FMQs sketch: no laughing matter

But occasionally there is a week when no one is laughing, and no one should be.

Day-to-day matters of policing, the BBC and GM crops all popped up today, but all were eclipsed by the Syrian refugee crisis.

Like the nation, the proceedings were haunted by the image of a toddler facedown in the surf of a Turkish beach, the double-victim of war and political paralysis.

This hellish inversion of a universal holiday snap - a child at the seaside, but drowned instead of playing - had many MSPs close to tears.

Labour’s Kezia Dugdale spoke of “women in the sea desperately trying to keep their babies afloat, fellow human beings left to suffocate in the backs of lorries” as she urged action.

Nicola Sturgeon, her voice cracking, said she had been “reduced to tears” by the boy’s picture.

She was also angry at the “walk-by-on-the-other-side approach of the UK government”.

Its refusal to join EU resettlement efforts was “utterly shameful” - the Tories’ tough line on immigration was “getting in the way of a human response to a humanitarian crisis”, she said.

“We simply cannot walk by on the other side: otherwise that little boy… will just become one of many, many more. We cannot and must not have that on their consciences.”

Labour’s Patricia Ferguson, failing not to cry, was equally eloquent as she castigated David Cameron for turning his back “on the most desperate people on the planet”.

Ms Sturgeon’s rhetoric peaked as she urged the Prime Minister to show some basic compassion and leadership instead of pandering to xenophobia.

Then he might “demonstrate that the proud traditions that Britain has in welcoming refugees have not died in the depths of a Tory debate about immigration, they are alive and well.

“This is a welcoming country and will not turn its back on people who need us.”

It was a sombre, moving, impressive show of collective will in which almost all parties joined the applause; only the Conservative MSPs stayed silent.