4. I warmly welcome Anas Sarwar to his place in the chamber.

There may have been eight hours of questioning yesterday, but there are still areas of outstanding concern: forgetting about a meeting, having a different recollection of another meeting, keeping meetings from the permanent Secretary and not acting swiftly on a claimed leak of a complainer’s name. However, the First Minister is right that it is for the Committee on the Scottish Government Handling of Harassment Complaints and for the independent investigator to untangle these matters.

There is, however, one lesson that we should all be able to learn today. It should not take a threat to the job of the Deputy First Minister before the Government complies with the will of the Parliament to release the legal advice that it voted to have released months ago. Those who worked for decades to establish the Scottish Parliament did not do so for that to be flouted by a belligerent and secretive 14-year-old Government that is more interested in defending itself than in aiding the process of democracy. Why can the First Minister not see that that needs to change?

I am afraid that I will have to agree to disagree with Willie Rennie in some ways. After the parliamentary votes, the Deputy First Minister had a process of discussion with the committee, which led to the committee having access to summaries of the legal advice that the Government had had. Earlier this week, that advice was published.

There is a really important principle underpinning the need for Governments to be able to take proper legal advice and for maintaining the confidentiality of that advice. Governments throughout the United Kingdom and indeed much of the world rely on that principle, too. There are many lessons to be learned here—I do not dispute that—but we must learn the lessons in the round, and the Parliament has a role to play in ensuring that some of the principles that are in place for the good governance that any Administration in the future will need are properly respected and given their place.

I am disappointed at the First Minister’s digging in on this matter. It has been two weeks since the Parliament voted for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s education report to be published. The First Minister said that we should judge her on her record on education, but that cannot be done if such an important report is hidden from the voters at the election. The Government has the report, but the Deputy First Minister has still not released it. Do we have to threaten another motion of no confidence in John Swinney to force him to respect the will of the Parliament?

The First Minister:

It seems that the Opposition wants to pick and choose the principles that it wants us to abide by. There is a really important reason why Governments must have the ability to take confidential legal advice, but Willie Rennie is now also asking us to dictate to an independent organisation, the OECD no less, what the timetable for the publication of a report that it has been asked to produce should be. I am pretty certain that, if we were to do that, Willie Rennie would be one of the first members to get to his feet in the chamber to say how outrageous it was that we were intervening in an independent process that we had asked the OECD to undertake.

There are a range of principles here that Governments must abide by, and we will continue to do that in the overall interests of the good governance of the country. Thankfully, perhaps, the people of Scotland will get the opportunity in a few weeks’ time to cast their verdict on all this. Then, all of us who are participating in this session—with one exception, of course—will put ourselves before the Scottish people, and the Scottish people can have their say and make their verdict. That, of course, is the verdict that we should all respect and abide by.