Roseanna Cunningham

Roseanna Cunningham (born 27 July 1951, Glasgow) is a Scottish politician who has been the Cabinet Secretary for Fair Work, Skills and Training since 2014 and is the Scottish National Party (SNP) Member of the Scottish Parliament for Perthshire South and Kinross-shire, having previously represented Perth.

Early life

Cunningham was born in Glasgow and spent her early years living in East Lothian and Edinburgh. In 1960 she emigrated with her family to Perth in Australia, and completed her schooling at John Curtin High School in Fremantle. She became interested in politics while still a teenager and joined the SNP in 1969 as an overseas member. Cunningham graduated from the University of Western Australia in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics, before returning to Scotland.

She worked as a researcher at SNP headquarters from 1977 to 1979 and was a member of the left-wing 79 Group inside the SNP during the early 1980s, but avoided expulsion as she was not a member of its steering committee (future SNP leader Alex Salmond by contrast who served on the 79 Group committee was expelled, whilst Margo MacDonald resigned from the party in protest before she could be expelled).

Scottish Parliament

The Scottish Parliament (Scottish Gaelic: Pàrlamaid na h-Alba; Scots: The Scots Pairlament) is the devolved national, unicameral legislature of Scotland. Located in the Holyrood area of the capital city, Edinburgh, it is frequently referred to informally as "Holyrood".

The Parliament is a democratically elected body comprising 129 members known as Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs), elected for four-year terms under the additional member system: 73 MSPs represent individual geographical constituencies elected by the plurality ("first past the post") system, while a further 56 are returned from eight additional member regions, each electing seven MSPs. The most recent general election to the Parliament was held on 5 May 2011.

The original Parliament of Scotland (or "Estates of Scotland") was the national legislature of the independent Kingdom of Scotland, and existed from the early 13th century until the Kingdom of Scotland merged with the Kingdom of England under the Acts of Union 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. As a consequence, both the Parliament of Scotland and the Parliament of England ceased to exist, and the Parliament of Great Britain, which sat at Westminster in London was formed.

Climate change

Climate change is a change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns when that change lasts for an extended period of time (i.e., decades to millions of years). Climate change may refer to a change in average weather conditions, or in the time variation of weather around longer-term average conditions (i.e., more or fewer extreme weather events). Climate change is caused by factors such as biotic processes, variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics, and volcanic eruptions. Certain human activities have also been identified as significant causes of recent climate change, often referred to as "global warming".

Scientists actively work to understand past and future climate by using observations and theoretical models. A climate record—extending deep into the Earth's past—has been assembled, and continues to be built up, based on geological evidence from borehole temperature profiles, cores removed from deep accumulations of ice, floral and faunal records, glacial and periglacial processes, stable-isotope and other analyses of sediment layers, and records of past sea levels. More recent data are provided by the instrumental record. General circulation models, based on the physical sciences, are often used in theoretical approaches to match past climate data, make future projections, and link causes and effects in climate change.

Land reform

Land reform (also agrarian reform, though that can have a broader meaning) involves the changing of laws, regulations or customs regarding land ownership. Land reform may consist of a government-initiated or government-backed property redistribution, generally of agricultural land. Land reform can, therefore, refer to transfer of ownership from the more powerful to the less powerful, such as from a relatively small number of wealthy (or noble) owners with extensive land holdings (e.g., plantations, large ranches, or agribusiness plots) to individual ownership by those who work the land. Such transfers of ownership may be with or without compensation; compensation may vary from token amounts to the full value of the land.

Land reform may also entail the transfer of land from individual ownership—even peasant ownership in smallholdings—to government-owned collective farms; it has also, in other times and places, referred to the exact opposite: division of government-owned collective farms into smallholdings. The common characteristic of all land reforms, however, is modification or replacement of existing institutional arrangements governing possession and use of land. Thus, while land reform may be radical in nature, such as through large-scale transfers of land from one group to another, it can also be less dramatic, such as regulatory reforms aimed at improving land administration.

Scottish Government

The Scottish Government (Scottish Gaelic: Riaghaltas na h-Alba; Scots: Scots Govrenment) is the executive of the devolved Scottish Parliament. The government was established in 1999 as the Scottish Executive under section 44(1) of the Scotland Act 1998, which created a devolved administration for Scotland in line with a the result of the 1997 referendum on Scottish devolution. The government consists of cabinet secretaries, who attend cabinet meetings, and ministers, who do not. It is led by the first minister, who selects the cabinet secretaries and ministers with approval of parliament.

Responsibilities

The Scottish Government is responsible in Scotland for all issues that are not explicitly reserved to the British parliament at Westminster by Schedule 5 to the Scotland Act 1998; such devolved matters include health, education, justice and policing, rural affairs, economic development and transport. The Scottish Government also has administrative responsibility for some matters where it does not have legislative power. An example is Sections 36 & 37 of the Electricity Act 1989 which allow the Scottish Government to authorise power transmission lines and grant power generation consents.