Professor John Robertson OBA

On a regular basis we see new ‘Scottish’ Labour MPs in Westmonster, serving up lies about their local NHS to feed the PM at PMQs – ‘Does the Prime Minister agree that my local NHS staff are failing?’

Today, the Herald’s top story has ‘more than 629 000 waiting‘. So, this means at most 630 000? Let’s give them that.

For context, to consider how bad or good that headline is, let’s look elsewhere to see if NHS Scotland might learn something.

In the Mirror on 15 May 2025:

More people have come forward for non-urgent treatments and operations after the busiest winter in NHS history. The rise of 18,751 appointments taking the backlog to 7.42 million in England will be a blow to Labour who had boasted of finally turning the tide against NHS waits which had surged for over a decade under the Tories.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/nhs-waiting-list-goes-up-35229374

Once more, with ten times the population, all things being equal, you’d expect NHS England to have around 6.3 million but, as we see, they have 7.4 million, 1.1 million more, 17% waiting longer.