Torcuil Crichton

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Gregor Poynton) for securing this important debate. I join him in welcoming this record settlement of more than £4 billion for the Scottish Government, but I would not want Members to go away with the impression that the SNP Government are somehow benignly mismanaging the economy, carelessly not controlling the NHS or accidentally running down educational standards in Scotland. They are involved in nothing less than the wilful destruction of the pillars of public life and public services in Scotland, because they are neglecting to make difficult decisions. They are putting off the reckoning that there must be in education; we must leave educationalists to educate and teachers to teach. They are also wilfully neglecting transport in the Western Isles and the west coast, and the health needs of constituents like mine. My hon. Friend the Member for Livingston said that one in six Scots are on waiting lists. My constituents in the Western Isles are not on waiting lists; they are waiting for the sound of a helicopter to take them to hospital, because the NHS does not properly function in the Western Isles thanks to the Scottish Government’s neglect and the lack of resources given to it. In the Western Isles, people do not take an ambulance or a taxi to hospital; they take a bus to an airport, to take a small flight to another airport, to take a flight to a mainland airport, to take a taxi to hospital to get chemotherapy. That is the state of the NHS in Scotland under the SNP.