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EXCERPTS
The [Scottish National Party] yesterday pledged itself to a child care system along the lines of Scandinavia, even though the cost could be as high as a billion pounds a year.
Fiona Hyslop, the shadow minister who recently gave birth to her third child, made a passionate plea for the country to go down the road of being prepared to pay for child care on the basis of both social need and economic justification.
"It is not just a social policy issue, but one which has a hard, raw, economic underbelly," she said, adding: "Children are our future, a truism, I know. But children also have their own present, and for far too many that present is about poverty and deprivation."
She spoke out in favour of a national settlement for nursery nurses, but it was on the broader question of a new national child care system that she claimed Scotland could be transformed. An independent Scotland would have to decide between giving grants to alleviate poverty or taking measures to eradicate poverty.
She said that with young couples facing student debts of £30,000 and the prospect of buying a home, was it any wonder that the country faced a low birth rate? Every other European country had a better system of child care, from Italy and France to the Nordic countries, said Ms Hyslop.
Seconding her, Adam Ingram called it an enlightened and progressive policy.
- reprinted from the Glasgow Herald