817, c 273.] During the election campaign, when he was challenged on those comments, he said that he was never “enthusiastic” about it and that he simply “read the lines” that he was given as a minister.”
“He is the man who, during a cost of living crisis, told Scotland about his six homes, five cars and six boats, as though he was speaking at an estate inventory rather than at the political stump. I note that, for those in Inverclyde who refused to elect him and who cannot afford one home, let alone six, hobbies in the English Channel feel somewhat remote. The motion—along with the standard, or lack thereof, that it sets—is simply sad. It calls for evidence-based policy that “commands broad confidence”, so let us apply that test. On net zero, the motion warns that environmental policies risk delivering net zero economic growth.”
“I would like to say that I am grateful to speak about the motion, but honestly I am just a bit bored. It is one that manages the considerable feat of somehow being simultaneously vague enough to mean nothing and specific enough to be so wrong. As the trans immigrant in the room—but, more importantly, as an educator—I almost feel that I have a moral or civic responsibility to speak about it. As a writer, I believe in examining authorial intent. The motion’s likely author, Nigel Farage, is not in the room. Seeing as he is not here, I will settle for Malcolm Offord, the ex-Lord Offord of Garvel, who might take some time to adjust to the acoustics that do not come with upholstered red benches.”
“At the end of the day, I believe that we need specific protection for our universities, not only because of the broken funding model that we keep citing as a spectre in our past but knowing that international students are the backbone of that economy. There is a broken immigration system with a lack of transparent leadership. Universities cannot continue functioning as if they are consumer models—they are communities and we must treat them as such. 17:04”
“Funding opportunities are narrowing and career pathways are becoming more and more precarious. So, as Willie Rennie asked, what should we do now? First, when public money is given to universities, a university recovery plan needs to be underwritten. There must be transparent and independent oversight of any funding that is given. Michael Marra noted that this is a funding story, but the public record shows that the University of Dundee was not starved of money; we know that the Scottish Funding Council gave it £22 million and then it got a further £40 million, taking the total emergency support to more than £60 million. That is not a cut; it is one of the largest bailouts that any Scottish institution has ever been provided with, but failures in financial monitoring that were repeated at multiple levels of leadership caused the crisis.”
“As many members have mentioned, communities are damaged when the people who sustain them are treated as costs that need to be reduced. Every redundancy means expertise lost. Right before I was elected, I got through stage 1 of the application for an Economic and Social Research Council postdoctoral job. Later, I was informed that it had been shrunk to a mere nine- month post. That is a signal that early-career researchers might need to leave Scotland to build a better future, which is particularly true in the arts, humanities and social sciences. My research was possible because public institutions such as the universities that I was involved with invested in it. Today, many staff, including casualised doctoral researchers and postdoctoral scholars, face a far more uncertain future.”
“As Willie Rennie and many other members have said, those are not isolated events; they are the sign of a sector that is under profound stress. During the industrial action at the University of St Andrews, I found some of the most meaningful university spaces that I have ever known and some of the most exceptional teaching that I have ever experienced outside classrooms during staff and student-organised teach-outs. We discussed the purpose of higher education, what casualisation means, what academic freedom means, and what universities owe the communities that sustain them. During the strikes, students were not treated as consumers; they were treated as participants in a shared intellectual exercise. Universities are communities.”
“The same broken system has cut 700 posts in Dundee, with more than 100 at risk in Aberdeen, and the university rejects any attempts at public intervention whatsoever. The University of Edinburgh in my region continues to be complicit in investing in genocide, which Kate Nevens mentioned, while 350 staff have already left through voluntary severance schemes that are linked to a programme of £150 million in projected savings. I have heard about such savings all through my time at university and after it—no one knows the details of them. At Edinburgh Napier University, staff have undertaken industrial action because of proposed redundancies and cuts. At Heriot-Watt University, staff have raised concerns about course closures and job losses.”
