JACKSON Carlaw defended Tory austerity yesterday saying it had helped people get into work.

The MSP was taking part in the final election debate of the campaign in Glasgow when he clashed with Nicola Sturgeon, Willie Rennie and Richard Leonard over the cuts imposed by David Cameron.

Startlingly, his defence of the old Tory prime minister came just minutes after Annie Wells refused to defend Boris Johnson.

Speaking on the debate warm-up show on the BBC Scotland channel, the MSP was asked to speak about the Prime Minister’s bizarre behaviour on Monday when a journalist asked him to look at a picture of a sick four-year-old boy forced to sleep on the floor in Leeds General Infirmary.

The Prime Minister initially refused to look at the picture and then took the phone off the reporter, putting it in his pocket.

Wells said: “I will admit that he could have done better. I wouldn’t have handled it that way.”

The Scottish Tory MSP then claimed she didn’t “represent” Johnson.

She added: “I don’t understand his way of thinking. But what I would say is that it’s one thing in this campaign. He could have handled it better.”

Johnson’s behaviour didn’t come up, with the politicians asked about independence, climate change, trust, and the parties’ respective economic policies.

The Tory-LibDem coalition government brought in austerity measures in 2010 in a bid to eliminate budget deficits that had ballooned following the financial crisis.

An estimated 14.3 million people are now in poverty in the UK. 8.3m are working-age adults, 4.6m are children, and 1.3m are of pension age.

Carlaw told the audience at the BBC’s HQ in Glasgow: “I certainly didn’t come into politics to impose austerity but let’s remember what were the circumstances that led to us having austerity in the first place.

“There was a huge financial crisis 10 years ago, and when people say, what did you learn as you go along the road as a politician the thing I remember, because I was a politician in the 1980s, was 4m people unemployed, and when we went into the financial crisis 10 years ago people were predicting we could have seen mass unemployment again.

“So people had a wage freeze, yes there were cuts, all of that was designed to make sure that we did not have millions of people in this country out of work.

“And in that sense we did not we have a record amount of people in work today.”

Sturgeon pointed out that more people were suffering from in-work poverty.

Carlaw replied: “We got through this financial crisis with people staying in work and that is the most important thing.”

He added: “I accept that though we have a record number of people in employment, some people have not actually had ... they’ve had a certain amount of in-work poverty”

A disbelieving Sturgeon told Carlaw that poverty was rising.

She added: “The Resolution Foundation, an independent think tank says that under Tory manifesto plans, child poverty would reach a historic high. That would be shameful and it’s one of many reasons why we should not allow a Conservative Government to have a majority and be able to impose more of that on anybody, not just in Scotland but on the whole of the UK.”

Earlier, the party leaders were asked if Brexit made independence inevitable.

The First Minister said the choice must be available to Scots next year “because Brexit is going to do real damage”.

Sturgeon said: “I do believe that people in Scotland when they get the choice again will vote to be independent, because the last few years have demonstrated to us the price we are paying for not being independent.

“A broken Westminster system has imposed austerity on Scotland against our will and of course is threatening to impose Brexit upon us. Our voice is being ignored, our votes are being disregarded.”

Carlaw insisted: “I don’t necessarily believe there will be a second independence referendum, we promised it wouldn’t be for a generation, and so I don’t think it will be until a generation has passed that we should put ourselves and our country through that again.”

LibDem leader Willie Rennie said the experience of Brexit had put Scots off independence.

“People have seen how difficult Brexit is, how breaking up a union of 40 years, the turmoil, the division, the economic damage that has come with it. We shouldn’t mount chaos upon chaos.”

Leonard said it wasn’t about how the UK Government had treated Scotland but “how the Tory government has treated Scotland”.

A redistributive Labour government would, he argued, reassure Scots.