Speeches by MacDonald.

“I think it is only BT Openreach, as far as I am aware. Okay, thank you.”

“Thank you. If all three of you could reply to this. We have a major problem in remote Scotland with basically a declining population, particularly of the young. I am the MP for, among other places, Skye and Wester Ross. Skye high school was built for 1,000 and there are only 500 children in it. That is the same up and …”

“Who do my constituents get in touch with to find out what they can do to get decent connectivity? I am obviously not important enough to get decent connectivity. I honestly mean that. We do not have superfast broadband at home. We do not have 4G or 5G, and nobody will take my calls or direct me. What happens if you are…”

“How is that getting on? How is it looking? Is it likely?”

“Mr Robinson, you have been doing an investigation into putting in an additional subsea cable and you are meant to announce in the spring of this year.”

“12. What steps he is taking to support rural homes that use heating oil.”

“In the remote highlands and islands, where mains gas is not available, where we have the highest level of fuel poverty in Britain, where local households and businesses rely on heating oil and electricity, and where much of Britain’s renewable energy is generated, but to minimal local benefit, does the Minister accept …”

“Do you agree that £9 million in total community benefit for the highlands, and £30 million for Scotland as a whole, is a paltry amount for a multibillion-pound industry?”

“I congratulate the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) on securing the debate. I want to speak briefly about mental health charities. Fundamentally, we have an enormous problem in the UK: the public sector no longer funds the mental health sector properly, and the charities cannot…”

“Will the hon. Member consider the impact of defining what a farmer is? Is it somebody who is part time and has another job? Is it a vermin control guy? I do not think we can take out just farmers when considering this, because we are talking about multi-rural employment.”

“All the evidence shows that graduated driving licence schemes work extremely well in reducing the number of serious incidents. I have one more statistic to finish with. In 2024, 1,602 kids aged between 17 and 24 were killed or seriously injured in Great Britain. According to international figures, if we introduced a gr…”

“A year ago in my constituency, Lewis Knox, aged 16, Fergus Ward, aged 17, and Jordan Cameron, aged 17, went off the road and died—no other car was involved. It was an enormous shock for the area. Lewis Knox’s father, Alan, is the head of the ambulance service in the area. He and his wife, Elizabeth, are calling for gra…”

“I met the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales this morning and am meeting the Federation of Small Businesses later. We have done all the modelling and I assure the Minister that our numbers are being checked out by all the experts. I think that the Government might be missing a trick on this one.”

“The Scottish Affairs Committee is doing an inquiry into the viability of high streets. We heard from a professor at Glasgow University who specialises in the subject, and he made an extraordinarily convincing case that Amazon is basically being subsidised by the high street—that Amazon is being hugely undertaxed and th…”

“I have spent a great deal of my life looking at small businesses. There are 4.1 million sole traders or self-employed people in the UK and that £90,000 VAT restriction is a block on building businesses. Were it increased to, say, £250,000 and 10% of those businesses employed people, that would mean 400,000 youngsters i…”

“We have heard about the 78% and the 99%. In north-east Skye we have 3% gigabit availability, and in south Skye we have 4.5%. We are dealing with enormous levels of depopulation among our young, with the number of children under the age of 15 at school halving in the last 15 years. A large part of that is because the pl…”

“May I intervene, seeing that we have been so generous on interventions?”

“I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman could encourage the Prime Minister, or indeed the Minister, to move forward more quickly in committing to increasing expenditure on our defence forces.”

“Given that one of the UK’s core NATO responsibilities is securing freedom of operation in the GIUK gap, can the Minister reflect on what an SNP-led independent Scotland would mean for that task? At a time when hostile states exploit political fragmentation, does he agree that a party that opposes the nuclear deterrent,…”

“Q6. According to the Office for National Statistics, 174,000 people under the age of 35 moved abroad in the year ending June 2025. In the highlands, the problem is especially acute: demographic statistics show that young people are not staying in rural communities and pupil numbers in schools are down by 40% to 50% in …”