“Teach worse.” Eventually, the university gave way and allowed us to retain our paid prep time, but the next year, that time was reduced across all departments, with the university quoting standardisation. All that happened while we heard rumours of our neighbour, the University of Dundee, making staff cuts. We heard stories that it allegedly released a list of redundancies in an encrypted document with a password that included the number of staff who would be made redundant. That is the broken model in which Scotland’s universities are functioning, which Meghan Gallacher has rightly spoken about. I agree with her that it is not about international students and immigrant students and they should not have to bear the brunt or be exploited to balance the books and then be treated like vermin.”
“Amid that, I worked in casualised roles. During my second year at the university, I and other staff on short-term contracts were informed that there would be salary cuts which, to many of us, were direct existential threats. We did what people who are in that position do: we organised, approached our department and signed petitions. Until we made it public, there was limited to no response from our institution. Eventually, a provost got in touch and asked to meet us. When we told him that if we were not paid for the one hour a week of preparation time that we were given for lectures and workshops that we delivered to hundreds of students, it would affect teaching quality, he said, “That’s okay.”
“I thank Maggie Chapman for refusing to let this crisis slip from view. A few years ago, before I was elected to this Parliament, I was a postgraduate teacher, union organiser and international student at the University of St Andrews. I taught there and I volunteered as an anti-casualisation officer with the University and College Union, and alongside colleagues I campaigned against insecure contracts and for an end to the normalisation of zero-hours employment in our universities. I was also completing my PhD at the time, with support from the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science. Yet, even with that support, there was a year of my doctorate where I, as an international student, paid £18,800 in tuition fees. That was at the lower end of the spectrum, and the domestic fee status amount would have been a fraction of that.”
“I support the motion whole-heartedly, and I hope that every member who signed it means it for more than just tonight, so that, the next time this chamber has a chance to act on what divides us and we speak as if we have more in common with one another than that which divides us, we actually vote like it as well. 18:07”
“I want to remember that she was Batley and Spen born and bred, and proud of it. I want to remember her relentless campaigning on creating safe civilian havens in Syria and the words that she used in the last two questions that she lodged in Parliament, which echoed her belief that our country could exercise the privileges and powers that we hold to do good for people regardless of borders or race. I also remember what her killer shamefully yelled when he killed her. After her murder, Jo Cox’s husband said in a statement that we must “fight against the hatred that killed her”, and I do not believe we can fight that hatred unless we know what it is to start with.”
“Jo Cox’s family have said this week that what troubles them now is not disagreement but the way that disagreement curdles into language that, as David Linden touched on, stops acknowledging the other side as people, language that corrupts the beauty of the word “local” into a hostile and alien phrase and language that seeks to convince us that some of us are less welcome here, less human than other people. That is the gap between the motion and the vote, and it is the gap that this Parliament will be judged on long after tonight’s debate is forgotten. The slide that we are seeing right now is gradual, and I believe that it is reversible, but only if we choose deliberately to reverse it. Today, therefore, I want to remember Jo Cox with the full beauty of her being.”
“As has been mentioned, Sir David Amess was murdered in 2021, and the threats against elected representatives have become so routine that we now build entire protocols around something as ordinary as a constituency surgery. The motion has been signed by members from every party in this chamber, and I do not think we should just wave that away as being a nice gesture, because every member who signed the motion echoes Jo Cox’s moral fortitude, her courage and her ability to know that standing with the marginalised is not political performance but decency. It is easy to vote for a sentence about having more in common, but it is far harder to square that with the hate that others people and isolates communities that are begging for love and care.”
“In February 2016, she opposed curbs on boycotting Israeli firms over the occupation, saying that “It is our right to boycott unethical companies.” As other members have noted, she was the chair of the Labour Women’s Network and is remembered for saying that she had gone into politics partly because only 23 per cent of the House of Commons was female. On 3 February 2016, she signed an early day motion marking LGBT history month and welcomed the legal gains of the past two decades. None of that represents the soft, safe version of Jo Cox that we often repeat every June. It was specific. It took sides. Some of it was uncomfortable, even within her own party. Ten years on, the line that we repeat—rightly—about what we have in common should unsettle us as much as it comforts us. The motion is honest about what has not changed.”
