Tag: Press Release

The press release issued by the SNP on 14 December 2022.

By Mairi Gougeon.

The cost-of-living and energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, rising inflation and the aftermath of the Covid pandemic is written about and discussed often.

Some of these are hopefully short-term issues and can be recovered from.

Another problem, however, is contributing to the hardship faced by Scottish households and will do so for the long term: Brexit.

A recent study, by Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, suggests that household food bills have gone up by £210 – primarily driven by extra checks and requirements on goods due to Brexit, with much of the cost passed onto consumers.

That’s a cost Scotland should not have to bear, not least because this hard Brexit was imposed on us against our democratic will.

It’s not just individual households. Brexit continues to pose huge challenges to Scotland’s food-and-drink industry with the loss of free trade and new obstacles to the movement of goods.

This sector is one of the key drivers of the economy with an annual turnover worth £15 billion and overseas export sales of more than £6 billion, representing nearly a third of all UK food exports.

We are fortunate to have some of the most amazing and delicious products and pure natural resources of anywhere in the world: our beef, our lamb, our venison and in our waters we have salmon and seafood, like langoustines, lobsters and crab.

Along with our cheese, baked goods, craft beer and spirits, including of course, whisky, these are world-class products in demand across the globe.

Producers benefit from the very features Scotland is known for: beautiful rugged landscapes, fertile land, clear waters and clean air.

I am extremely proud of the international reputation for quality and provenance that this country’s talented farmers, fishermen, manufacturers, and processors have built.

During my recent trip to Paris, in the run-up to St Andrew’s Day, I saw first-hand how sought-after Scottish produce is in that market.

Little wonder that France is the largest food-and-drink export market for Scotland, valued at just over £1 billion last year, which was up 12 per cent from pre-pandemic levels, despite significant hurdles and bottlenecks caused by Brexit.

France is also the largest export destination by volume for Scotch whisky and Atlantic Scottish salmon.

To mark St Andrew’s Day, the Scottish Government and the Scottish Development International offices in Paris partnered with Salmon Scotland to celebrate 30 years of Scottish salmon’s ‘label rouge’ status.

It was also an opportunity to promote the excellence of Scotland’s food-and-drink products to more than 250 key French and other stakeholders, customers and politicians.

The 10,000 people in Scotland whose jobs depend on the salmon industry understand the crucial importance of such powerful advocacy.

France is not only the second biggest general export market for Scotland, but with more than 160 French-owned companies and 28,000-plus employees, it is also the second largest investor and foreign employer after the US.

Unsurprisingly, the Scottish Government has recognised France as one of Scotland’s most important and strategic economic partners.

We also face common challenges with France, notably on food security and a sustainable green transition.

We value ongoing collaboration with the French government on matters including low-carbon farming and soil preservation, but again Brexit threatens to stand in the way of progress.

Westminster’s Retained EU Law bill threatens to remove 47 years of EU law from our statute books in a reckless move to de-regulate, putting at risk the high environmental standards that are already in place in Scotland.

But the Scottish Government will continue to look EU-wards for solutions to shared challenges and we are following with interest the EU’s actions on food security.

I have written to the European Commissioner for Agriculture, asking if it is possible for Scotland to join the European Food Security Crisis Preparedness and Response Mechanism (EFSCM) as a group member, or explore other means of co-operation with the EU.

Engaging with the EU and the UK Government was one of the recommendations of a task force established with the food-and-drink sector earlier this year to monitor and identify potential disruption to the food-and-drink supply chain as a result of the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis.

We are already doing all we can within our resources and powers to help the sector.

We will continue to support the Scotland Food & Drink Recovery Plan with £15 million of Scottish Government funding over 2020-2023.

Led by trade association Scotland Food & Drink, the plan aims to mitigate the damage inflicted by the pandemic and Brexit.

We recently awarded 33 food-and-drink businesses grants worth £10 million as part of our food processing, marketing and cooperation grant scheme.

We are providing £2.7 million funding over 2019-2024 towards the Scottish Development International-led Scotland Food & Drink Export Plan to help the industry identify opportunities across key markets globally.

We have also invested £190,000 in the Scottish Grocers’ Federation’s “Go Local” grant scheme this year to support convenience stores throughout Scotland to provide dedicated, long-term display space for locally sourced Scottish products.

