Meeting of the Parliament 05 June 2024
Presiding Officer, I do not know what you think, but I think that one of the basic infrastructure requirements of any country is to make it easy to get around. It is kind of vital to people and it is certainly vital to the economy. For the country to function, we need to get a few basics right, and chief among those requirements is decent roads. We do not necessarily need more roads; we just need better ones.
World leaders are not queuing up to get advice on that from the Scottish Government—and nor are leaders from anywhere else in Britain—because Scotland is ahead of the game, but only in the number of potholes that we have. Earlier this year, researchers who analysed reports of potholes in 69 cities across Britain, which were registered via FixMyStreet.com, found that Glasgow was the worst, followed by Edinburgh. I see that China has landed a craft on the crater-filled dark side of the moon. It could have saved itself the bother and just come to Glasgow, or to Caithness, where it has been reported that people are leaving because of the state of the roads. Scotland’s roads are so bad that we could almost think that it is deliberate. It is as if we are living in some dystopian experiment led by a faceless Green committee that sits around trying to think of ways to stop us driving.
I do not blame the councils—not even anti-car Edinburgh would actually want its roads to be as bad they are. It comes down to the decline in funding that our councils have had under the Scottish National Party, and it is time that we stopped that.