Contribution
I thank the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) for securing the debate, and for the very constructive way he approached it. He focused on young people, migration and those who make our country so much richer, which I thought was a useful thing to debate on St Andrew’s day. In that spirit, can I be the first to wish the hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) a very happy birthday, and thank her for her speech? She touched on some really positive aspects of the cross-border element of the debate, which I will come on to in just a moment. I thoroughly enjoyed her speech, and I hope that she manages to enjoy the rest of her day.
The hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar talked about history, and touched on this point very effectively. It is sometimes useful for all of us, regardless of our political allegiance, to reflect on the fact that history, like politics, is not black and white, but various shades of grey. There are things we get right and things we get wrong, and sometimes we do not do nuance as effectively as we could. Sometimes that is a debt we owe. On that point, we should talk about migration, which the hon. Member talked about very effectively. In recent times, we have talked about migration in very black and white terms, forgetting, as the Chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson), set out very effectively, the rich tapestry that makes Scotland, as McIlvanney described it, “a mongrel nation”.
I represent Dundee as well as Angus, which had an even higher proportion of Irish people in its population than Glasgow. I am a product of that—I am a Stephen Patrick, after all—but to this day, I am very proud of my Scottish heritage. I will not mention any one individual, Madam Deputy Speaker, but when we debate migration, that includes the question of emigration from Scotland. We all know people who have moved away, and we have a rich diaspora around the world who will be celebrating this day, along with Scots in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK. We have benefited from that, but we have also benefited richly from those who have migrated to Scotland. Dundee is a richer city and Angus is a richer county as a direct consequence of that.
I would like to reflect on how our predecessors have talked about the subject. The hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) is not in her place, but of course Ming Campbell was my immediate predecessor in North East Fife, which was my previous seat. He sadly passed away this year; the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) mentioned others who have passed away and contributed so much. I may not have always agreed with him, but he contributed so much, as did others who represented my constituency. There was Winston Churchill, but there was also, of course, former Labour MP E. D. Morel, who did so much on the slave trade and on what was going on in Congo, along with Roger Casement. I encourage anybody who is not aware of Morel’s fine work to read up on it. As we are talking about that, I also pay tribute to my predecessors, Gordon Wilson and Andrew Welsh, who contributed so much to this place and to the broader debate. It is a debate that it is right to have.
We talk about young people. We parliamentarians—this is a good thing on which to reflect on St Andrew’s day—have a responsibility to leave the world a little bit better than we found it. We should leave more rights for young people than we enjoyed, but unfortunately, we do not always get that right. For example, our immigration debate does not benefit our higher education sector, which thrives when it is international, and when it brings students in from around the world. Scottish students benefit from sitting in the same classroom as students from elsewhere around the world. Scotland thrives internationally as an energy hub—others rightly talked about that—yet we are the only country that has found oil and gas not to have implemented a future generations fund. Norway’s is now worth £1.5 trillion. That is not the fault of the current Administration, but it is worth all our while to reflect on that.