We can all help our food-and-drink sector, and the jobs and businesses it supports, by buying local and Scottish whenever we can.

Supermarket shelves are filled with great Scottish produce right now, including festive essentials like carrots, potatoes, cream, bread, ham and, of course, brussels sprouts.

Brexit also hampers domestic production, with labour shortages caused by the loss of freedom of movement.

These affect cafes, restaurants and hotels too where so many great Scottish products are turned into excellent meals.

The hospitality industry, especially in rural and island areas, has struggled and is continuing to struggle, due to a lack of people to live and work in their communities.

No matter how innovative the industry is or how wonderful our produce, if we cannot get it to markets, the sector will face challenges.

Now, with clear evidence of Brexit causing food bills to rocket, we are all affected.

There are many factors influencing food inflation, but other countries and citizens don’t have to contend with Brexit.

It is only with independence and a return to the EU that these key barriers – to trade and to labour – will be reversed.

The press release issued by the SNP on 6 December 2022.

By Anum Qaisar.

Over the last twelve years of Conservative rule and financial chaos, it has been children that have sadly paid the price. Children are often collateral damage in the UK Government’s on-going war against the poorest in society.

The UK’s Government’s crumbling social security system is failing families across the four nations and is not fit to withstand the financial crises that we are facing.

I recently secured my first Westminster Hall debate and I took the opportunity to raise these critical issues that are causing untold harm to children, young people, and their families.

We are currently in a position where around four million children in the past month have experienced food insecurity – and with the rising cost of food and energy, children and their families are being pushed further and further into poverty, with little to no hand to help them up from the UK Government.

We know that childhood poverty has both short and long-term social and economic consequences, and this is something that has been sorely overlooked by the UK Government.

Last week in my opening speech I said that raising an issue such as social security for children provides a voice for the voiceless – as children and young people are often largely underrepresented in political debate. When debating social security provisions, our minds generally associate this with the working age population, and what support is in place for such a group.

However, I would argue that a robust social security system ensures everyone, regardless of age and of course other characteristics, are considered equally.

It has been said that an investment in our children, is an investment in our future – and being a Scottish Member of Parliament in Westminster provides me with a unique perspective both on policy and legislation.

As an SNP MP, I will often speak about a “tale of two governments” when discussing the vastly different policy approaches the UK and Scottish Government take in comparison to each other. What we are currently witnessing is a Scottish Government producing bold and progressive policy across the board, using the limited economic and legislative power it has to make meaningful change to its citizens lives.

This is in stark contrast to the regressive and punitive policy Westminster is currently producing such as the benefit cap, two-child limit and five week wait for Universal Credit – these policies are inherently poverty inducing.

It is imperative that social security, particularly in the case of children, is seen as an investment, which is why I am proud that the Scottish Government has followed the lead of its Nordic neighbours, framing children’s social security in this way. OECD research has shown that investing in the early years can make a significant social and economic, ensuring an equal playing field for children.

To ensure every child has the best possible start in life, the Scottish Government has rolled out several bold policies such as the The Scottish Child Payment, The Baby Box that has a 98% uptake rate, and fully funded high quality childcare hours.

The Scottish Child Payment has recently increased to £25 per week for those already in receipt, and based on recent modelling, this increase in payment is set to lift 50,000 children out of poverty. This is a piece of game-changing progressive that will make a real difference to children and families across Scotland.

We must not only consider the immediate impact of robust social security for children, we must also think about the issue as a societal one, and how targeted policy can actually diffuse throughout society.

There are long term economic and social benefits by investing in the early years and a robust social security system for children can also have positive outcomes for other societal issues such as gender inequality.

By providing free childcare hours in Scotland, this not only ensure children have the best start in high quality early years education, it also allows for mothers – who are often burdened with the majority of childcare – to return to work or education earlier.

The UK Government is at a crossroads. It has a choice to deliver meaningful policy for children living in poverty across the UK. Poverty is a political – not personal – choice.

As the cost of living crisis continues to spiral, UK Government Ministers must act quickly and follow the lead of the progressive path the Scottish Government has taken to alleviate child poverty – building a longstanding social security system that works for the next generation, the generation after that, and the generation after that.

The press release issued by the SNP on 2 December 2022.

