I am delighted to be here.
At a lunchtime speech one usually dispenses with the jokes that are de rigueur for their after dinner equivalent as if to prove that lunch is not for wimps which is a pity since KPMG has offered some fertile territory in the last year on tax law suits – far enough away to be entertaining – but when I opened my newspapers yesterday I rather thought the last laugh was yours since UK income is up an average of 20%.
Powerpoint presentation on Scottish Education - Staying Ahead
University of Strathclyde
I am grateful for the chance to speak in the debate at this early stage in the policy process.
Like others, I welcome the Executive’s determination to modernise Scotland’s planning system.
One of the easiest quips to make about the Scottish Parliament is that it simply isn’t connecting with the business sector – it’s also one of the laziest.
As a general rule of thumb you’ll find anyone using this line is increasingly out of touch with what’s actually going on in and around Holyrood.
Perhaps it was his height, but Donald Dewar seemed to see more than the rest of us.
From way up there Donald seemed to glimpse the Scotland he wanted for us all.
As the opening speaker on the Labour side this afternoon, I do not want to start with the details of the motion but to go back to first principles.
What have we learned in recent years about how we all learn.
Can I start by thanking you for this invitation to open your proceedings this morning.
The Scottish Parliament may be a remote and unfamiliar body to most of you but it is one that has responsibility for presiding over the nurturing of Scottish higher education and I hope you take away this week some interesting insights about how we are evolving up here.
Donald Dewar, Scotland’s first First Minister
click on the link below:
“Follow that,” as one of my colleagues has just said.
I will follow the trend and begin by adding my welcome for Nicol Stephen to his new post.
I am rather glad to be here myself.
Someone in the whip’s office rather mischievously asked me whether I should not now be featuring in our debates on strong and healthy families, to which my response was, “Not yet.”
Today is the last day of term.
Decades on, most of us remember the last day of the school term, which had about it a certain predictability: we could turn up in our own clothes; we could bring a game; if there were any speeches, they were about what we were doing during the holidays; and we got away at lunch time.
As members who are concentrating will know, our strike rate is one out of four-we are allowed to turn up in our own clothes.
There was, of course, another given about the last day of term: even if one had the most Calvinisitic heidie in Scotland, one would not be expected to do any mental arithmetic.
However, today’s debate is really about a clever piece of mental arithmetic concerning whether we are putting our money where our mouth is.
It will relieve the front-bench team to learn that, with a mere 180 seconds left to me this morning, I will focus on just one statistic from the report.
One in three Scots now lives in rural Scotland-although I suspect that, the day after tomorrow, that number will be a little higher.
However, that part of Scotland benefits from two thirds of the total economic development spend.
That is an interesting statistic.
