Support from the Parliament

A quick snap of staff members, one of our lovely volunteers and two politicians, Bruce Crawford (in the blue shirt), MSP for Stirling who is appearing in my blip blog for at least the third time, and Humza Yousaf,the Minister for External Affairs and International Development (purple shirt) appearing for the second. This was taken after the Scottish Parliament debate in support of The Leprosy Mission Scotland. The highlight by far was when, in responding to the motion brought by Bruce, and the statements by MSPs Anne McTaggart, Kenneth Gibson and Nanette Milne (the latter has a particularly keen researcher, who called me for more details on what the Aberdeen fundraisers get up to, which made it into her speech, and it is impressive that they've raised over £60,000 since 1995), Humza described my boss Linda (in the blue and gold silk jacket) as 'tenacious' and 'ferocious'! Watch the debate here for the context to those descriptions (about 20 minutes in), but it's rather entertaining without the context! He's met with her several times in her role as chair of the Network of International Development Organisations in Scotland (NIDOS) as well as CEO of TLM Scotland since he took on the ministerial role. He or someone on his staff seemed to like me calling him 'something of a legend' for those comments on our Facebook page, as the picture and blurb was copied pretty quickly across to his MSP Facebook page. All the better for raising awareness of leprosy and The Leprosy Mission!

I know not everyone likes our parliament building, but I do love it, but am not sure what they are doing to it now, lots of boarded off bits at the moment. But it is all very civilised and pleasant in how things operate (and I do mean that as a compliment), though I was very entertained by the Presiding Officer telling off the MSPs like a bunch of small children for chatting amongst themselves before Decision Time. The Scottish Parliament makes all its decisions at about 5pm each day, with the Presiding officer asking if they agree with whatever the motion is, and if everyone says yes, that is that, no formal vote is required. If a no is heard, then they are asked to vote on their keypads. None of that division stuff like down south!

Linda was telling us that she was at a meeting of the Cross Party Group on International Development last year with Terver Anyor, a TLM staff member from Nigeria who was visiting Scotland at the time, and he was astounded at how Scottish politics works. They had lunch in a wee restaurant near the parliament before the event, and there were quite a few MSPs there, so Linda was pointing them out. One of them was Nicola Sturgeon, the deputy First Minister, so a fairly important person, and as it worked out, she left the restaurant just before they did and walked ahead of them back to the parliament. Terver couldn't get his head around the fact that she was just walking on her own, no security guards, no flash car, just like any other person in Edinburgh, somewhat different to senior politicians in Nigeria, and to be fair I think in most countries, even allowing that we're not technically a state, I doubt this would change even if we do get independence after the referendum in 2014. What a nice, peaceful, wee country and people we are! Well, when sober...

Afterwards some lovely food to help a friend celebrate his birthday. Yum - Crabshakk on Argyle St, so good! And a fairly late night, hence another back blip!