The day after zero new deaths were recorded, the above headline is a bit grudging. It reminds me of the day I took a neighbour round the new campus building where I worked.
Passing my door, with a wee sign saying ‘Dr John Robertson‘, he sniffed and remarked: ‘I see they gave you one of those.’
I’d worked hard for that PhD.
Have Scotland, its government, its NHS and its people, done nothing to earn this reducing death rate? Is it just fate? Is the writer, based in England, with 77 deaths that day, just a bit annoyed?
There is much evidence that the lower death rate has been earned.
Scotland has a far higher base mortality rate than England and that despite that coronavius deaths are lower.
NHS Scotland has a higher staffing ratio.
Scotland’s hospitals with their in-house cleaning did not have mass Norovirus closures last winter as NHS England did.
NHS Scotland has a vastly superior A&E performance.
Scotland’s 50 unique coronavirus assessment centres kept infected patients away from GP surgeries.
Urban Scots have obeyed the social distancing rules more than their counterparts in the South.
I have the evidence for all these claims. They’re easy found. Any half-baked health correspondent will have the necessary research skills.
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
Probably the weirdest analysis of Nicola vs Boris you’ve ever read –
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18500195.guy-stenhouse–comparing-boris-johnson-nicola-sturgeon-interesting-exercise/
Not surprising though when you find out at the end of the article that the author used to be known as Pinstripe, their former super-libertarian SNP_bad columnist. I don’t know why the Herald ever employed Pinstripe.
Actually, the relative merits of the Herald and Scotsman in this area are surprising. Pinstripe, recently unmasked as Guy Stenhouse, is worse than a mixture of Bill Jamieson and Brian Monteith – whereas I’d rate the Herald as a wee bit more indy-friendly than the Scotsman.
And, on business/economics, the Herald is streets ahead with their business columnist Ian McConnell who rates way above Bill Jamieson and actually seems to have a decent understanding of economics – whereas the the Scotsman hands that area to Bill Jamieson, who may be “good” at discussing the stock market, but is no economist.
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Yes our NHS is superior to the underfunded English partly privatised NHS but will we still have our NHS after Brexit?
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I am sure that many of us will have known people, had bosses, colleagues, neighbours, etc who, no matter how good something was our how kind something had been would find something, however small, with which to damn the entire thing!
The late Scottish poet, Alistair Reid, wrote a poem about such an attitude. It ends with the line: “We’ll pay for it! We’ll pay for it! We’ll pay for it!”
Since they got the heave-ho in 2007, it has been the knee-jerk response of Labour in the Scottish Parliament.
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Noticed that headline this morning and thought it was weird, praise can’t be given outright , with their agenda we know that , so why give it a mention at all , most of the rest just ignored the zero deaths as expected , trying to hold on to as many readers as they can I think ! .
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This comment has nothing to do with the topic of this piece.It applies to the subsequent piece about Heidegger, but, for some reason the system is saying that what I have written is a duplicate and won’t accept it.
Yours, in frustration:
“Thanks for this. Heidegger has long proved to be problematic amongst philosophers, particularly those with a humanist, communitarian, even liberal stance. He was, of course a Nazi and proud of it and was wholly unrepentant about it. However, as many have, often through clenched teeth, accepted, he was pretty good at the practice of philosophising. The journal, Philosophy Now did a feature on him last year, with several essays from a variety of philosophers. Hannah Arendt, for example, was influenced by his methods.
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf had a superb voice and was one of the greatest opera singers there has been. Because I and many others enjoyed her voice, does that mean we are expressing support for National Socialism? Jean Jacques Rousseau informed much thinking on child centred education, but he was a physical abuser of children because he could not get them to do what they were tellt. Paul Gascoigne was a footballing genius, but he was also a wife beater.
Many right wing politicians and journalists started out as Marxists.
I know that McLuhan claimed that medium was the message (or massage), but, do the messages not have some validity independent of whom put them forward?
Personally, I think that, on the whole, media studies in schools and universities has had a positive influence by demythologising and deconstructing what it produces. After all, is that not what this site is about?”
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