I take the opportunity to apologise to the Presiding Officer and the Minister because I will have to leave after my speech to meet visitors who await me. I congratulate Murdo Fraser on securing the debate and on making what I thought was a very fine speech.

As many MSPs do, I lay a wreath every remembrance Sunday. As I did when I was a councillor, I go to the remembrance service in the parish church in my home town of Tain. Why do I do that, when I was born after the second war? My parents were in the second war, but the first world war is a long time ago. There are two reasons why I do so. The first is to do with my late father, who lost two uncles in the first war. Euan Robson mentioned a family that lost all four sons. There is not a family in the Highlands or in Scotland as a whole that was not touched by the first world war. My father lost Uncle Walter and Uncle Arthur, who both died bravely. He never forgot that. He would talk about them and about how it was said in the family that their death hastened the death of their father, who died of a broken heart shortly after the first world war. I have never forgotten that. When I go to Tain parish church, I think about such things and remember my late father for what he said.

Something else happened that brought home to me very directly and in a way that I cannot forget the effect that the first world war had on people's lives. When I was about 12 or 13, I was sent to stay with two elderly sisters in Tain because my parents had to go away. It was remembrance Sunday when they told me the story of how their brother, Ian Mackenzie, had been killed. He had fought with the Seaforth Highlanders right through the war, but was killed in its closing weeks just before the armistice on 11 November 1918. They talked of his brilliance. He was the son of the town clerk in Tain, who had gone all the way from a wee Highland town to Balliol College in Oxford, where he had been one of the brightest of his generation. I am slightly ashamed to say that as they told me about him, the tears poured down their cheeks. To them, although it had happened many years earlier, his death was as yesterday—he was their beloved elder brother. As we all know, as we get older such events are as yesterday. I have never forgotten that.

I accept that members have different attitudes to Europe. In a way, that is why I and many others are so passionate about, if not the European Commission, other forms of links between European countries. We have experienced the longest period of peace in Europe's history. Some would say that Europe has the most sophisticated societies in the world, but they are also the most bloodthirsty, in that their citizens have been given to killing each other for many hundreds of years.

I will close on a lighter note. When my Great Uncle Walter's will was read in 1918, to my family's concern it transpired that he had left what little money he had to children in Canada. He had never married, but he had worked in Canada before the war, so I obviously have cousins there. I do not know them and they do not know me, but I wish that they knew how brave their grandfather had been.

As Euan Robson said, it is right that we remember such events and that we teach future generations about them. We would be insane to forget history. I again congratulate Murdo Fraser on his motion.