Speeches by Crichton.

“My hon. Friend may well be right about that clock tower, but she will also know that Carlisle will always be a little bit of Scotland, because it was apparently in Carlisle that the Loch Lomond ballad, with its famous lines “You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland before you”, was wr…”

“I thank the hon. Member for that intervention, which allows me to highlight that some 95,000 children in Scotland are to be lifted out of poverty by our Chancellor’s Budget, which got rid of the two-child benefit cap. It is not just in terms of education and health that St Andrew’s children are being failed. St Andrew …”

“I will, if only because the hon. Member displays the best budget cut I have seen this year.”

“I do not think I will. Of course, St Andrew was bilingual, or trilingual or quadrilingual—as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson) pointed out, he is celebrated in Russia and Greece. He appears on the Basque flag, and Basque is the oldest language in Europe. If he and his children were living i…”

“I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) for securing this debate on St Andrew’s day and for giving us the opportunity to take stock of the issues and challenges facing Scotland. I will not detain the House for long, Madam Deputy Speaker, because you caught me on the hop—I had hoped …”

“The hon. Member mentions a national sovereign wealth fund, which the SNP called for, to be funded from oil revenues, in the ’70s and ’80s—”

“And the ’90s, and maybe until today. The SNP Government had the opportunity to put one in place when they auctioned the ScotWind licenses for offshore wind for £700 million—they would have done it for £70 million, but were given guidance on that. They had the opportunity to either invest that £700 million in a sovereig…”

“Does the hon. Gentleman regret that the Scottish Conservatives propped up the SNP for four of those 18 years?”

“That is going into Treasury, but it is not being put into consumer bills?”

“I think you just described GB Energy there.”

“Is that why you put projects into the auction round that do not have planning consent already because you do not know what is going to—”

“Adam, do you have any final thoughts on CfDs?”

“The last panel talked about capital costs stalling us and you are telling us supply chain or uncertainty over contracts could stall us.”

“Tom, there are problems with it, but would you describe CfD as the gold standard internationally?”

“Is the supply chain ready for that?”

“I will keep it brief because time is running short. Before you were interrupted, Ana, we were having this discussion on AR7 and CfDs. There is quite a lot of demand from industry, saying that the budget was not big enough for AR7. How does the Department balance that demand from industry, “If we are going to make this …”

“On CfDs and allocation round 7, the Secretary of State kind of increased the budget after the bids did not come in. Why does he not do it the other way? Why does he not set a low budget and then increase it if he has to?”

“A cheeky last question. Tom, you mentioned the North sea; what would keep us going in the North sea for the next 20, 30 years if companies are facing 78% levies on their profits?”

“So we are locked into that?”

“Michael, to go back to renewables obligations, you said that 16 GW of ROs is going to end quite soon and that 10% would move on to CfDs. Would it make sense to reform renewable obligations or turn it into something else or abolish it?”