Scottish Conservative Party leader's message to Inverness food bank mum
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Scottish Conservative Party leader Ruth Davidson has revealed how she would sign up a mother struggling to feed her children, if they met at the Highland Food Bank in Merkinch, Inverness.
The politician, who was trying to secure votes in the city on Friday, said she would tell the woman there was “light at the end of the tunnel”, that the country’s debts were close to being cleared, and only two more years of hardship lay ahead.
The party leader’s one-day trip included a visit to the city’s global medical diagnostics company Life Scan, drop-ins to several High Street businesses, a mingle with afternoon shoppers, a drink in the North Kessock Hotel, and an evening fund-raiser in Dingwall.
Miss Davidson said her message to people at the foodbank had she visited would be simple: “I get that it’s been hard. I completely understand that. We’ve got a couple more years to go and then we’re through the worst of it, or we go right back to where we started.”
Figures show more than 3000 people in the Inverness area were supported with vouchers from food banks last year.
She said: “If that’s where we were sitting right now, first of all I would thank those who were working in the food bank because I think there are an awful lot of people in lots of different areas who do charitable voluntary work and who don’t get the thanks for it, so that would be the first thing. And to the people who are in there, the first thing I would say is we absolutely in this country have a benefits system that’s designed to make sure that nobody falls through the cracks. What we want to do though is to have as few people as possibly relying on that. That’s why we’re spending extra money to try to help people who are not in the jobs market.”
Forecasters predict the country will be out of the red by 2017 and a report by the independent International Monetary Fund last week suggested inequality was falling in the UK after peaking in 2010.
Miss Davidson insisted the Conservatives in coalition with the Liberal Democrats had managed to turn the economy around.
She added: “The thing that I would ask people to remember is the debt that’s been built up doesn’t go away by itself. And I don’t want it to be our children or our children’s children who has to pay. This is something we can sort out. Let’s not undo all the hard work that we have done.”
