Torcuil Crichton
MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar · Labour · United Kingdom
“Regardless of how we divide on the referendum, I wonder if colleagues on the SNP Benches will find it in their hearts to put political division aside at 8 o’clock tonight?”
“My constituent, Angus Campbell, held the only commercial licence for tuna in 2025. He has invested thousands in equipment and a route to market for the bluefin tuna now swimming off the Atlantic coast of the Hebrides. This year, he got no licence.”
“I thank the hon. Member for giving way, and I assure the Father of the House that the passion he feels finds a strong echo in my part of the world, where the cultural memory of being driven off the land is still very strong. The Father of the House said that he would avoid dry, legalistic points, but I agree with the hon.”
“I declare my chairmanship of the all-party parliamentary group for volunteer rescue services. I inform the House that, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Alison Hume) who chairs the all-party parliamentary group for coastal communities, we are holding a joint evidence session for CROs next week, so that they…”
“On heating oil, the Scottish National party Government boasted that they would add £5.4 million to the £4.6 million the UK Government gave to domestic consumers. However, there is scant evidence that that is reaching my constituents in the Western Isles, which have the highest fuel poverty figures in the country.”
“My constituent Carol Campbell is a marine coastguard team leader in Stornoway. Civil servants like her do not just serve the public—they save the public. The June deadline has come and gone, and all she sees is a shambles. I know Carol; she has given a lifetime of service.”
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“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough) for the balanced way in which he introduced the debate. I will say at the outset that my constituents completely understand the need to consult on regulations. The fatal shooting involving a shotgun on the neighbouring Isle of Skye some two and half years ago cast a shadow over all highland communities, and my sympathy and concern go out to everyone affected by that incident. Notwithstanding that, I come to this debate not in support of shooting but with a conservation concern.”
“It was good to see you walking in today, Mr Speaker. I welcome the publication of the local power plan, which will be keenly read in my constituency—the heart of the Atlantic—where communities are taking their share in the wealth of wind. To renew and expand community energy, we need to get connected to the grid. I welcome what the local power plan has to say about setting up tailored support for communities, but there must be priority support from Ofgem, the grid operators and this Government to ensure that communities benefit from the wealth of wind.”
“The figures are impressive, but 10% of constituents in the Western Isles cannot get more than 10 megabits a second. While I welcome Project Gigabit, the islanders tell me that the areas first being considered for connection already have good fibre connection. They are getting a fibre upgrade, while people perhaps just a few hundred yards off the main fibre cable running the length of the island are left hanging on a copper line. Will the Minister press Openreach to ensure that it makes these hard-to-reach connections and does not just rely on easy connections and big figures to convince Ministers that it is doing its job?”
“Along with that of the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), my constituency has an obvious interest in the High North and the defence of the western approaches. I welcome the £40 million investment in anti-submarine sonobuoys and the Atlantic Bastion operation’s defence of our subsea cables, but can the Minister give us a similar assurance on the integrity of cables and communications between our islands across the Pentland Firth, the Minch, the Irish sea and even the Isle of Wight?”
“Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it is a matter of considerable regret that the Scottish Government asked for the fishing and coastal growth fund to be devolved without first agreeing the mechanism outside the Barnett formula that would reflect the fact that Scotland has a larger share of the fishing industry?”
“The right hon. Gentleman speaks about the fishing industry being heard. I hear reports of the SNP saying that Shetland would be listened to if it had a seat at the SNP table. I have a message for Shetland: we in the Western Isles have an SNP MSP, and we have not been listened to for 18 years.”
“That fund should be directed towards small, inshore coastal communities, to help to revive them and those coastal economies, rather than being handed out to the mackerel millionaires or the quota barons who currently rule the oceans. Fishing quotas themselves, which could be the subject of a whole other debate, should serve the public good, not narrow interests. If we are serious about the future of the seas and our coastal communities, quotas must be looked at again. They should have a social value and be aimed at the long-term benefit and sustainability of our coastal communities.”
“I welcome the Government’s £360 million fishing and coastal growth fund and regret, as I said in an intervention earlier, that a direct proportion is not going where it should be—to Scotland, where a large part of the UK’s fishing effort is—because the Scottish Government demanded control of the fund without agreeing a mechanism beyond the Barnett formula. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Anna Gelderd), who is no longer in her place, that that fishing and coastal growth fund should be directed towards the recruitment of new entrants and young people into the industry. There are commendable efforts in the Western Isles to get young people into the industry, with some success, but our populations are so small that they can only go so far.”
