How the Wilson-Dalgety axis headlines, above right, should read in a more truthy world The nonsense they currently publish to maintain their plummeting sales trend, to now less than 10 000 per day. The Tory crisis headline will do. Continue reading Scotsman headlines made more truthy and less dishonest
It’s just a sub-poll of 80 Scots so major health warnings but still interesting. Relatively new pollster We Think on 8th August 2024, had (all respondents): 1. Which party did you vote for on July 4th? Actual result – Labour 35%, SNP 30%, Cons 15%, Reform 7%. So, poll sample is reasonably representative for Labour and SNP if puzzling for Cons and Reform. 2. And if there were a UK General Election tomorrow, which party would you vote for? Assuming this translates to Holyrood 2026, deeply disturbing for the Cons and Labour and moderately encouraging for the SNP? Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election Continue reading Latest mini-poll – Labour quickly lose sheen, SNP hold steady and Reform replace Cons?
Talking-up Scotland reader statistics Talking-up Scotland xtwitter followers. I’ve been a bit disappointed with TuS reader numbers recently. Rarely getting 2 000 a day and hardly ever approaching the 5 to 6 000 some days in 2020. However, after stumbling on ABC DATA for the multi-staffed Scottish local and national newspapers, I feel less concerned and also somewhat taken aback. Examples below. Check your own local at the link. The Herald – 11 364 The Scotsman 7 710 Scotland on Sunday – 3 996 Herald on Sunday – 5 815 Ayr Advertiser – 543 Ayrshire Post 4 059 Cumnock Chronicle … Continue reading Settling down to……?
Investigators at Arcadia Care Home, Bridgeton, where a 54 year-old woman died in a fire (Image: Daily Record) From the Insider on 16 August 2024: A care home operator has been fined £500,000 for failings which led to a 54 year-old woman dying in a fire in Glasgow. HC-One, which ran Arcadia Gardens care home in the Bridgeton area of the city when the fire broke out, pled guilty to a breach of health and safety at work committed in March 2017, the Crown Office said. From This is Money in August 2017: Controversial businessman and Labour party donor Chai Patel … Continue reading Glasgow care home where woman died in fire is owned by £1.5 million Labour donor whose company had 856 Covid deaths and was praised by Scottish Labour
At times, I begin to feel uncomfortable living here. It seem like every public service is performing better and everything cost more than in the rest of the UK, after 17 years of SNP in government. Oh no, here’s more: Funding for Welsh students is “broken”, according to a student union, after figures showed the average university graduate leaves with more than £35,000 of debt. That is an increase of more than £14,000 in five years, according to Student Finance Wales (SFW) figures obtained by BBC Cymru Fyw. The highest outstanding student loan balance in June was nearly £140,000, which the … Continue reading Be careful what you vote for in 2026 – Student debt in Labour Wales more than twice that in Scotland
I’m grateful to rtpscot for alerting me to this. BBC Scotland has never mentioned that the illegal cheap drug business in Scotland’s towns and villages and by association out drug deaths, is now utterly dominated by County Lines gangs based in England. They have only once used the County Lines names in one headline back in 2021 and, to my knowledge, only once referred to the source cities once in 2019. In 2017, BBC Scotland Highlands and Islands, when the label was less familiar, had: A Highlands woman has been described as a “central figure” in a gang’s distribution of … Continue reading BBC Highlands in 2017 – off-message and reporting on English drug gangs behind a 270% surge in violent crime and increased drug deaths
From euronews. yesterday: Captured by Moscow soon after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the nuclear plant has frequently been caught in the crossfire, becoming a continual source of worry for international observers. The recent fire that broke out at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in eastern Ukraine has renewed fears of a potential disaster at the site. All citizens also have an iodine tablet, which blocks radiation absorption by the thyroid gland, thus preventing thyroid cancer risks. Each household receives it every five years. But whether it’s necessary to ingest it depends on the scale of the radiation leak. … Continue reading Thyroid cancer cases double in the decades after nuclear power comes to Scotland
There’s not a mention, in the above by David Cowan, of England nor of the County Lines gangs, all based in English cities, currently completely dominating the drug supply across Scotland and bringing with them surging violence in small-town Scotland (source below). In the above report, we do see: Every year the campus has 100 groups and 1,400 individuals under investigation. It says that annually, it dismantles and disrupts a third of those groups. Their activities include drugs, smuggling firearms, human trafficking, child abuse and sexual exploitation, serious fraud, cyber crime and illegal dumping. Read any report in the tabloids … Continue reading BBC Scotland visit the centre of the war against English ‘County Lines’ gangs but manage to avoid reference to them
By Professor John Robertson OBA The Guardian today suggesting a further worsening of the situation with regard to cancer waiting times in England. The gap in those waiting longer than the target time, was already wide when the BBC produced this in November 2022: In July 2024, using the other one-month target, NHS Scotland was still performing better: Why is this? “It’s not specifically down to the SNP, but it’s SNP policies,” Whitford told The National. “We still have a public NHS here in Scotland. To some extent it’s still the same in Wales, but in England the Health and Social … Continue reading As Labour’s NHS England challenge gets tougher why NHS Scotland needs the SNP to stay in charge
The above data are from a Freedom of Information request to Police Scotland responded to on 30 July 2024 and, of course, missed by ‘our’ MSM. Against a background of staffing stability, we see a 155 485 or 16% reduction in callouts in only 5 years.1 There are currently 16 234 police officers in Scotland2, 27 or 0.16% fewer than in 2007 when crime was 50% higher3. Sources: Continue reading Steady fall in callout pressure on Police Scotland as staffing stabilises
Talking-up Scotland 