the skies across Scotland, emergency services are outlining their plans for coping with disorder on bonfire night. Last year, 61 arrests were made and several police officers and firefighters were injured.
Professor John Robertson OBA
BBC Scotland in their BBC Breakfast insert seem to be using the 2023 figures for ‘last year‘, rather than those for 2024, the actual last year.
Wonder why? Here’s what they had to report on 6 November 2024:
Overall, the force said the incidents of serious disorder had fallen this year.
As part of Operation Moonbeam, a police operation launched in 2020 to deal with disorder at this time of year, specialist resources were deployed 26 times on 5 November last year – this year there were 18 deployments. The number of injured officers has also reduced significantly – 62 last year compared to one this year.
Assistant Chief Constable Tim Mairs, gold commander for Operation Moonbeam said challenging scenes had not escalated to mass disorder as it had last year.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wr182e5pko
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Remarkably, they still expect people to pay for this pish let alone believe them.
I wonder how many at Pacific Quay are due for the chop in the latest round of planned “efficiencies”? See if you would only pay for that damned licence 🙂
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O/T We’re accustomed to the BBC and other MSM outlets framing Scotland’s public services negatively. It’s their attempt to undermine the reputation and electoral prospects of the present Scottish Government. We’re accustomed to such coverage being presented without context, without perspective, and without cross-UK comparisons – unless the latter are unfavourable to Scotland.
It is in this context that highlighting assessments of Westminster’s governance of public services by credible sources is relevant. The MSM in Scotland have little interest – little incentive – in exposing Scotland’s electorate to Westminster’s failings in devolved public services.
The Institute for Government (IfG) has been examining the state of the criminal justice system in England and Wales. It’s not in a good place! It seems to be suffering from substantial under-capacity to meet the demands upon it. More evidence of the blight of Westminster austerity! Of course, sustained underfunding of devolved public services in England has negative spillover impacts on the so-called Block Grant to the Scottish Government.
Source: Institute for Government (October 23, 2025) Performance Tracker 2025: Criminal justice system (https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/performance-tracker-2025/criminal-justice/overview )
On criminal justice in England & Wales, the IfG states: ‘Criminal justice is coming apart at the seams and the mood across the sector is bleak. Performance problems in policing, criminal courts, prisons and probation mean services have been in crisis management mode for years. This makes it hard to do longer- term strategic thinking, leads to inefficient use of public money, and creates frayed and adversarial relationships between services and departments.’ (my emphasis)
The IfG reflects on the situation pertaining after over a year of a Labour government in Westminster:
The IfG argues: ‘No part of the criminal justice is currently meeting demand. The best performing of the justice services we look at is policing – but even that is dogged by recurrent problems, with frequent failures on professional conduct and standards and the police inspectorate repeatedly criticising forces for “failing to get the basics right” on things like answering the phone, investigating crime and bringing offenders to justice.
‘In prisons, failure to ‘meet demand’ does not just take the form of insufficient spaces and emergency releases, though these naturally get the most coverage. It also results in prisons failing to provide access to education and courses for prisoners, or even to meet prisoners’ most basic requests, like more toilet roll for their cells.’
‘Inability to cope with demand has led to serious delays across the system. This is most acute in the crown court, which deals with the most serious criminal cases, and leaves defendants, victims and their families in limbo for months or years. But this is a problem well beyond the crown court. The mean case in a magistrates’ court in 2024 took six and a half months to be brought to justice from when the offence was committed – 42% longer than in 2010 and 23% longer than 2016. This increase has occurred at every stage of the process: it takes longer from offence to charge, from charge to the first court hearing, and from the first hearing to case completion.’
The communication challenge is to counter mainstream media gaslighting of the Scottish electorate. And it is to extend and deepen the appreciation that we in Scotland should take no lessons from Unionist politicians on the effectiveness of Westminster on provision of public services. Westminster after all is the ONLY government in the UK will ALL the powers required to deliver – if it so chooses – sufficient resources for the provision of decent quality public services.
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