“Those sites are in remote location, which, combined with the physical geography and the need to have fuel supplies available out of normal hours, means that the sites cannot possibly be physically or remotely monitored, as HMRC says they have to be. The council has been informed that, unless the sites are monitored and HMRC is satisfied that all sales are for legitimate licensed use, the sites and the licences may not be approved. We see there, as we saw with conservation measures, the disconnect that often exists between bureaucracy and the reality of island and fishing communities.”
“That is a challenge facing the local fishing fleet, but it is not the only one; others include high fuel costs, access to markets and sometimes red tape from Whitehall itself. Again, this is not the Minister’s Department, but the Western Isles council, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, and, I suspect, other local authorities across our coastal communities, have faced a recent challenge from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, about which I have written to the Treasury. The council may lose its authority as a registered dealer of controlled oils, supplying 14 fishery piers across the 10-island chain that makes up the Western Isles.”
“If overseas hiring for fishing roles ends in December 2026, parts of the country—including mine—would be significantly impacted. While that is not this Minister’s Department, her support and the Government’s support in flexing those requirements would be appreciated. The effect on the sector is quite obvious. A skipper from the Western Isles has been in touch with me recently to say that seven years ago he had a local crew of seven, but he is now forced to employ three crewmembers from Ghana. He and his son now skipper the vessel back to back in order to fish at every opportunity and ensure that they pay their foreign crews the right wages—considerably more than he or his son take home themselves.”
“The Macduff Shellfish factory in Stornoway, which has attracted more boats, and there are other processors in the islands, but they face massive logistical barriers not just in getting to the continent, but in getting to the mainland in the first place, thanks again to the ferry debacle that the SNP presided over. As well as successes, there are major challenges. The hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (John Cooper) hinted at the problems of recruitment to the sector; in an area such as mine, where depopulation and demographics leave a “doughnut hole” where the working-age population should be, that is a huge challenge. The proposals by the Migration Advisory Committee on skilled worker visa changes would have a profound effect on recruitment to the industry.”
“In the last year, the value of landings in the Western Isles has gone up to £16 million—a 4% rise—and that increase in value is the result of pot limitation efforts and various other measures, including banning larger vivier crab vessels from operating within six miles. Those statistics demonstrate what folly there was in trying to impose top-down conservation measures. When the local fishing fleet provides the conservation measures, the dividends are obvious. The majority of income generated by Western Isles boats comes from the prawn sector, at £9 million. Scallops catches were down 14%, but nephrop landings were up by 25%, mostly due to the presence of processing in the islands.”
“The first, for anyone across the UK tempted to back the Greens today, tomorrow or next May, is that the combination of Greens and SNP in Scotland has set back marine conservation by a decade and a half at least. The other is that, if we are to sustain the fishing industry in communities such as mine, we need to end uncertainty. To ensure conservation, we need conversation. We need talks about sustainable management with the fishing industry and fishing communities—the experts on sustainability—on what is essentially their self-interest. Nobody knows how to responsibly steward our waters better than the fishermen themselves. There is powerful evidence from my constituency that self-imposed controls by the community itself increase the value of landings.”
“The hated highly protected marine area proposals, which would have closed 10% of Scottish waters, were seen off by protests and songs by Skipinnish and Vatersay fisherman Donald Francis MacNeil, but there is a lingering suspicion that the agenda has not gone away. Since the collapse of HPMAs, there have been fears that the existing marine protected areas and other designations will become pegs on which further restrictions could be hung. The rebranding of HPMAs, without the colourful measures of banning canoeing and paddleboarding, could be a danger. It is understood that the Scottish Government will be consulting on 173 sites. Although the Outer Hebrides sites have not been confirmed, it is expected that up to 20% of those total sites may be in Hebridean waters. There are a couple of lessons to be learned from the HPMA debacle.”
