David Maddox: Remembers the future

I spent part of my morning talking to a group of P7 primary school children (10 and 11-year-olds), about the Scottish Parliament and working here. They were members of a class who were visiting on the Holyrood education programme and it was good to see that the experience of being in the parliament and sitting through 30 minutes of debate had not been an endurance but an interesting experience for them.

I gather some of the class have even expressed an interest in becoming politicians and two of the pupils I spoke to want to be journalists. Another couldn't make up his mind if he wanted to be a policeman or a television journalist and another, who was impressed with the parliament building (until I told him about the leaks and cost), wanted to be an architect.

What it goes to show is that, contrary to popular opinion, it is not the intention of all our youngsters to become footballers, models or reality TV stars. And it should be said that these were not privileged children from a private school, but a pupils from good state primary in Edinburgh.

The experience of visiting the parliament then was a very positive one for them and could help to shape their dreams and aspirations.

The excellent Holyrood education programme which allows for hundreds of school pupils to have this experience each year is unfortunately over subscribed and schools have to book early or not at all more often than not.

Which put a whole new perspective for me on the rather unseemly row yesterday over whether it was right to suspend FMQs or indeed whether the whole day's business should have been cancelled.

Had the SNP got their way (although they claim it was the Presiding Officer Alex Fergusson's idea) and cancelled all parliamentary business yesterday then there would have been nothing but a tour of the building with an empty chamber (pictured above) for those primary school children to experience.

For many that may be their one chance to have that sort of valuable experience and it would have been a shame if they had lost out for want of politicians wanting to make a short sighted decision, which I am sorry to say, seemed to have more to do with headlines than actual sorrow.

As sad as the helicopter tragedy was, people's lives are unfortunately curtailed in accidents almost everyday, yet their deaths are not taken as a reason to bring the business of democracy to a halt.

So while it was appropriate to mark the sad deaths of those 16 men, politicians should remember that life has to go on and that they should remember the living, in particular the children who are our future.