Part of 2. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:39 pm on 19 September 2017.
Well, far from it—I don’t think Scotland is the Shangri-La that is portrayed. There have been real problems in the Scottish education system. There are still issues over the attainment gap, which we have closed and they have not. If we look at health, and we look at the 1990s, it was normal in the 1990s, in the days of a Tory Government, for people to wait two years for an operation. That was normal. People accept that no more—no more. We know that waiting times have been reduced substantially despite having an enormous cut in our budget in that time. We’ve just seen the best GCSE results ever. Scotland has its own education system. You can’t compare their qualification system with ours because it’s so different. We are building schools across the whole of Wales; in England, nothing is being built. We’re proud of that fact. If we look at the economy, our unemployment rate is 4.3 per cent. That would have been undreamt of in the 1990s. We are still attracting excellent investment into Wales—the best foreign direct investment figures for the past 30 years—and that’s because we have a Government that is able to go out and sell Wales. Whatever the politics of that Government, the profile that Ministers have is far, far greater than was the case in the 1990s, and that’s why we’ve been so successful in bringing jobs into Wales.