“I thank the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) and the Backbench Business Committee for bringing this important debate to the Chamber. I pay tribute to all those who have cast a net, hauled a creel or pulled on a mussel rope to sustain us from the seas. We have been fishing the waters around our islands for millennia. Just like the right hon. Member’s constituency, island life in the Western Isles is still shaped by the rhythms of the sea. The fishing fleet in the islands, while a shadow of the fleet that sustained the international herring industry in the early 20th century, is still a mainstay of the economy. Less than two years ago, these small fishing communities saw off an existential threat from the SNP and Green Scottish Government, which would have effectively wiped out the industry.”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and politely decline his offer to stand for the Scottish Parliament, because Na h-Eileanan an Iar has an excellent candidate in Donald MacKinnon. Next May he will wipe out the SNP and give us a real voice for the islands, which have not been listened to in 18 years. We have much to agree on when it comes to the share of the fishing and coastal growth fund, and I remind the hon. Member that the fund will be there for a decade. What is past is past, and without rancour, we could work together through the fisheries APPG and other organisations to ensure that more of this fund goes to our coastal communities, and particularly our fragile inshore coastal communities that need support—”
“Welsh does very well out of broadcasting, but I am glad that the Western Isles are well represented on the airwaves just now. The stand-out star of this season’s “The Traitors” is Stephen Libby from the Isle of Lewis—I think he is going to win it this weekend. I am glad that Gaelic has its place in the Government’s Green Paper on broadcasting, but the UK Government give S4C £7.5 million a year to develop digital broadcasting, while BBC Alba, the Scottish channel, gets nothing. Will the Minister join me in my efforts to get the UK Government to re-engage with Gaelic broadcasting as a cultural and economic dynamo?”
“Yesterday, with Highlands and Islands airports at the centre of international events, there was no Scottish news programming on STV—the ITV channel in Scotland—because journalists were on the picket line in Aberdeen and Glasgow. Their strike centres on STV’s plans to cut the cherished northern edition of news output—formerly Grampian News—and to cut 28 editorial jobs and merge them with central belt news services, which would dilute and diminish northern coverage. Does the Leader of the House agree that, when facts are so precious, it is important that we protect local journalism and value the distinct voice that it provides?”
“There should be wide cross-party support for a review of the rural fuel duty discount, as my colleagues in Scotland have attested. I checked today, and the cheapest fuel I could get in Stornoway, the main town in my constituency, came in at £1.34 per litre. In Glasgow it is £1.28. Far from being a rural fuel discount, there seems to be an urban fuel discount in Scotland, and I am sure that is true of other parts of the UK. So I join colleagues from across the House in calling for a review of the scheme, and perhaps some gifts in forthcoming Budgets, or a signal from the Minister that such a review will be carried out.”
“Since then, duty seems to have been mostly frozen in Budgets, which means that the rural fuel duty discount has been frozen as well. As the hon. Member for North Devon correctly pointed out, had it gone up by inflation the discount would have gone up as well. I had the Library do some research, and it estimated that in 2021 the scheme cost the Treasury only £5 million. Had it been increased by the consumer prices index, it would have gone up by 2p—£2 million—to 7p a litre. It was extended by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition in 2015 and now affects 12 seats. The hon. Member estimates 11, but I estimate 12: four Labour, five Lib Dem, two SNP and one Conservative. The Conservative one is the seat of the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak).”
“It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss—apologies for not informing you of my intention to speak. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Devon (Ian Roome) on securing this important debate on an issue that affects lots of rural seats, including my own in Na h-Eileanan an Iar. The 5p a litre discount—“Danny’s discount”, as we called it on its introduction in 2012 when he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, shamelessly promoting his own constituency and other rural areas—was widely welcomed in the Scottish islands, and it has been adjudged a success, although forgotten by many. If I had been a Lib Dem, I would have taken out posters at every rural fuel station affected to tell people that they were getting 5p off every litre.”
“I thank the Secretary of State for his statement, and pay tribute to the role of the Royal Navy and RAF personnel in taking out this rogue tanker flying under the flag of a rogue nation. The Bella 1 was taken just a few hundred miles out into the Atlantic, which is too close for comfort for those of us who come from the Western Isles. I understand that we hosted the USAF maritime patrol aircraft Poseidon out of Stornoway airport and two V-22 Ospreys out of Benbecula. Can the Secretary of State give us more details on the role of Scottish airports in this operation? Does he agree that, yes, we have a frontline in the Donbas, but that the frontline for us against Russia is our backyard: the wild North Atlantic?”