“Jo Cox’s record was wider than the one line that we often quote on the anniversary of her death, that “we are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.” In her maiden speech, in June 2015, she said: “Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration”.—[Official Report, House of Commons, 3 June 2015; Vol 596, c 675.] In April 2016, backing Lord Dubs’s amendment on child refugees, she said: “Who can blame desperate parents for wanting to escape the horror”?—[Official Report, House of Commons, 25 April 2016; Vol 596, c 1235.] She helped to write a 2015 Labour friends of Palestine report calling for the Gaza blockade to be lifted.”
“I thank Jenny Young for lodging the motion and for the chance, on the 10th anniversary of Jo Cox’s death, to allow ourselves a moment of pause. Grief is a drowning heaviness. It is also, I believe, something that warrants action. Before I get to the rest of tonight’s debate, it is worth being specific about what we are marking today.”
“I thank Alyn Smith for securing this debate. I shall begin with a wee bit of a disclosure. I have been informed of a television show called “Dept Q”, which was filmed in and is set in Edinburgh, but it has nothing to do with my office. I was not consulted or invited to audition. I can only describe this as a shocking act of impersonation, and I fully intend to raise it with the appropriate authorities.”
“Given that no rent control areas are likely to be designated until the summer of 2027 at the earliest, that rents have increased above inflation in Edinburgh and Lothians East and that the increasing cost of living and high interest rates will further squeeze renters, who are already struggling, what interim protections will the Scottish Government put in place for private tenants, including those on mid-market rents, who are facing unaffordable rent increases while the rent conditions assessment and designation process under the Housing (Scotland) Act 2025 is completed?”
“I ask for a Scotland that is kind, that cares for its children, that looks after the people who need it the most and that does not open every conversation about childcare with talk of cost or market or economic efficiency but starts instead with what I believe every single person in the chamber agrees on: that children deserve the best start and that mothers deserve to be supported. Can we please begin there? Let us begin from that common ground and then work outwards towards our differences and, hopefully, at some point resolve them. I do not know every member of the Parliament quite yet, but I choose to believe that everyone here came to do some kind of good. That is the Scotland that I came here for. Can we please try to be worthy of it?”
“As every member of the Parliament has been violently informed over the past few weeks, I am an immigrant. Some members have called for my investigation, deportation and removal. However, when I came to Scotland, I was introduced to a version of this country that is beautiful, kind and all-encompassing in ways that no other place I have ever known is—a country that believes that anyone who is here deserves the right to live a full and dignified life. I have worked for that belief and, in return, I ask for something that I do not think is unreasonable.”
“Indeed, some respondents to the survey—some of which were organisations that work in exactly the spaces that we are talking about today—said that “British nationals do not want to work in care”. That is a damning indictment of the state of the care work sector and our treatment of British women and immigrants alike. Those are the people who the care system depends on, and they are disproportionately excluded from the entitlements that we are debating today by non-standard hours, eligibility rules that are tied to visa status and a system that is not designed with them in mind. We need fair work conditions, a sectoral pay agreement and a funded training pipeline. I ask the Minister for Children, Young People and The Promise, when she closes, to give the Parliament an update on when the workforce strategy will be published.”
“The question is thus not whether we can afford to do this but whether we can afford to keep not doing it. We need to bridge the disparity that we have discussed between PVI and LA salaries, but we also cannot expand childcare without fixing the wider workforce crisis that exists in education, health and social care sectors, which will determine whether any of this is deliverable in the first place. Four in five care workers are women and a high proportion are also international workers, who comprise 32 per cent of the average social care organisation’s workforce. Some organisations who responded to a Scottish Care survey reported that international workers are covering 90 per cent of shifts. Too often, their work is devalued and treated as an afterthought.”
