It’s been a torrid start to the year. The incoming US president is expressing Putinesque territorial ambitions and the megalomaniac weirdo Elon Musk has endangered MP Jess Philips with his disgusting slurs about her.

Public discourse is nasty and dysfunctional, and public figures have rarely seemed so hopelessly incapable of nobility.

So the prospect of the first big Scottish parliament debate of the year, on Tuesday afternoon, did not inspire confidence. Scottish Labour and the SNP are locked into a mortal struggle and this debate, over child poverty and the SNP’s latest budget, seemed to set the stage for point-scoring.

But there still is such a thing as sincerity in politics. Politicians can rise to the occasion as we saw in this debate .

The best speech was by Scottish Lib Dem MSP and former leader Willie Rennie, who eschewed the politics for the personal. “It breaks me every time that I see symptoms of the fact that a child is living in poverty,” he told the chamber.

“Many of us will have seen those when we do our weekly door knocking or advice surgeries: a cold, damp home; clear signs of hunger and desperation; the fact that such children are deprived of the opportunities that others are afforded quite easily; drug or alcohol misuse, which disrupts families and causes enormous damage; and signs of poor health in young people that last for the rest of their lives.”

Read more Rebecca McQuillan

Child poverty, he said, was “not so much a political issue as one of human rights and child rights”. It blights individual lives........

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