“Similarly, BBC Alba has become the principal broadcaster for Gaelic speakers—except that in truth there is no similarity, because the UK Government generously funds Welsh language broadcasting while giving little or no support to Gaelic broadcasting. This year, the gap in the annual funding for Gaelic and Welsh television will widen to £100 million. Admittedly, there are more Welsh speakers—850,000 and counting—but even if we look at it proportionally, we have to ask why that remains the case. A previous Conservative Government set up the Gaelic television fund in 1991, with £9.5 million a year, and nowadays the UK contribution would be £25 million. But funding for MG Alba, the successor organisation, has been frozen for 10 years, and the UK Government contribution has fallen to zero.”
“It was the most successful of the BBC’s Gaelic programmes, drawing 1.6 million views on iPlayer, which was almost 20% of a record breaking 8.1 million total views for Gaelic content in the last year. Of course, it is not just about murder; it is about the children’s programmes, music and learning for the Gaelic communities and the worldwide diaspora that the BBC and BBC Alba—the channel co-funded by the BBC and MG Alba—provide. I will turn to funding in a second, but I am glad that the Green Paper acknowledges the importance of Scottish Gaelic as a cultural transmitter and a keystone of the language, as it does for Welsh. The Green Paper states: “Partnerships between the BBC and S4C have been a cornerstone of Welsh language media”.”
“It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) on securing this important debate, and thank him for his support for broadcasting in minority languages and for making programmes that would otherwise not be made. It was satisfying to see that Gaelic merited seven mentions in the Government’s Green Paper and public consultation on charter renewal. That is about one mention for every 10,000 speakers—that is how perilous the language is—but that represents only a tiny fraction of the viewers that Gaelic content attracts on the BBC and elsewhere. The most recent example is “An t-Eilean”, a gripping crime thriller filmed on location in Harris.”
“I do not require a figure, but I would like guarantees from the charter review and the Government that there will be certainty of support for the Gaelic broadcasting service, not just as an incredible cultural asset but as an economic dynamo that will help the language and broadcasting to continue and allow us to tell our stories to the rest of the world.”
“That means that in two years’ time, Gaelic broadcasting budgets will be worth just 50% of the launch budget. S4C receives £7.5 million a year from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport for the transition to digital, while Gaelic gets nothing. In Ireland, TG Ceathair has €20 million for digital transmission; we have nothing. I do have hopes, though, because this is not about a begging bowl. Gaelic has created 320 jobs, and for every £1 invested, £1.34 comes back to fragile communities. I hope that the Culture Secretary and the charter review stay close to the language of the Green Paper, which promised to consider options to provide MG Alba with more certainty on its funding as part of the charter review.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. I also echo the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes and Mid Fife (Richard Baker) about the £100 million spent in Scotland and elsewhere to make sure not just that all voices from across all parts of the UK are heard and seen on the BBC, but that the production value, the jobs and the creative content are made in the regions. The BBC does quite well at that. As I said, it contributes £10 million a year, and the Scottish Government grant £14.8 million, including an extra £1.8 million, perhaps because the Deputy First Minister is a Gaelic speaker—tapadh leat for that, Kate. In reality, the budgets for Gaelic broadcasting have been frozen for 10 years, and in the case of Gaelic radio—the real mainstay of Gaelic-speaking communities —budgets have been worse.”
“When it comes to creating clean jobs and local wealth, there is no better example than the community-owned wind farm sector in my Na h-Eileanan an Iar constituency. I welcome what the Government have done to clean up the grid connection queue, but the community-owned wind farm sector in my constituency is still stalled and cannot get access to the national grid. The National Energy System Operator, Ofgem and private companies all want to promote community energy, but unless Ministers direct the regulators and grid operators to give priority to community-owned wind farms, that will not happen. I would like to discuss this issue with Ministers, but I also ask them to come and see how community-owned wind farms create wealth and clean jobs in my area.”
“Bliadhna mhath ùr—happy new year to you, Mr Speaker. Will the Minister update the House on Cameron barracks in Inverness and plans to move some asylum seekers to that town?”