“On cost, the affordability argument has come up ample times today and, yes, full expansion is expensive, but expert groups and economists have shown that early years investment produces the highest economic return of any investment in the education system. Removing childcare barriers for parents will add hundreds of millions of pounds annually to Scottish gross domestic product, if paired with adequate employability support. A funded entitlement that works only 9 to 5 in term time is not a real entitlement. We know that 43 per cent of mothers in Scotland work part time, on shifts and in the evenings. Any expansion must include flexible delivery, childminder networks, community settings and extended hours, or it will work only for some families and not others.”
“We went into the election with the most ambitious offer of any party—for 1,140 funded hours for all two-year- olds, regardless of the parents’ working status, and 570 hours for every child from six months old. That would not be means tested or conditional; it would be universal, because conditionality, too, has costs, from administrative overheads to take-up gaps and cliff edges that cut families off the moment that a parent’s hours change. Twenty-six of Scotland’s 32 local authorities report gaps in provision and, in 19 of them, the gaps relate specifically to one and two-year-olds. Universality is not charity or generosity; it is cost efficiency.”
“Prior to my election, for years, I sat in community halls, union meetings and drop-ins across Edinburgh and heard people’s difficult stories directly, and they are the people who I speak for: a healthcare assistant who said that her shift starts at 7 and who told me that her entitlement applies only if she works 9 to 5; a lone parent in Leith who wanted to retrain and whose life could have changed but who could not find a nursery place for her 14-month-old; or a grandmother in Musselburgh who became a full-time unpaid carer not because she chose it but because there was no affordable alternative. Those are not fringe cases; they are the centre. The Scottish Greens support the motion and welcome the cabinet secretary’s willingness to collaborate. Together we must go further.”
“A part-time nursery place for a child under two costs on average £133 a week, and there is no funded entitlement for that age group. Right now, we are doing less than England, and families are paying the price. The staff nursery in the Scottish Government’s own Victoria Quay building closed down last year.”
“Thank you so much. Deputy Presiding Officer and cabinet secretary, I offer my warmest congratulations to you both. It is a profound honour to speak in this Parliament for the first time, by the grace of my constituents, my family, my lovely Green colleagues and colleagues from every other party who have cared for me during this time. When I made my affirmation last week, I said that I was doing so for the people of Scotland and their care, and today’s motion is precisely what I had in mind. Childcare is not an ancillary issue; it is the load-bearing wall of our economy and the future of our communities, and right now that wall has cracks in it. As we have heard often enough today, the Pregnant Then Screwed survey found that, for half of Scottish mothers, it simply does not make financial sense to go to work.”
“Any member who believes that they were unable to cast their vote for Anas Sarwar should please advise that they wish to make a point of order. The fifth vote is for John Swinney. Members who wish to cast their vote for John Swinney should vote yes now. Once again, the voting time is 60 seconds. Members voted. The Presiding Officer: The vote is closed. Should any member feel that they were unable to vote in that time, they should please make a point of order. That concludes the votes for all candidates. On this occasion, we will also have an abstention vote, because it seems that not all members have voted. If any member did not vote in that round and wishes to record an abstention, they may abstain by pressing their yes button now. There are 60 seconds in which to vote for an abstention. Members voted.”
“On a point of order, Presiding Officer. Sorry—I was unable to do so because of technical snafus. I vote for Gillian Mackay. The Presiding Officer: Your vote for Gillian Mackay has been recorded. The third vote is for Malcolm Offord. Members who wish to cast their vote for Malcolm Offord should vote yes now. You have 60 seconds in which to do so. Members voted. The Presiding Officer: Voting has closed. If any member believes that they were unable to cast their vote for Malcolm Offord, they should please let me know by making a point of order. The fourth vote is for Anas Sarwar. Members who wish to cast their vote for Anas Sarwar should vote yes now. Again, the voting time is 60 seconds. Members voted. The Presiding Officer: Voting has closed.”
“I make the affirmation for the people of Scotland and their care, my bonnie, bonnie home. I, Q Manivannan, do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm, that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to law.”