A Plan for the NHS and Social Care

John Lamont Excerpts

Wednesday 19th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)]

I welcome the measures set out in the Gracious Address to deliver the national recovery from the pandemic, which will make all the United Kingdom stronger, healthier and more prosperous than before. I welcome the fact that this Government are pursuing an agenda that will be for all parts of the United Kingdom, including Scotland and my constituents in the Scottish borders.

It is also clear from the Gracious Address that the Government are committed to the Union. I welcome the measures to enhance transport infrastructure, with investment promised to improve connectivity within the United Kingdom. I look forward to seeing more detailed plans in due course, but for my constituents in the Scottish borders there are exciting opportunities to improve cross-border transport links: by getting the borders railway extended to Hawick and Newcastleton and on to Carlisle, and by upgrading the A1.

A theme of today’s debate is the NHS and social care. It is important for me to pay tribute, as others have done, to those across the NHS who have worked tirelessly to deliver the national vaccine roll-out—nurses, doctors and many others within the NHS family have been working incredibly hard to get jabs into arms as quickly as possible. We have been leading the world. We should also recognise the efforts of UK Government Ministers, who have secured a robust profile of 450 million coronavirus vaccines for all the United Kingdom—something from which Scotland has undoubtedly benefited. This weekend, I will proudly roll up my own sleeve and finally become part of the daily statistics, receiving my vaccine at the Borders Events Centre in Kelso. It is worth pausing to reflect that the SNP Scottish Government would have preferred Scotland to have been outside the UK-wide procurement scheme and part of the EU vaccine process instead.

The SNP’s desire to be outside the UK leads me to the conclusion of my contribution, but before I finish I want to congratulate my colleague and friend Rachael Hamilton MSP, who was re-elected to the Scottish Parliament last week. We should also recognise my hon. Friend the Member for Moray (Douglas Ross), leader of the Scottish Conservatives, for his achievement in the election. He took over the leadership in August last year, and in that short period he has dedicated himself to stopping the SNP majority. Many in the press thought that he could not outperform our previous best ever Scottish election performance in 2016, achieved by Ruth Davidson. But not only did he secure 31 Scottish Conservative MSPs last week; he also attracted 100,000 additional Scottish Conservative votes. Crucially, he stopped that SNP majority and a mandate for a second independence referendum.

The SNP went into the election saying that securing a majority would give it a mandate for a referendum; Scottish voters thought otherwise. It should be focusing not on a referendum but on the day-to-day priorities that matter most to Scottish voters: the education system, the NHS and all the other pressing issues that need to be resolved. I congratulate my hon. Friends in the Government for producing this programme for government, and I wholeheartedly support it.