“I thank the Foreign Secretary for her statement and her stamina. Over the past hour and 40 minutes, no one has regretted the downfall of Nicolás Maduro, but notwithstanding what the Foreign Secretary has said about the tension between practical, progressive realism and political principle, few of us can condone his kidnapping to stand trial in the domestic courts of another country. This has all the hallmarks of a treacherous deal between the remnants of the Maduro regime and the United States. Does the Foreign Secretary accept that it signals the end of the rules-based international order, and that the fraying of that order benefits not our friends in the west, but our foes in the east?”
“I thank the Minister for the statement and the work his team and the Scotland Office team did in securing the 500 jobs at Grangemouth. I also pay tribute to the former Business Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds)—now the Chief Whip—for the work he did on this deal and on keeping the lights on last Christmas at Harland & Wolff in Arnish, Methil, Belfast and Appledore. Then as now, voters and workers expect the two Governments to work together, but the Minister will confirm that the SNP sat on its hands over Grangemouth. The SNP checked out—as it has checked out today—on standing up for Scotland’s workers.”
“He said that structure “means reforms and improvements are difficult to roll out at scale or pace, while accountability and transparency are easier to avoid.” Scotland is being ill-served in its health, and the ailing St Andrew is being ill-served by this SNP Government when it comes to health.”
“They have been waiting a long time through our revolving carousel of Health Ministers. A rotating carousel of 130 health strategies—one for every seven weeks of this SNP Government—has meant that 618,000 Scots are still waiting for specialist care in Scotland’s NHS. One figure is going up in Scotland’s health scene: the number of private health operations, which is up by 55% since 2019. Those are not just for those who can afford them, but those who need them because the waiting lists are so long that they have no alternative. Scotland has a large number of health boards, with 14 health boards, 31 integration authorities and numerous quangos, all under tight Scottish Government control. Mike McKirdy, an eminent surgeon assigned by the Scottish Labour party to assess the future of Scotland’s health, has said it is a “complex structure”.”
“But do not worry, because the SNP is coming to the rescue of Scotland’s ailing saint and ailing population—or it would do, if it could get ambulance waiting times in order. In January last year, one patient in Lothian on category red—that is a heart attack situation—had to wait more than 17 hours for an ambulance, and an individual in the highlands this year had to wait for 18 hours. It now takes a median wait of 22 minutes for NHS 24 to be answered in Scotland. The NHS app, which I have had for many years as a patient at the Royal London hospital, will not be available in Scotland until 2030. Why? Because the SNP Scottish Government refused the English NHS app, because the political optics of putting the St Andrew’s cross on an English app just would not look good, so Scots have to wait. Scots are being ill-served.”
“I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) for securing this debate on St Andrew’s day and for giving us the opportunity to take stock of the issues and challenges facing Scotland. I will not detain the House for long, Madam Deputy Speaker, because you caught me on the hop—I had hoped to be writing my speech while others made theirs. I will plough on to discuss poor St Andrew. I have been checking in on Scotland’s patron saint, and he does not look very good. As a Scot, his average life expectancy would be just 77 years; his sister, Andrea, could expect to live to 81. Some 26 years into devolution and 18 years into an SNP Government who were meant to make things better, Scotland has the lowest life expectancy not just in the UK, but in the whole of western Europe.”
“On this week’s figures and at current rates, it would take 133 years to close the poverty rate attainment gap in Scotland—that is shameful. Scotland and St Andrew’s children are being let down again by this SNP Government.”
“Professor Lindsay Paterson, the esteemed Scottish academic, has said that the attainment statistics for Scotland’s schools “fail to capture the serious decline of attainment that has been picked up by PISA.” Of course, the Scottish Government previously used international assessments to measure the gap between teachers’ appraisals and real attainment, but those surveys were abandoned in 2008. Now Professor Paterson says: “What is euphemistically called pupils’ achievement of the curriculum levels is in fact teachers’ impressions of whether their own pupils have achieved the levels… They are simply hunches.” In 2016 the then First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, promised that her Government’s priority would be to close the education attainment gap.”
“Member for Clacton is appalled by the celebrated diversity of our great city, but I am not. I am very proud of the dozens of pupils at the Glasgow Gaelic school, and I am proud that dozens of pupils who speak Arabic, Urdu, Polish, Punjabi or Chinese are students as well, but these children—like St Andrew, ailing in his unhealthy bed on those waiting lists—are ill-served by Scotland’s SNP Government. As was pointed out by the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell), a former Secretary of State for Scotland, there is a statistical fiction in education as well as in health.”
