It would be amusing if it wasn’t so serious.

Right now, we have a UK Tory government treating politics like a private parlour game. UK Ministers are so caught up in their own personal and vicious battles for supremacy, they appear to have forgotten the point of being elected.

Every day sees chaos and confusion. The drama is matched by a sense of drift. What is lacking completely is any sense of grip or focus on what really matters.

By contrast, here in Scotland, we are absolutely focused on our purpose - to govern in the interests of the country and of our communities, here in Glasgow and all across the land.

The priorities of the SNP government I lead are crystal clear. We want Scotland to be the best place for our people to grow up and grow old in and to live, work and learn in. We want our country to be one where people are valued, respected and treated fairly and justly.

This week, I had the opportunity to mark an important milestone in achieving true equality for Scotland’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex community. As First Minister, I apologised unequivocally for past laws which criminalised the act of loving another adult and I apologised for the hurt and harm those laws have caused so many people.

We also introduced a bill to Parliament to right this historic wrong, providing an automatic pardon to men convicted of same-sex sexual activity that is now legal. My hope is that for those men and their families, they can now feel a weight lifted and that for young men today, they will never know the fear of their love being found out.

No-one should be criminalised for loving someone.

And no child in Scotland should ever grow up feeling unloved, unwanted or uncared for.

When children and young people can no longer live with their families, the state takes on the role of their parents. I take seriously my responsibility of being the lead “corporate parent” in the country for the children and young people who grow up in care, including here in Glasgow.

Ensuring that we have the right policies and services to support them matters hugely. And to be frank, there is more we can and must do, which is why I have set up an independent review of care.

Young people who have been in care have told me they want what other children have when growing up – quite simply, to feel loved. It has been a privilege to get to know some of these care experienced young people and to show them that I care about them.

So when a remarkable young man called Callum Lynch asked me to go with him to his graduation from Strathclyde University, I said yes immediately.

Callum is warm, funny and strong – he has had to be, to overcome the challenges he has faced in his young life.

And now he is a graduate, with a bright future ahead of him. Callum is living proof, that with the right support, young people who grow up in care can go on to achieve their dreams. We owe that to all your young people.

Of course, not all learning needs to or should take place in formal educational settings. Sometimes, real understanding of a subject is achieved through practical experience – as our Education Secretary John Swinney discovered on Thursday.

He accompanied almost 200 Scottish school pupils from 94 different schools on a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust. Auschwitz is the concentration and death camp where 1.1 million people, including over one million Jews, were murdered by the Nazis during World War II.

John acknowledged that nothing he had read or thought he knew about the Holocaust prepared him for the sheer enormity and awfulness of what he saw and witnessed. It reinforced his – and my – belief that it is important for young people in Scotland to have their learning shaped by experiences like this.

Remembrance Sunday is another such experience. On Sunday, I had the honour of leading the country in paying our respects to and remembering the sacrifice of all those who have served in battle to protect us. It is hard now that over 100 years have passed to comprehend the scale of the impact of two World Wars on communities the length and breadth of Scotland – hundreds of thousands were killed, injured or psychologically wounded and very few families were unaffected. Today, conflict and war still continue to claim and maim lives of our brave armed forces – they deserve our thanks for all that they do on our behalf.

And pausing every year in our collective act of remembrance, we should also remember to act.

That advice is particularly appropriate for politics and politicians, when cultures and behaviours are under scrutiny and rightly so.

At such times, governments should offer leadership and demonstrate their mettle. Hope, love, equality, fairness and justice – these are the values the SNP government has focused on this week, in our efforts to make a real difference to the lives of Scotland’s people.