 The next item of business is a debate on motion 987, in the name of Nicola Sturgeon, on appointment of junior Scottish ministers. I shall invite the First Minister to move the motion. I then intend to invite each party to make a short contribution. I call on the First Minister to speak to and move the motion. Thanks, Presiding Officer. It gave me great pleasure to rise to move and support the motion in my name that Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater will be appointed as Scottish junior ministers. My statement earlier set out the reasons for and the detail of the co-operation agreement struck between the Scottish Government and Scottish Greens. Those appointments will deliver a key element of that agreement. By approving those appointments today, Parliament will make some history not just in Scottish politics but across the UK as a whole. This will be the first time that green politicians have entered national government in any part of the islands. Our co-operation agreement commits us to a raft of commitments necessary to steer Scotland through the challenges that we face. Action to support tenants and tackle poverty plans to reform public services, investments to accelerate our transition to net zero and create green jobs and so much more besides. The ministers appointed from the ranks of the Greens will now share their responsibility but also the great privilege of delivering on this bold, ambitious programme. Patrick Harvie will take on the role of minister for zero carbon buildings, active travel and tenants rights. Patrick has of course been an MSP representing the Glasgow region since 2003. During his time in politics, Patrick has served as the convener of the Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee. He is, I believe, the longest-serving party leader in the Scottish Parliament. He is also a passionate and effective campaigner for the causes that he believes in. I personally worked closely with Patrick during the 2014 referendum, and that experience makes me genuinely enthusiastic about the opportunity to work with him again this time in the Scottish Government. His wide-ranging brief, including Active Travel, Energy Efficiency and Tenants Rights, gives Patrick the task of leading and implementing, together with his ministerial colleagues, some of the most significant transformations that we need to make to tackle the climate emergency. Lorna Slater will become Minister for Green Skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity. Amongst her responsibilities, Lorna will be tasked with driving a green industrial strategy, helping people to acquire the skills that they need to benefit from the transition to net zero, creating a more circular economy and working to protect our natural environment. Lorna was born and brought up in Canada and, after earning a master's degree in engineering, moved here to Scotland in 2000. Since then, she has been working as an engineer and then a project manager in the renewable sector, which included working on the world's biggest tidal turbine. As such, although she may be relatively new to Parliament, Lorna brings formidable professional experience. She has not only been working in one of the key industries powering our greener future, but her project management experience will also serve her in good stead in ministerial office. I have complete confidence that both new ministers will make an excellent contribution to the Scottish Government. Patrick Lorna and myself and the rest of the Scottish ministerial team are ready to get on with delivering our ambitious commitments and building a fairer greener Scotland. I now therefore formally and with great pleasure ask Parliament to support the appointments of Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater as Scottish junior ministers, and I move the motion in my name. When the deal was announced, it confirmed that the Greens had finally given up any pretence of being an opposition party. For years, they propped up the SNP, backing John Swinney whenever he failed miserably, rubber stamping budget deals in exchange for a car park tax and not much else. Just as we warned at the time, if you vote green, you really get SNP yellow. However, instead of fronting that up for what it is—a coalition—the Greens wanted to have their cake and eat it. Somehow they were still trying to pretend that they were an opposition while they were in government. When Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater accepted ministerial positions in the Government, they wanted to keep asking that same Government questions at FNQs. They wanted to have opposition debating time so that they could do the Government's bidding for them. That is why I am pleased, Presiding Officer, that, like those of us on those benches, you saw through that and have ruled accordingly. Of course, all of this was an effort by the Greens to rig the Scottish Parliament by pretending that this coalition is something else, even though their own constitution defines it as exactly that, and what a coalition of chaos this will be. That is exactly why the Scottish Conservatives will be voting against the Green members becoming ministers today, because the Greens are a serious threat to Scotland's economic recovery. At First Minister's question time, right after the election, we said that the SNP had to reset its relationship with the business community. I know that the First Minister