Ross Greer
Scottish Green Party · Scotland
“In the short term, will the Government introduce measures such as the Scottish Greens’ proposed Amazon tax—a higher rate of NDR for large online retailers—to help even the playing field for small businesses and local high streets?”
“I welcome the fact that vape shops will now be paying full rates. However, that shows how poorly designed the small business bonus scheme was in the first place. The Government spends more than £200 million a year on untargeted reliefs, despite its own review finding no economic benefit to the scheme.”
“Scotland faces a wave of applications for hyperscale data centres. If all the applications that are currently in the pipeline were approved, they would consume up to 6,000MW of power, which is more than one and a half times our entire national power use at peak time and is obviously completely impossible.”
“The Government’s policy is to support what it refers to as “green” data centres, but that position was decided before ChatGPT existed, before Elon Musk launched Grok and before any of those hyperscale proposals came forward. So, what is the Scottish Government’s definition of a “green” data centre?”
“I am glad that the Labour Party has secured a debate on restoring public trust in Scottish politics, because, quite clearly, the public have very little trust in our political institutions. However, that did not begin and does not end with Peter Murrell’s crimes against the SNP.”
“If we want to talk about the damage that has been done to our politics in a UK context, we could mention Labour Together, an institution with strong links to the Prime Minister that was caught spying on journalists and did not declare substantial amounts of money that it had received in donations.”
The complete record
Every one of 553 lines we hold for Ross Greer, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 12 of 12.
“I have said before that it is a matter that is to be dealt with through the personal and social education curriculum in our schools. I raise that issue because I have worked on it throughout the nine years that I have been a member of Parliament. We recognised the problem nine years ago, and in the period of time that it has taken us to get even this far—and we are nowhere near done with it—the issue has only got worse. The manosphere did not exist nine years ago, and Andrew Tate was not an influencer nine years ago. I will address specific points on social media later, but I want to talk about the fact that, at the moment, the guidance for teaching sexual education in our schools makes one passing reference to the principle of consent—just one. That guidance is from 2014; it is not decades old.”
“Like most members, I know teachers who have been injured in the workplace throughout their career, but that has been happening far more frequently—and, in some cases, more severely— in the post-pandemic period. Like the last time we debated this topic, the aspect that I want to focus on is violence against women and girls in schools. I raise the issue again because of my frustration at what I see as a lack of urgency in tackling it. The Zero Tolerance report from two years ago, “Gender inequality and violence against women and girls in Scottish schools” showed that one in five young women and girls felt unsafe at school in Scotland, and two in three had been sexually harassed. In large part, that is because boys and young men just do not respect girls and women—and, in some cases, they hate them.”
“The challenge of violence in our schools is very real. One of my frustrations with how the debate has developed over the past couple of years is that young people are almost always spoken about as either the victims or the perpetrators of that violence, and we rarely talk to young people as opposed to talking about them. We need to recognise that young people are absolutely key to the solutions. We heard from members of the Scottish Youth Parliament this morning that they want to talk about the core reasons behind the rise in violence in our schools. The vast majority of pupils are well behaved the vast majority of the time: recent reports have confirmed that. All staff and pupils deserve to be safe at school. Our schools are certainly not all unsafe all the time, but there is a very real issue.”