SNP MSP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, Alasdair Allan, has welcomed the passing the Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill, following its final vote in in the Scottish Parliament late this afternoon. This is one of the final pieces of legislation to be voted through in the current parliamentary session.

The Bill is designed to simplify legislation to make crofting regulation less onerous, as well as strengthen the role of grazing committees sharing common land and give crofters a greater say in how the land they work on is used.

Commenting, Alasdair Allan said:

“140 years of successive crofting acts have created a complex legal framework that is not currently serving crofting particularly efficiently. So, this bill is a welcome move to simplify some of that picture. I very much hope to see further and more comprehensive legislation soon.

“I would like to thank all the crofters who engaged with the policy making process, from responding to consultations to those who were able to meet directly with the Minister for Agriculture  when he was in the Western Isles last year. I would like to pay thanks in particular to the Scottish Crofting Federation for their efforts in highlighting areas requiring amendments to strengthen the bill, as introduced, and for their direct engagement with me on this.

“I was pleased to have been able to secure a significant number of my own amendments to this bill at Stage 2. These make improvements, such as giving Ministers the power to regulate the transfer of  owner-occupier crofts; preventing a right-to-buy where a crofter is in breach of their duties; the explicit inclusion of ‘enforcement of duties’ in the Crofting Commission’s responsibilities; and introducing a more practical and proportional civil rather than criminal penalty when there is a failure to uphold certain duties.

“Last week, I was then able to bring forward additional amendments at Stage 3, which relate to grazings shares, and giving the Crofting Commission rather than landowners, the final say, on applications for environmental or forestry use of common grazings.

“It felt very fitting that my final speech in this session of Parliament was about a subject as important to my constituency as crofting. I’m very glad we have managed to get this important legislation over the line before Parliament’s dissolution ahead of the election campaign.”

I have had hundreds of emails from constituents about the assisted Dying Bill and many people will already know I voted against the Bill at stage 1. Now people, understandably want to know how I will vote at stage 3.

Now the Bill comes to its final stage in Parliament, I have continued to try to give this bill the serious thought it deserves. Like many other MSPs, the issues that this bill has raised for me are troubling, and I have tried to do them justice.

The way Mr McArthur and many other members have debated this bill has been a credit to this Parliament.

For both sides of this debate, huge questions of principle are clearly engaged. The debate has for many people also awakened memories of their own families’ own most harrowing experiences.

During the course of the bill, I tried to support amendments which I thought might introduce safeguards. But I also tried to avoid making changes that I reckoned would make the bill garbled or land it in court.

Yet, still, I am left looking at a bill now that genuinely troubles me.

One of the reasons for that is the significant holes in it.

I realise there were compelling legal reasons why Parliament had to remove the provisions guaranteeing health professionals the right not to participate in assisted dying.  Those original measures, wise as they were, exceeded the Scottish Parliament’s devolved powers. The best hope now is that those gaps will somehow be filled in by Westminster at some future date.

That prospect may reassure some people. But it does not reassure the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Scotland, who have cited this new uncertainty as their reason for moving from a position of neutrality on the bill to one of opposition.

Many opportunities were passed up to support amendments that might have plugged other gaps. The bill’s movers could, I believe, have reached out, to religious and other charitable institutions by accepting an institutional right to opt out.  They did not, and that now, potentially,  has consequences.

Meanwhile, I was not the only MSP to be genuinely taken aback when the majority in Parliament rejected Daniel Johnson MSP’s amendments. These would have prohibited situations arising where the option of assisted dying was raised proactively by doctors, rather than initiated by the patient.

As a result, we now have a bill that feels, to me, to assume that a conversation between someone with a terminal diagnosis and a doctor is always going to be a constructive experience, in which a range of options will be understood, assessed and placidly discussed. All I can say is I can’t really imagine that this is how such a conversation would go for me.  

And, for older patients from many backgrounds, it is difficult to overstate the extent to which a doctor is still an authority figure. Some people have told me they simply lack the personal confidence to contradict a doctor. Ever.

I recognise that some people will disagree with me. I can at least agree with them that this bill is founded in the vitally important principle of personal autonomy.

However,, for me, it exhibits a very idealised vision of that autonomy. It pictures a world in which people exercise choices without any external forces ever being placed upon them; Like the pressures on a woman in a controlling relationship; or those on someone who nurses the never-uttered fear that living out their years in a care home might cost their children the inheritance of a house.

The bill also seems, to me, to assume that people seek out the help and support they need in their lives, in order to allow them to be assertive about their own rights and needs. In rural and other traditional communities, where the desire to save face and avoid being talked about can be powerful forces, such an assumption is often ill-founded.

I completely accept that families, doctors, nurses, already have to wrestle with deeply distressing end of life decisions. The manner of some deaths already raises questions about human suffering to which I certainly offer no trite answers.

Yet I still have to recall the advice, often given to legislators, that  “hard cases make bad law”.  That, advice is, I believe, not to belittle the hardness – the terrible, tragic hardness - of the situations we are talking about.

Rather, I believe that this maxim is a warning that laws generally prove to have much wider applications than those which politicians originally had in mind.  

The fact is that we now have a bill which is opposed by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society in Scotland, opposed by numerous former presidents of the Royal Societies of Physicians and Surgeons in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, opposed by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Scotland and opposed by Inclusion Scotland.

The Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, meanwhile, has said the bill “infringes the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities”.

Anyone who feels they can see past objections like those, needs to feel very sure about this bill.

I am not. I respect those who have come to a different conclusion, but, I will be voting against it.