is on her phone just now. I do not know if it is to business leaders or if she really speaks to business much at all at the moment. I can assure her that that is not the reset that businesses in Scotland wanted. In fact, it is the exact opposite. The SNP has brought extremists into government in the middle of an economic crisis. The SNP does not want to hear this, but the Greens are extreme and they have made it clear themselves. Patrick Harvie said that successive UK and Scottish Governments have shared an ideological belief in the pursuit of endless economic growth. Lorna Slater has rallied against endless economic growth and attacked it in their manifesto. For once, I hand it to the Greens. They have nailed it. My party has pursued endless economic growth and we continue to do so unashamably. We have pursued more jobs, more businesses and I cannot quite believe it that the Greens have rumbled us. We do want hardworking people to have more money in their pockets. I just do not understand why Nicola Sturgeon and her Government do not. We pursue endless economic growth because it provides extra funding for our schools, for our hospitals, for our public services. Let us look at what the Greens really mean when they criticise endless economic growth. They want our economy to go backwards. That means businesses shutting down and people out of work. At the heart of her Government, Nicola Sturgeon has introduced an anti-jobs, anti-business ideology, with people who hold the most extreme economic views of any Scottish Government minister since devolution. If SNP members think that is a laughing matter, shame on you. Lornais later wants Scotland to have a totally different tax structure. From the recent SNP Green budget deals, we know that that means tax rises. She warned the oil and gas industry, which supports 100,000 jobs, to transition or die. She has said that it is not possible to run out of money in the middle of an economic crisis. Nicola Sturgeon has made her an economic minister. Those are not just slips of the tongue. The Green Manusbesto had proposals to stop people selling their homes unless they could pay for costly refurbishments. Stop petrol and diesel car sales in just a few years. Stop building all new roads. Any SNP member listening to the First Minister trying to dodge questions about the future of the A75, the A77, the A9 and the A96 will be butting their head in their hands. Those are not serious proposals in the Green Manusbesto. They are a joke, but now, thanks to Nicola Sturgeon, they are government policies. She can try and distance herself from those outrageous positions, but she has brought them into her government. She said earlier that the coalition was a leap of faith, but those appointments are reckless in the extreme, and the Scottish Conservatives strongly oppose them, and we will not vote for them today. I would like to welcome Patrick Harvie and Lauren Slater to their new roles, but I fear that they will very quickly realise that the SNP's rhetoric does not match reality. I think that they will also very quickly realise that the divider-in-chief can only act at the great unifier for so long. I think that they will also come to realise that co-operation to Nicola Sturgeon means rolling over and doing what you are told. In terms of ideas for government, we did the Government to do £15 an hour for care workers. They said no. We did want them to double the Scottish child payment. They said no. Although when we asked the SNP to be more ambitious with the job creation scheme, we did not mean finding jobs for their pals in Parliament. That was not quite the green shoots of recovery that people of Scotland were looking for. Frankly, that is not a new development or a new period in the governance of our great country. That is merely the final confirmation of the same coalition of cuts between the SNP and the Greens that has hammered Scotland's public services for years. Although I appreciate Patrick Harvie and Lauren Slater's success in achieving for themselves some of the longest job titles in 21st century politics, serious questions need to be asked about why those roles could not be performed under the previous ministerial structure. They should be replacing existing ministers, not adding to the ministerial pay bill. However, the elevation of Lauren Slater and Patrick Harvie to ministers comes with a substantial price tag for the Scottish taxpayer. There are now eight more ministers in government than when Labour left office, and the ministerial wage bill is now set to exceed £1 million a year for the first time since devolution. Over £2 million is now set to be spent on maintaining the Government and the ranks of special advisers that it employs, not to mention all those hundreds of press officers. There are now more press officers in Scotland than perhaps journalists themselves. The people of Scotland can be forgiven for feeling that their Government is out of touch and short changing them. Ignored by the Government as local libraries, swimming pools and museums across Scotland closed their doors due to cuts signed off by this very Government, no more can Patrick Harvie vote for cuts in this Parliament to local budgets and then stand outside the very libraries that his cuts helped to implement and protest against them. We are now just a couple of months away from COP26 when the eyes of the world will be on Glasgow, but already some of the most