The Scottish Labour branch’s Health rep is headlined in the Herald with a typically desperate attempt to exploit an unavoidable consequence of the outbreak with irresponsible and ill-informed claims which, irresponsibly , can only scare the very patients she pretends to care about.
Cancer death tsunami? Astonishingly she claims this:
More people die from cancer than from Covid-19?
Well duh, yes, because the SNP (as she likes to always put it) lock-down strategy has pushed the Covid-19 death rate down to zero for more than a month now, ever widening the gap with Labour Wales and Tory England.
Crisis in cancer services before Covid-19?
96.1% of patients started treatment within the 31-day standard, compared with 96.5% in the previous quarter and 94.9% for quarter ending March 2019.
Surgery capability?
The WHO in 2019 said: Scotland’s health system is to be congratulated for a multi-year effort that has produced some of the largest population-wide reductions in surgical deaths ever documented.’
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bjs.11151
AND of course missing from Lennon’s argument, the reasons why cancer patients were kept away from hospitals?
Cancer treatment in hospitals weakens the immune system making patients particularly at risk from death by Covid-19 and travel to hospitals increases that risk further. What on earth does Lennon think should have been done differently then?
As for the planned cuts designed to keep those same patients safe, while re-introducing the more urgent surgery safely, she does know that the virus is still with us?
Footnote:
Fret not
The likes of her and comrades
Are about to become museum pieces
The more their poisoned tongues wag
The quicker that their certain fate shall befall them
And offer a parting piece of advice
Study the recent polls
72 % of the younger generation support
Indy and heading for the polling booths
Whilst what is left of the Union support
Is heading for the inevitable grave
And My Dear Monica you now have one foot in the polical grave
Oh dear dear me even the Sammaratins
Can not possibly help you
And when we say repent
Your only reply is forever
I know what you meant
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That good man, Tom Devine has an excellent analysis of Scottish Labour’s problems. A kind of long, slow cancer eating it away.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/03/strange-death-labour-scotland
“In the 1990s, as a university teacher, I began to notice a steady and then increasing drift, among brighter undergraduates with a political interest, away from Labour, to which their parents and grandparents had given loyalty for so long, towards the SNP. That trend has predictably accelerated in recent years as issues of identity, devolution and then independence came into the Scottish political mainstream.
For many of Scotland’s youth now, nationalism is cool and Labour is old hat. A generation of potential leadership talent for the party is in the process of being lost and that quality will be irreplaceable.”
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The article is a handy addendum to Mr Gerry Hassan’s “The Strange Death of Labour Scotland” and brings it up-to-date.
The Labour Party in Scotland, after 2007, sank into baleful, resentful oppositionism, fermenting in the bile of rage that their ‘right to rule’ in Scotland had been denied by the people – the bastards! And, although I did not hear the word, the contempt many had for their former voters was rancid.
Sadly, Ms Lennon’s statement is an example of this. Like most politicians of the British Nationalist kind, used to their splenetic utterances being passed on unchallenged by the Scottish media, when they are actually challenged, even mildly – because, even BBC Scotland feels it has to put on at least a show of ‘even-handedness – they begin to stutter, and fall back on shallow slogans or try to point to something distracting.
Many are just incapable of putting together a nuanced, insightful argument, which is Professor Devine’s point about the loss of politically involved young people from the Labour youth ranks.
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Get some sleep Mac.
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She Warks Hard For The Money (Donna Summer)
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Lou Reed springs to mind…
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