By Alyn Smith.

The UK Supreme Court did us all a favour last week, and I applaud the Scottish Government for taking it to and the SNP who between them took it to the Court.

They’ve taken a legal issue, settled it, and left us all with a far bigger, more interesting and existential democratic one full of far more opportunities and challenges. Challenges for the UK Government especially, and for all politicians of all views.

There were three submissions before the Court, from the two governments, Scottish and UK, and from the SNP.

The Scottish Lord Advocate invited the Court to rule, hypothetically but still not entirely in abstract, on the right of Scotland’s national Parliament to legislate to hold a referendum, even an advisory one – and in the SNP submission in addition to giving a view on what the right to self-determination actually means in the UK and in our interconnected modern world.

The Court could have sided with the UK submission and said all of this is hypothetical and premature, absent a bill passed by Holyrood to hold a poll, nothing to do with us, lads.

It did not, and this is a significant win for the Scottish Government.

It could also, perfectly fairly, have refused to say anything about the right to self-determination, a long-established (though seldom examined in any senior Court) warm and fuzzy feel-good principle of UN and EU law.

Instead, it gave a clear and unanimous view. It also debunked the widespread and genuinely held view that the UK is a voluntary union.

I’m biased, I’m a lawyer myself, and I like things to be binary, black and white, for things to exist, or not.

I watched Catalan friends and colleagues for years agonise about rights that did not exist and support that would not (indeed, did not) come, and I want to see Scotland saved the same torment.

The ruling of the UK Supreme Court on the right to self-determination is of global significance and is a hard blast of chilly reality for a lot of Scots who honestly believed that the UK was a voluntary partnership of equals (and in 2014 voted accordingly).

Under the current devolved settlement, I’m sorry to say, it is not. The UK is not a voluntary union.

That will be a hard learning for a lot of people and we in the Yes movement should be respectful of that.

Because the world is a club of states, the EU is a club of states.

Despite the interconnected and messily overlapping nature of regional and global human society, commerce, data and trade, it is states that make the rules of the clubs they have formed and they’ve written them to suit themselves.

All the warm and fuzzy rhetorical window-dressing about democracy and the rights to self-determination in the UN’s case, or the “ever closer union” of the peoples of Europe in the EU’s, is and has always been a self-serving legal fiction.

This is why we in the Yes movement want Scotland to join that club as a state.

The right to self-determination was always qualified. It existed in a post-colonial context, or in the case of oppression or occupation.

It gave a fig leaf of legality when the international community decided to intervene in failed or failing states like the former Yugoslavia or South Sudan, or invaded ones like Kuwait or Ukraine.

It has never really been meant to empower people.

My predecessor in the European Parliament, the much-missed Professor Neil McCormick, as a member of the European Constitutional Convention, proposed articles to the draft EU Constitution (that eventually became the Lisbon Treaty) specifically to create a right to self-determination in EU law.

The proposals were voted down by all sides. The EU does not have any meaningful right to self-determination, not by accident but by conscious design.

The states will deal with such matters at the time in whatever way best suits them. The UN and international law have the same deliberate fuzziness.

Sovereignty pooled is sovereignty retained, as we know from Brexit, and power devolved is power retained, as we now know, in cold hard black and white, within the UK, under the current constitutional settlement.

And that’s why the current devolved settlement isn’t good enough. Scotland has outgrown it.

Scotland has come a long way politically since 1997 – and the independence referendum, the EU referendum, the aftermath of both and the collapse of integrity and credibility at Westminster leaves the UK with an indefensible and unsustainable democratic deficit.

73% of Scots want back into the EU. 50% or so of Scots want independence. Only 22% of Scots trust the UK Government to act in their interests.

The next electoral event that we know of is the upcoming Westminster election.

That is the next opportunity for the people of Scotland to give their view on how fit for purpose their governance arrangements are, and who is best placed to make decisions for Scotland. A de-facto referendum on Scotland’s right to choose.

The SNP have a clear vision of Scotland’s best future, and that is independence in Europe.

It is up to the SNP to harness that de-facto referendum into achievable change, by defining what we seek and building a consensus for that achievable change, however incremental it may need to be, to build a credible momentum.

We have some thinking yet to do on this, but it is an argument that we can win, and win big for Scotland.