prominent climate activists have expressed their pessimism about what the summit will achieve and have cast doubt on this Government's pretensions to be a leader in the fight against the climate crisis. I want COP26 to be a turning point for Scotland and the rest of the world. Future generations need it to be. The First Minister is shouting from the sidelines, but I do not think that two green MSPs are going to quite be the great change that the global community is looking for. That is why I want us to come out of COP26 with a truly historic Glasgow agreement, the moment that the world turns its warm words into meaningful action to confront the climate crisis. That is, yes, the Scottish Government, it is also the UK Government but, frankly, it is also global governments turning their words into actual action so that we can confront the climate emergency. We keep being told that we have less than 10 years to confront it. Let's make that our national mission and priority. When the leaders of the world descend on Glasgow, a city that is represented by me, Nicola Sturgeon and Patrick Harvie, they will be entering a city in the grip of a dangerous and spiralling waste crisis. We are cleansing workers. Cleansing workers are shamefully compared to the far right by an out-of-touch city leader. You are right, First Minister, that is ridiculous. Instead, I want them to see a country focused on the urgent issues at hand, not fighting over the constitution. It is shameful and she should address that directly with a leader of Glasgow City Council. Those appointments today are more about how the Government and Nicola Sturgeon looks than actually what it delivers for the people of Scotland. After 15 years, the people of Scotland deserve better. When Robin Harper became Scotland in the UK's first elected green parliamentarian in 1999, he reflected on how, at the turn of the last century, the politics of change were represented by the colour red and that the colour of the 21st century must be green. This afternoon, we will take our first place in government, the first greens anywhere in the UK to do so. We sometimes overuse the word historic in politics, but this is a genuinely historic moment. A new party, a new movement, a new politics is entering government. That has happened fewer than half a dozen times in the last century. Patrick Harvie will be, to the best of my knowledge, the First Minister for Tenants, who was himself evicted by an unscrupulous landlord. In fact, I think that he is the First Minister to have tenants in their job title. He will be responsible for delivering the most ambitious tenants rights agenda seen anywhere on these islands for decades. Patrick has been integral to the development of the Scottish Greens into a party capable of taking this step today. Having been taken along to ecology party meetings as a kid by his mum Rose to joining a Scottish Green party that had about 300 members as an adult, to the rainbow parliament of 2003, the long decade of being just one of two green MSPs and the remarkable progress that we have made in more recent years. Just days after the IPCC issued its code red for humanity, the need for radical transformation of our economic and social systems could not be clearer. I know that Patrick will take that fierce sense of urgency with him into government and apply it across all of his portfolio responsibilities. Having known him as long as I have, I feel that I owe Patrick's new Government colleagues a word of warning. If you did not know much about obscure 1970s science fiction before now, please be ready for that to change. I am not just talking about Dr Who, but you should probably swat up on that. With Patrick at least, a growing Netflix watch list is the most that you will need to prepare for. Lornaus later's new colleagues though will sooner or later end up on the trapeze. It is hard to think of someone more qualified to take on the role of minister for green skills and industrial strategy than Lorna, a renewables engineer who was until just a few weeks ago a key member of the team who delivered the world's most powerful tidal turbine here in Scotland. Lornaus later brings real industry experience and expertise into Government. Lornaus knows exactly what is required to deliver a just transition, because that is exactly what she was doing until she was elected to this place. I know personally just how committed Lornaus is to getting the job done. For years, we have worked together to develop our party, including as conveners of its operations committee. One of those truly sought-after positions, whereas you know, Presiding Officer, you get all of the blame but none of the credit. Our recent electoral success, and particularly the election of a green group, where the majority of members are women, is in no small part down to Lornaus' incredible project management skills, her patience and her stubborn determination. I should say briefly, Presiding Officer, that it is quite extraordinary to see the Tories come to this chamber today to accuse others of extremism. Douglas Ross has now had more than a week to apologise for his use of a homophobic dog whistle in response to our announcing this co-operation agreement, but yet again today he has failed to do so. The real hypocrisy is in the accusation that he levelled at the First Minister. Only two members of this Parliament have ever allowed an extremist party, a homophobic and a