No BBC Scotland breakfast conspiracy? I’ve been feel a lot better thanks Gary

Scotsman today

There’s been some anger about the cancellation of the wee Scottish inserts into BBC Breakfast. Some have suggested that it’s to hide the NHS Scotland coronavirus performance from English viewers. Mind you, the website coverage would support that idea.

However, I’ve noticed a change in me, already. I used to get all wound up at 06:27 as we heard about Scottish drug deaths, a parent claiming their child had been killed by NHS Scotland, a parent claiming their child had been killed by NHS Scotland, a parent claiming their child had been killed by NHS Scotland, a parent claiming their child had been killed by NHS Scotland, a parent claiming their child had been killed by NHS Scotland or an NHS target missed.

I’m feeling less angry now so I thought I’d celebrate this happy new development by looking back to 2016 when I wrote:

The Power of Nightmares: Waking up to early morning bad news on BBC Scotland and fearing the unknown

‘The ‘baleful habitual practices of the miserable mind’ are strongest in the early morning’

Dr R Fletcher, ‘Surgeon to the Lunatic Asylum near Gloucester’ 1833 (p.206) wrote this in 1883. I know it’s not a recent and reliable source, as we used to say in Higher Education, but I think it shows that we’ve known about this effect for some time. Anyway, didn’t Dr Foster go to Gloucester? Never mind. It was no accident that medieval monks and more recently, private school boarders, got started with their religious indoctrination before dawn so as to catch them anxious, fearful and absorbent of the required sense of superiority and deep racial prejudices necessary for the conquest of lesser peoples.

Making these early hours particularly effective for indoctrination, they often follow on from nightmares:

‘Nightmares tend to occur during the early morning, as opposed to late evening with night terrors, and patients usually have good recall of the events of the dream.’ (Science-based Medicine, 2014)

Moving forward to Scotland in the years after Referendum 2014, as we watch the early news from ‘where you [people] are now’, on BBC Breakfast, does the above matter? Well….

‘I would like to re-emphasise the importance of “bad news” in the genesis of psychopathology, as this does not seem to be generally recognised. Bad news, of deaths and other disasters, is not available to our primate cousins who are not equipped to exchange gossip, but has been available to our ancestors over the last few million years since language evolved. Since these ancestors lived in groups of about 150 individuals, the amount of bad news they could generate was limited, even if we add in bad news from neighbouring groups. Now, we have available the bad news of many billions of people. Since news of death or other disaster may presage the nearby existence of a predator or of raiding parties from neighbouring tribes, or of disease, it must have been adaptive for bad news to increase anxiety and promote activities to ward off occurrence, such as increased washing, checking of security arrangements, and the advantageous territorial constriction of agoraphobia.’

See that last phrase there? Is that a way of saying ‘Better Together?’ Is Unionism a kind of agoraphobia, a fear of autonomy and wide-open EU spaces?

19 thoughts on “No BBC Scotland breakfast conspiracy? I’ve been feel a lot better thanks Gary”

  2. All HAIL Boris! All hail BORIS! Hail! Hail! Hail! For he saved us! Hail! The rate of infection *might* be slowing (even though they aren’t doing enough testing to know true numbers,,,). Hail! All HAIL BORIS!!

    Sorry, the GMS propaganda was full force this morning,,, I’m still recovering from it.

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  3. Ah, so true so true

    Now, I don’t remember WW2, but I read a piece ages ago (so can’t remember the detail) that they’d done such a good job of using propaganda to get women working in factories and other jobs normally only men had done before, that their propaganda to put women back in their box to stay at home and care for their menfolk seriously failed. Hah. Up yours government oppression.

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    1. Contrary, it was worse that that. The Government reintroduced the ‘marriage bar’ in many occupations, with trade unions being a major lobbyer for this. It meant that huge numbers of women, including my mother, who had been doing important jobs and doing them well, were forced out because they were married women. (The first breach in this injustice came c1953, when the EIS forced an end to it. And, remember, too, in these days, married women’s income was considered their husband’s income. So, these women were changed overnight from independent women back to being dependent women. It was not until c1976 that my wife was able to make her own tax return and, in those days I was still eligible for ‘the Married Man’s Allowance’. A small part of her pension is based on NI contributions I made during the first 2/3years we were married.

