From Insider, today: Sentiment amongst Scottish businesses is showing signs of improvement as lockdown restrictions begin to ease, according to a survey of Scottish companies. The Addleshaw Goddard Scottish Business Monitor, produced with the Fraser of Allander Institute, also found that the volume of business activity is expected to recover significantly over the rest of the year, despite the economic uncertainty. and: However, there is encouragement to be found in the survey data. Nearly half of companies say they expect no change to their workforces and 61% of companies described their cashflow position as secure or very secure for the … Continue reading Business activity expected to recover significantly

Back again as just Hughie, the Scotland in Union covert writing group member, seems to have lifted my sources from repeated rejections of the argument that hospital discharges caused the care home infections. We seem to agree that they were inadvertently caused by agency staff untested on arrival in care homes, often from as far away as Kent. The research is here: https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2020/07/29/why-were-hospital-discharges-into-care-homes-only-dangerous-in-scotland/ But then, astonishingly, he thinks the Scottish Government was to blame for not testing them even though they were bussed in by profit-seeking corporations, making up to £1 000 per week for a resident. Might the care … Continue reading Prof Pennington lifts my research and then misuses it to blame Scottish Government

By Alex Marshall Its not even ‘HAD’: ONS v Euromomo Excess mortality Z score indicates how much excess deaths there are per head of population looking at euromomo’s graphs: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#z-scores-by-country I’ve copied the maximal Z scores for the epidemic in some european countries: spain 43.58england 39.6france 24.31belgium 24.29wales 18.9italy 16.65scotland 15.92sweden 12.93 The base width in weeks is about the same for each country’s hump. As you see Scotland is way down the list. It has only been in 3rd place in 2020 weeks 19 and 22 long after the peaks . I wonder why ONS chose these weeks for … Continue reading Scotland had the 3rd highest Covid-19 death rate in only 2 weeks out of 28 but the ONS chose those for media consumption

Our appalling MSM cling desperately to the corpses from the initial coronavirus surge, sucking on the draining lifeblood of faded statistics That headline is a lie. Scotland had the third highest rate of excess deaths in Europe but no longer does. This perverse inverted pride is sickening. Get up to date! Leaving how we got here for another time, Scotland has had NO confirmed coronavirus deaths in the last two weeks and only six in the last month, just over 1 per million. England has had well over 2 000, 30 to 40 times higher per capita! Scotland has with … Continue reading HAD! Some viewers have been…

Reader George S Gordon alerted me to this. All feeds welcomed! If you try to argue that Scotland is becoming a fairer country than its big neighbour, the MSM media and opposition politicians will be infuriated at this display of ‘unjustified exceptionalism’ even anti-Englishness, somehow. Talk of this kind here, has been a bit sidelined, for obvious reasons, but this announcement, to my knowledge ignored elsewhere, is special. Do share it. Opinion piece by Cabinet Secretary for Social Security, Shirley-Anne Somerville. From this week, thousands of families across Scotland will start to get letters telling them they are entitled to … Continue reading A Fairer Scotland? Scottish Government tries to do it better on poverty but ‘our’ media is silent

Lisa Summers repeats the myth that the Scottish Government in the face of SAGE advice, the UK Government’s refusal to consult on the 4 Nations approach, the opposition and media embrace of that UK-wide approach and the late devolution of the actual power to do so, was nevertheless responsible for the timing and this the early death toll. This is an unconscionable [shockingly unfair or unjust] lie. BBC Health has reported the ONS findings revealing England to have had the highest level of coronavirus deaths in Europe. These are the total figures for the period from between the end of … Continue reading Reporting Scotland’s high coronavirus death rate: That was then but this is now

By Brenda Steele: Here is how one part of the foreign press reported a WHO Briefing: The novel coronavirus is neither seasonal, nor does it occur in waves, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Tuesday. WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said in answer to questions at the twice-weekly UN press briefing held virtually in Geneva that the COVID-19 virus likes all weathers unlike influenza, even though many people think it is seasonal. “And even though respiratory viruses, in the past, did tend to do this, you know, different seasonal waves. This one is behaving differently. This one is one where we … Continue reading UPDATED: The unbelievable truth: How Nicola ‘gets it’

At today’s Holyrood briefing, Jackson Carlaw made much of the UK statistics watchdog’s criticism of the First Minister’s assertion that coronavirus rates in England are five times higher than Scotland. This week they are demonstrably 4.7 times higher. Any fool can check that. That they are, was not the issue for Carlaw but that the Office for Statistics Regulation has supposedly ‘damned’ the SNP because the statistics they used were problematic, for them as pedants. The watchdog had two concerns. From BBC Scotland: It said the first minister had used data from an unpublished estimate of the prevalence of the … Continue reading Office for Statistics Regulation accused of pedantry, conservatism and political bias