misogynistic party, to hold sway over a Government, and they are sitting on the Conservative's front bench today. Douglas Ross and Stephen Kerr were enthusiastic supporters of their party's cosy relationship with the DUP. Those of us who are committed to working together in the interests of people and planet will be taking no lessons from the extremist enablers on the Tory benches. This is a moment for 48 years in the making for the Greens. We take this step because of the steps taken before us by Robin Harper, Rose Harvie and so many others. I am so very excited to see what Patrick Harvie, Lorna Slater and their colleagues across the Government achieved together over the coming years. I know that they will serve the people of Scotland with passion and integrity, and I will be proud to vote for Patrick and Lorna's appointment today. Can I start by expressing some dismay? The First Minister regaled the chamber with talk of a new kind of politics. She then went on to wholly ignore my question about national testing and embarked on an infantile attack on my party. All hail the new politics, same as the old politics. As a Liberal Democrat, I will always look for and appreciate consensus in our politics. As such, I congratulate these two parties for having found such common ground. As indeed, I congratulate Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater on their elevation, but I cannot support either the deal that they have arrived at or their appointment as Green Ministers because my party just do not share that ground. The First Minister has attempted to emulate the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, who brought Greens into government in early 2020. She has sought to mirror that coalition with the appointment of the co-leaders of the Scottish Greens to ministerial office. However, there is a pale imitation of the deal that is hatched on the other side of the world, and thin gruel for a Green Party that has, until now, characterised itself as radical. The New Zealand deal was forged under the imperative of the climate crisis. It was significantly signed practically amidst the very smoke of the bushfires that had devastated their Australian neighbours. Ardern wanted to demonstrate to the world that her Government was taking this global threat seriously. As such, the climate emergency formed the centrepiece of that deal. Although that imperative exists for Scottish ministers in equal measure, there is no such centrepiece to this. It will be almost inexplicable to the majority of Green voters who, according to a poll in April, support Scotland's retained place in the United Kingdom, that the central mission of the deal is a second independence referendum. That partnership exists first and foremost to ask Westminster for another referendum and then to use its likely refusal to drive yet more grievance at the expense of all other public policy. It is not a deal with the climate in mind. After years of missed emissions targets, the Scottish Green Party might have driven a harder bargain. Ardern's power sharing agreement went beyond climate and looked to social justice as well, but where her partnerships stretched for new and radical frontiers in social policy, the Scottish deal does not. The New Zealand coalition immediately embarked on a brave new policy of testing pills at festivals to keep drug users safe. However, the nationalist coalition agreement agreed today is entirely silent on Scotland's drug death catastrophe. Far from being radical or extreme, there is very little to this deal at all. I have mentioned national testing, but on issues such as wider education reform, the abolition of the council tax and the decarbonisation of our homes matters, where you would expect green MSPs to want to have a say from the back benches. There is very little substance, and they will not seek to trouble the SNP or subject it to effective scrutiny. There is even a clause in the agreement that demands that the Greens offer and I quote, no surprises to their partners. I can almost hear the groans across the chamber, because from here on in, when it comes to contributions from green back benches, we will be subjected to choreographed softball questions and speeches scripted by Government spads. For there is no question that the Green Party has surrendered entirely, and for the life of this Parliament, their opposition status. Nicola Sturgeon must be rubbing her hands at having got such a cheap deal. When I think of the Greens in Scotland, I remember the party of Robin Harper, a movement focused on reform and dedicated to challenging the old order of things. Robin never swapped environmentalism for nationalism because he supported Scotland's place in the United Kingdom. I really do not know what has happened to that radical zeal or that internationalist focus. By putting nationalism ahead of the climate emergency, Patrick Harvie and co have revealed their true colours. Those colours look far more like the acid yellow of the party of government than the pride enrolled of the global green movement. That is why the Liberal Democrats will oppose that motion tonight. Thank you. The question is that motion 987, in the name of Nicola Sturgeon, on appointment of junior Scottish ministers, be agreed. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed, therefore we will move to a vote, and there will be a short suspension to allow members to access the digital voting system.