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      1. Well said Alasdair, and a good reminder to folk that it is only very recently (well,,, to some of us, it’s recent,, ahem) women have had some freedom. So many people say (and the MSM in particular) – women have had the vote since 1930! (Even though that was only for married women over 30 yo as far as I remember. ) Not all laws are good laws…

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  4. No pretence anymore.
    The BBC is for Boris and England—England and Boris.
    London and England and Boris–Boris and England and London.
    ( Though they don’t actually say England—that is what they mean).

    Any resemblance to Britain or the UK is entirely coincidental, not deliberate and a mistake.

    Neil MacSpy has a piece in the Herod this morning, stating that :-
    A.-Boris is wonderful.
    B.-Brexit must go ahead.
    C.- Since Boris is wonderful, independence is dead.
    D.- “I (MacSpy), believe in independence”—NO, no, fooled ye. A day early Hunt-the-Gowk ! Though who would believe such p!sh !

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  7. Although it was pretty mediocre, I had been in the habit of listening to GMS, because of the weather and transport updates, which were important for me when I was working and the habit continued. However, I have switched to Radio 3. There was a piece on R3 this morning which reported that there had been a substantial increase in R3 listening ….. and a lot was in SCOTLAND!

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    1. Same here Alasdair, Radio Scotland GMS is good for getting weather and traffic, which is why I stick with it (and I really do NOT like music in the morning), but it can be a strain at times. In some ways it’s my ‘daily dose of BBC’ – I don’t watch the telly and don’t look online at BBC news, so avoid most of it. Some mornings though, it can be particularly atrocious. I had to switch off this morning after waking to … ugh. All HAIL BOOORRRRISSSSSS AAAaaaaarrrrrggggghhhh….

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  8. Not just BBC tho’ John this from Sky news. While they do give a breakdown of the figs per country you will note how skillfully they misquote the nos of actual and confirmed virus cases comparing the 9k fig for those being treated ‘in hospital’ in England with the actual figs for Scot & Wales and exclude N/Ire. But wait the UK fig is 22k so by my reckoning the actual Eng & N/ire fig is nearly 19k not 9k as presented. All I’m afraid to deliberately disguise the true extent from the gullible.

    https://uk.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-another-159-people-die-testing-positive-england-140000671.html

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  9. There is a lot to be critical about the approach of UK government to covid 19.The long initial delay of months before anything was done – first, a COBRA meeting. The useless “herd immunity” stuff and flawed modelling that first did not take account of the number of fatalities that letting it rip would cause and followed that by the worse blunder of excluding from modelling the effect of mass testing, the well-known and well tried method of controlling pandemics.

    Then there was the failure to follow the advice in the 2011 report into policies to be adopted in the event of a flu epidemic in the UK. Among the recommendations not followed was to be prepared by having enough ventilators. It was unacceptable for political reasons relating to Brexit to the UK government to seek ventilators through the EU when that was offered to it. To cover possible embarrassment and criticism over this, there was a lie about missing the email that contained the offer.

    At last, the UK government and the Scottish government are being challenged over the failure to follow WHO on testing for covid 19. The British Medical Journal has entered the fray. It says: “On 24 February, there were nine confirmed cases of covid-19 in the UK. On the same day, the World Health Organization recommended countries outside China with imported cases or outbreaks “prioritize active, exhaustive case finding and immediate testing and isolation, painstaking contact tracing and rigorous quarantine of close contacts.”1

    On 22 March—when there were 5683 confirmed UK cases—Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies programme, repeated the message on the BBC: “What we really need to focus on is finding those who are sick, those who have the virus, and isolate them, find their contacts and isolate them.”

    This is entirely unexceptional. Case finding, contact tracing and testing, and strict quarantine are the classic tools in public health to control infectious diseases. WHO says they have been painstakingly adopted in China, with a high percentage of identified close contacts completing medical observation. In Singapore, Vietnam, and South Korea meticulous contact tracing combined with clinical observation plus testing were vital in containing the disease. This combined with strong measures to enforce isolation for travellers returning from high incidence areas obviated the need for a national lockdown and closure of all schools in Taiwan and Singapore.23”

    https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m1284

    Today, with a low profile R4 at last started to get to grips with the issue of testing. Professor Anthony Costello was invited for a brief interview.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000gtm1 From about 1.34 in.

    Readers here will know that Professor Pollock has been writing to the Scottish government urging it to undertake widespread testing. I have not heard anything that suggests it is able to do so or wants to do so.

    There are questions to be asked about where responsibility about taking this kind of decision lies in an emergency such as this. Control of an emergency is a reserved matter. It seems plain enough that, as Professor Pollock and others have pointed out, a one-size fits all approach is not appropriate

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