By Legerwood There was a Tweet I saw this morning from someone who thinks the 84-hr wait case was his mother. From what he said in the Tweet the circumstances surrounding the case were quite different to the impression given by DRoss or whichever one of the interchangeable wastes of space brought it up. On the subject of A&E waiting times it cannot be disguised, and should not be glossed over, that the A&E waiting times in NHS Scotland have been on a downward trend for some time and this has been made worse by the number of attendances at … Continue reading The reasons for NHS Scotland’s A&E figures are Covid related

Yesterday, Douglas Ross confronted the FM with his story of a patient waiting more than 80 hours in an Ayrshire A&E. The FM agreed to investigate but today, before she needed to do so, someone who suspects the patient was his mum, blew the story out of the water: Continue reading The ’80 hours in an Ayrshire A&E’ story by Douglas Ross is exposed as fake news

It’s the big news for BBC Scotland today as it emerges that the SNP Government is unlikely to pass on the income tax cuts announced by the UK Chancellor today. Scottish MSPs will miss out on a cut of around £2 000! Those earning the median wage in Scotland of £25 000 or less, will see no difference but will, of course, benefit from the continued investment of taxation in services. This is further evidence that the SNP is the left-of-centre party in Scotland or the UK for that matter as SNP Media signalled in February 2022: Scotland will continue … Continue reading Will Scottish Labour MSPs rejoice as SNP refuses them a tax cut?

NHS Scotland’s A&E departments see around 300 000 patients in a year. Around 5% wait more than 12 hours because after triage they have been found to be not at serious risk. A Scottish Cons freedom of information request found one person who waited 84 hours, nine months ago. We are not given the full details. There are beds in A&E. Did they wait in one of those as seems likely. Did the medics try to send them home but they refused to go? The Cons also found ‘others who were not treated for 79, 64 and 53 hours‘ so … Continue reading Only 0.001% of emergency cases interesting to Scottish Tories

BBC Scotland regularly reports when Scotland has the highest Covid 19 infection rate in the UK. On 8 July, we read: Scotland still has highest Covid rate in the UK and last week they were careful to remind us The number of Covid-19 infections in Scotland rose last week. They’re saying nothing this week as cases fell sharply in Scotland by 18% and by 606 to 2 841. In England, they climbed by 13% to 28 167 making the rate pretty much the same as in Scotland and so not newsworthy for the agenda. The rate in Wales climbed 4% … Continue reading Covid cases plummet in Scotland as they surge in England and Wales

By stewartb Rightly, poverty and its negative consequences are important, politically charged subjects. The purpose of this blog post is to put the feasibility of addressing these issues in Scotland today in a context viz. that within which the Scottish Parliament and Government operates whilst within the UK. The Scottish Government’s constraints and dependencies were described recently in a publication from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS): ‘… the challenges of projecting the finances of a government (the Scottish Government) that has to run a balanced budget, and whose funding depends to a large extent on decisions by the UK … Continue reading On poverty and inequality: how England’s voters have chosen for the UK to be!

By Alasdair Galloway For many people Neil Oliver is a zoomer. Even the National Trust couldn’t put up with him. Someone though must think he’s ok though even if it is just his mammy and GB News. This https://twitter.com/i/status/1571975114673061891 is a classic Oliver defence of the Union. But he makes several points that even though I don’t agree with him, remain important. First of all, there is his view of the “Scottish connection”, which seems to take the form of the Queen dying in Scotland as a reflection of the significance of Scotland’s place in that Union. Even a cursory … Continue reading Neill Oliver and Britishness

We’re used to a sequence of small surveys of around 1 000 Scots showing, recently, support for independence down just below 50%. These opinion polls are carried out by private companies and often for newspapers with an agenda on the issue. They’re by no means useless but neither are they authoritative. Not on the Herald’s front page in paper but leading in the online version and of course, in the National (above), this major report is being ignored by the BBC, the Scotsman, the Record and the Courier. From the British Social Attitudes Survey 2022: Just over half of people … Continue reading Support for independence at least 52% in first large scale reliable research

In a quick-fire hat-trick of reports carefully avoiding the Scottish Government’s achievements in child poverty reduction, in increased nurse staffing, Reporting Scotland give us an evidence-free piece on the living wage. A quick bit of research by their many paid researchers would have provide the context all professional journalists claim to practice but, at Pacific Quay, they don’t. See this: So, to summarise: Scotland has among the highest median earnings in the UK, dramatically reducing numbers of low-paid workers, a narrower gender pay-gap and has significantly fewer workers earning less than the Living Wage, than the other parts of the … Continue reading Not telling us about Scotland and wages