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Annie Wells, List Con MSP, for now, campaigning on a platform of drug and alcohol deaths. Today, it was alcohol deaths and the above claim.
You can, with some very simplistic arithmetic, prove the above to be kind of true but to do so you have to:
- Not take account of population growth, aging demographics, or external factors like the COVID-19 pandemic, which drove spikes in 2020-2023.
- Ignore the telling fact that in the first full year and pre-pandemic, 2019, the level was the lowest since 2013.
- Ignore the significant recent post-pandemic fall in 2024, from 1 277 to 1 185, the lowest since 2019, before the pandemic spikes.
- Ignore the University of Glasgow, scientifically undertaken research, published in the Lancet in 2023, which found:
The introduction of minimum unit pricing in Scotland is associated with significant reductions in deaths from alcohol consumption, research has found. Over a period of two years and eight months after the policy was rolled out in Scotland a 13% reduction was seen in deaths from alcohol consumption when compared with an estimate of the deaths that would have occurred without the legislation, using data from England. This is equivalent to avoiding 156 deaths a year, found the study by Public Health Scotland and the University of Glasgow, published in the Lancet and reported in the BMJ. The greatest reductions in deaths were seen in people living in the most socioeconomically deprived 40% of Scotland and in men.
https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p672.full
It’s clear why Wells is making these desperate wee videos. In the most recent poll from Find out Now and the National, the Conservatives are in 6th place on 7% and heading for a near-extinction event. At best, the Tories will get a handful of MSPs and she, in the Glasgow region where Ipsos have them at only 5%, looks like being deselected in favour of the men and or one of the posh ladies.
Please Support Talking-up Scotland at:
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Talking-up Scotland 
I note that , in your above post, you include a wee list of things to ignore but failed to include the most important thing to ignore…….
That would be Annie Wells.
How many deaths were there that resulted from the austerity policy that was implemented by a former Tory-Lib Dem UK government coalition.
Studies estimated it was 330,000 excess deaths in the UK.
Wells is just another Tory branch office member with a selective memory, whose seat at Holyrood in the May elections is , I hope, one that will be (should be) on a shoogly peg.
A complete waste of space.
Liz S
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May I also add that she , Ms Wells , who obviously lacks any political savvy, should really be mainly targeting the Tory party’s biggest political threat in May’s elections…….and that would be Reform UK.
There is a reason why, like Murdo Fraser, she, Wells, does not ever win the constituency seat in any Scottish parliament elections , as it seems that people are not that daft to want either of them to represent them as their constituency MSP……hence why both of them are always the proverbial Bridesmaid and never the Bride.
Based on your above post it may also now be a case of Wells not even being invited to the wedding.……..Ha Ha………if that is, as you state above, she is “deselected in favour of the men and or one of the posh ladies”….or even , dare I say, is removed for someone who can at least articulate a sentence.
Liz S
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