Making Britain a Clean Energy Superpower

Torcuil Crichton Excerpts

Friday 26th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (Lab)]

I congratulate you, Madam Deputy Speaker, on your appointment, and it is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith) and to hear so many other maiden speeches today. They make faraway places such as East Thanet and Lowestoft, with which in fact my constituency has old herring connections, seem closer to us. It has also been a pleasure to hear so many maiden speeches this week from my 35 fellow new Scottish Labour MPs. I realise that that number somewhat brackets the Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Rutherglen (Michael Shanks), who blazed a trail for us. I am delighted to see him on the Front Bench, just as I am delighted to see my hon. Friend the Member for Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West (Martin McCluskey) bar the doors so that everyone has to hear what I am about to inflict upon them.

With your indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker, and my translation, I begin: Mar urram dhaibhsan a thànig romham agus iadsan chleachdas i as mo dhèidh, tha mi togail mu ghuth nam chànain fhèin airson Na h-Eileanan an Iar. In honour of those who became before me, and those who will surely use my native language after me, I raise my voice today for the people of the Western Isles.

The commonest question I am asked in this House, apart from how to pronounce the name of my constituency, is how I manage to travel from Westminster to the Western Isles. Of course, the easy answer is by Tardis, but the honest answer is that here we are a mere hop and a skip away from Glasgow, and then I travel by a small jet—on schedule, hopefully—to Stornoway. As I board that small, tubular jet, I feel almost like a character in “Succession”, but I know that there is gold at the end of the flight.

Of course, we are connected; we are not in the middle of nowhere but at the heart of the Atlantic. We have the wealth of wind that will deliver the benefit of jobs, growth and energy security for this country in years to come. Those Atlantic islands and the western seaboard are what will give GB Energy meaning and reality in that transition from east to west, away from the North sea and away from the myth that we will not be there in another two generations. Two generations of my constituents have earned energy security for this country from the North sea, and two generations more will continue as we make that just transition to renewables.

That will be done with the heft of two Governments—the UK Government and the Scottish Government—and will require the muscle, investment and expertise of commercial developers. Vitally, it must involve the consent, involvement and power of communities. Just as the Labour Government of ’97 established, from the pre-devolution Scotland Office, a community land unit enabling communities to have the means and wherewithal to take over their own land, setting in chain the land reform revolution in the highlands and islands, I am encouraged that this Labour Government are open to ideas such as a community energy unit, to enable communities such as mine to take their stake in that wealth of wind, and create a template that can be used across the whole of Britain. These are themes to which I will return, alongside the unfinished business of land reform—I read today that a highland estate is for sale at £12 million, with carbon capture and the Ponzi scheme of peat restoration attached, and I know that that is unfinished business.

Of course, wild weather and radical land politics are not the only things that the Western Isles have to offer the United Kingdom. There are deep connections to the country and to this place itself. The tide of the Thames that rises and falls outside, marked by Mary Branson’s “New Dawn” high up there in St Stephen’s Hall, is the same tide that covers and uncovers “Sheol an Iolaire”, a tidal installation that I installed in Stornoway harbour, along with my good friend Malcolm MacLean, to mark a wartime tragedy and the loss of a ship of that name.

That same tide that sweeps into the Viking bay of Stornoway also laps Tarbert in Harris, Lochmaddy, North Uist, Lochsboisdale and Castlebay in Barra. That Hebridean archipelago of nine—or is it 10— islands guards our western approaches. Were they to be transposed on to a map of mainland Britain, they would run from London to Sheffield in length—with better scenery, of course. That is why I am reluctant to enter the traditional rivalry between maiden speakers of declaring their constituency the most beautiful in the country: when they come, they will see that there is no competition.

I do not intend to give a Cook’s tour of my constituency, but Barra, the jewel of the Hebrides, is where Angus MacNeil, the former MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, resides: fior Ghaidheal—a true Gael—and a generously spirited man, whose chairmanship of many Committees in this House was testimony not just to his political acumen, but to his ability to befriend people across the Chamber. That is one characteristic of my predecessor that I hope to emulate.

I will not take the House around the whole of the Western Isles, because time is short, but there are some other political monuments that deserve mention. I have no fewer than four former Labour MPs in my constituency on whom to lean for advice: Dame Anne McGuire, the queen of Stirling; Ian Davidson, the former Chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee, who is still campaigning for Labour; Calum MacDonald, the former Labour MP for the Western Isles and our community wind farm expert; and, foremost among them, Brian Wilson, a former Energy Minister, whose counsel I commend to those on the Front Bench, and who has been a guiding light for me since he hired me at the West Highland Free Press as a journalist many years ago.

In passing, I cannot but pay tribute to those above us. I do not mean the angels; I mean the devils in the Press Gallery, among whom I danced for many years as a journalist for the Daily Record and The Glasgow Herald and as a freelance broadcaster for the BBC. Of course, it is Friday and nearly lunchtime, so they are not there. When I was in the Lobby, it was always nearly Friday, and always nearly lunchtime.

In a double transfer deal, which performed that rare feat of uniting the Westminster Lobby and Downing Street, I am joined on these green Benches by my hon. Friend the new Member for Rochdale (Paul Waugh), who was my Lobby roommate upstairs and will now join me here. On the old maps, my constituency might have been marked “Here be dragons.” My hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale slayed one to get here.

I will not detain the House with descriptions of whisky, salmon, scallops that reach Singapore in 24 hours, Harris tweed or beautiful bays, but I remind the Minister that the people of the Western Isles have the tenacity, the wherewithal and the resourcefulness, embodied in the Arnish yard near Stornoway, to act as a stepping stone in the journey to renewables and to clean energy.

It has been a long road from there to here. Many people have helped, and since I have arrived I have had many messages of support, and prayers and passages too. As I come from one of the most religiously observant parts of Britain, that comes as no surprise. One passage, from an old friend, has stayed with me. To save the Hansard reporters, who are probably struggling with the accent, never mind the translation, I will do the task for them. She said: “May your conversation always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to deal with anyone”—biodh ur comhraidh an-comhnaidh grasmhor, air a dheaneamh blasta le salainn.

Seasoned with salt, Madam Deputy Speaker. I like that. I hope that all our exchanges in this House will be gracious and seasoned with the salt air of the Atlantic and our common future, because in this Chamber and in this kingdom, we are all islanders.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call Adrian Ramsay to make his maiden speech.