Meeting of the Parliament 11 June 2024
I think that every member in the chamber agrees that we must eradicate child poverty, that no child should go to bed hungry and that every child deserves the best start in life. I genuinely do not believe that anyone on the Government benches thinks that that feeling is not held strongly by Opposition members. Likewise, those of us in the Opposition believe that every single member of this Parliament wants to strive to eradicate child poverty.
Like the First Minister, I speak as a father of two young boys, who I admit to having hugged a little tighter and held a bit closer in the past 48 hours, because the strength that young people provide us as families and our society has no barriers. It upsets me to see that so many children in Scotland are disadvantaged by poverty.
On the consensus point, I thank the First Minister for using this as his first debate and for leading a discussion in this Parliament on an important topic for those of us who are elected here and for our constituents up and down the country. I note that he repeated what he said when he was seeking to be First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, which is that eradicating child poverty will be his Government’s single most important objective.
I believe that that is a laudable aim, but I must treat it with a degree of scepticism, because we were promised that closing the attainment gap would be Nicola Sturgeon’s defining mission and that the then education secretary, the now First Minister, would not narrow the gap but close it completely, yet that gap has barely changed at all.
The First Minister’s predecessor, Humza Yousaf, said that he would reduce national health service waiting lists following the pandemic. That was going to be the priority of his Government, but they have grown. A record one in seven Scots is on an NHS waiting list. A previous SNP First Minister, Alex Salmond, promised that the SNP would dual the A9 by 2025—next year—but instead of completing that work on that vital lifeline, it has been delayed by at least a decade or more.
Successive SNP leaders have promised to focus their Government on defining issues but have been distracted by their campaign for independence. The First Minister could set out a very strong and clear signal today that he really means what he has said previously in the chamber and what he has just said in the debate—that eradicating child poverty will be his Government’s top priority—by ensuring that he puts that mission and not independence as line 1, page 1 of the SNP’s manifesto.