Stephen Gethins

It is a pleasure to be with you this morning, Sir John. I congratulate the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing the debate and on making the points that he made. The hon. Member, like other Labour Members, in particular, seems to like talking about the Scottish Government, who are not answerable to this place, rather than the UK Government, who are. To be fair, I am not surprised. We saw after last night’s debacle that they would rather talk about anything but the Labour Government, who have delivered very little over the past year apart from chaos and a continuation of failed Conservative policies—not much change there. The fact is that this place still has a profound impact on the Scottish Parliament. It is where the majority of its budget comes from and it has a huge impact on the policies that can be pursued in the Scottish Parliament, as the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) will be well aware as a founding member of that institution, which he rightly highlighted. Scotland is still hampered by migration policies and the hostile environment, as we have witnessed recently at the University of Dundee, whose losses are overwhelmingly attributable to the drop in international students as a direct result of those policies.