“I do not think I will. Of course, St Andrew was bilingual, or trilingual or quadrilingual—as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson) pointed out, he is celebrated in Russia and Greece. He appears on the Basque flag, and Basque is the oldest language in Europe. If he and his children were living in Glasgow, they would make up that one third of Scottish schoolchildren in the “Dear Green Place” who speak more than one language—something that the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), in his desperate attempt to divide Scotland, found so appalling. To allay your fears, Madam Deputy Speaker, I emailed the hon. Member for Clacton—I assume the email went to his constituency office. I saw that the email received no reply, because he is rarely seen in this place or in Clacton. But he has been informed. The hon.”
“People in the Western Isles know that the S in SNP stands for “stunt”—the portholes had to be painted on to the ship so that Nicola Sturgeon could have a pretendy launch. That £500 million means that the S in SNP stands for “squander”, with millions wasted, affecting the ability and confidence of my constituents to stay in their homes and be connected to the rest of the islands. I hope that S will also stand for “swept away”, because in May that is what Scotland needs.”
“For that situation, Madam Deputy Speaker, I need no notes, because the ferry fiasco is writ large in the experience of all my constituents, who have suffered for years because this SNP Government did not manage to procure enough ferries and took their eye off the ball. This crisis, which they thought would affect a few hundred islanders, has become an international symbol of the failure of nationalism in Scotland. This week I welcomed the extra £820 million that the Chancellor found to give to the Scottish Government this year. In my book—in anyone’s book—£820 million is eight CalMac ferries, but the SNP Scottish Government can only manage 2.5 ferries for £500 million. It is a shame and a scandal.”
“I thank the hon. Member for that intervention, which allows me to highlight that some 95,000 children in Scotland are to be lifted out of poverty by our Chancellor’s Budget, which got rid of the two-child benefit cap. It is not just in terms of education and health that St Andrew’s children are being failed. St Andrew was a fisherman and was used to boats, as are many of my constituents in the islands, but these modern-day St Andrews are being let down. They see thousands of pounds of shellfish exports rotting in the harbour, or having to be deep-frozen at extra cost, because of the failing SNP’s ferry fiasco.”
“My hon. Friend may well be right about that clock tower, but she will also know that Carlisle will always be a little bit of Scotland, because it was apparently in Carlisle that the Loch Lomond ballad, with its famous lines “You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland before you”, was written by a Jacobite prisoner facing the gallows. That song, which is much more fondly remembered than “Flower of Scotland”, was written in Carlisle, was it not?”
“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?”
“T3. Western Isles Women’s Aid in my constituency helped 180 women last year. The refuge is working at capacity, yet its funding is uncertain. That is why my fundraiser on Friday will seek to raise funds for the organisations. More than 1,800 women reported domestic abuse in the highlands 10 years ago; last year the figure was closer to 2,800. Does the Secretary of State agree that in rural and island communities it takes a lot of courage for women to report domestic abuse, yet we can see from the figures that domestic abuse is no less prevalent?”
“Has the Treasury made any assessment of the SNP’s plans to separate Scotland from its main market, the rest of the UK, which accounts for 60% of its trade? While I am at it, may I thank the Chancellor for the £820 million extra for the Scottish budget?”
“My friend the Scottish journalist Jen Stout has just returned from the grey zone between Russian and Ukrainian forces, where to try to evacuate the wounded or even to wander outside for a moment is to invite death from the sky by drones. The message she brings back from Ukrainians on the frontline is that they will not give up this territory that they have defended for years. Will the Prime Minister ensure that the message that comes from here—apart from the Lord Haw-Haws paid by Putin—is that their frontline is our frontline, that Ukrainian sovereignty must be respected and that we will stand with Ukraine?”
“The Yantar was intercepted in the north Atlantic, which is the UK’s new frontline but my constituents’ backyard. I was reassured by the preparedness of the RAF and the Royal Navy and grateful for their defence of our airspace and seaspace, but what assurance can the Minister give my constituents about our preparedness and resilience to meet these kinds of hybrid attacks? These cables do not just run across the Atlantic; they run between our islands, too.”