Meeting of the Parliament 29 September 2016
Thank you, Presiding Officer. I enjoy the poshness of your voice on these occasions.
Late last night—Mark McDonald will appreciate this, as a football fan—I watched a bit of the highlights of Celtic and Man City from Glasgow. Just after that, the news came on. I was surrounded by papers for the debate, the Government’s financial review and so on, but what got me last night was the haunting picture of that young boy from Aleppo who had been gassed in one of the Russian or Syrian attacks on that city. I call it a city, but it hardly exists any more.
I turned back to all the papers that were in front of me, and here we are, all asking for X hundreds of millions for this and X hundreds of millions for that—by the way, I should add that that is not my party’s policy. Quite a lot of me immediately thought that we should be discussing how to get humanitarian aid into that young boy’s life as much as we should be discussing our country. Maybe that was just the moment that I was in as I tried to think about childcare in Scotland; instead, I thought that childcare in Aleppo is a different concept—they are just trying to stay alive.
As Daniel Johnson and the minister said, there is a lot of broad political agreement on the direction of travel that is being embarked on. Liz Smith struck up an entertaining debate about vouchers. I seem to remember that being Conservative policy when I was a candidate in 1999, which probably shows that I am pretty long in the tooth. You probably remember the same policy, Presiding Officer, although you were not advocating it, I should swiftly add.