In August (the most recent monthly data), NHS Scotland’s A&E department’s saw 77.8% within 4 hours. In the same period, NHS England saw, on average, only 66.2% and NHS Wales saw only 60.1%. NHS Scotland is thus 17.5% faster (11.6% of 66.2) than England and 26.5% faster than Wales. Today, as NHS Forth apologised for only treating 41% in 4 hours, BBC Scotland tell us: Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton said the latest figures were “not sustainable” and called for an independent review. He said: “Staff in health boards like Forth Valley cannot and should not be expected to … Continue reading Only NHS Scotland need apologise despite the best emergency services in the UK

Note first, the classic ‘Sturgeon’ disrespect. They’ve changed it on the website now to call him ‘Johnson’. I’m going to be lazy again, of maybe efficient (?) and just use my May 2021 rebuttal of Macwhirter’s ‘Sturgeon no better’ drivel. Here it is: Johnson and his SAGE chums delayed the lockdown. The power to do so, but still without the power to borrow for furlough, was devolved only at the end of March 2020. Scottish advisers could attend SAGE but not debate decisions. Johnson spoke of ‘taking it on the chin’ and Whitty is still on Youtube explaining why we … Continue reading Starmer far worse than FM says Robertson

The Herald’s one-sided ahistorical account, written for it by the Labour Party’s chums at the Ferret, reaches Day 3 with accounts of air pollution rising in some of our streets. You know, those places where combustion engines do cause a lot of pollution, do put lives at risk and, of course, where the decisions that matter if you’d like to change things, are reserved to Westminster and have been since the first combustion engine vehicle appeared in 1892, Tory or Labour government. Once more, I’m not saying it’s OK but I am saying our media should be giving us the … Continue reading Say after us: ‘Scotland is more polluted!’

In a piece largely driven by UK data, the Scotsman allow Scottish Labour’s Jackie Baillie a platform to scare the public with, of course, an ill-informed rant: Scottish Labour said it was time to “raise the alarm” over Scotland’s Covid situation. “It is clear now that case numbers remain at a worrying level across Scotland and that more lives are being lost,” said health spokesperson Jackie Baillie. “Despite this, the SNP government continues to keep its head in the sand and pretend that everything is going to plan. “We know that vaccination is key to tackling this pandemic. But in … Continue reading Jackie Baillie feeds Scotsman scare as infections in Scotland plateau way below rUK

Also the winning the Mince award for journalism, the Herald tell us: Critics have attacked a decision to continue making secondary pupils wear masks in classrooms, branding it an “assault on children’s rights”. Members of Stand By Me Scotland (SBMS), a parent-teacher campaign group, said they were “appalled and disgusted” after ministers announced current Covid-19 mitigations in schools would be extended. https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/19658430.covid-scotland-school-mask-rules-blasted-campaigners/ Stand By Me Scotland has 1 151 members. They don’t have to be parents with bairns in school. There are 792 000 pupils in Scotland’s schools. How many parents or carers do they have? Let’s give SBMS the benefit of the … Continue reading Herald wins ‘We’ll Print Anything’ award with ‘Only one in a thousand parents ‘blast’ school mask rules

Let me be clear from the outset that by the word ‘Scot’, I mean absolutely anyone who lives here, who regardless of ethnicity or birthplace or other largely physical identifier, has a level of fondness for the place and who wants it to be better than it currently is. I can’t rule out unionists from this group though I think they misjudge the situation. As for Tories, well OK, but that’s quite a stretch given the dominant narrative about Scotland their leaders daily spout and the actions to harm us, their Westminster bosses favour. So, to the point, the above … Continue reading ‘Scots’ different enough to be different?

By stewartb The news that Scotland had missed out on Westminster’s backing to develop its first carbon capture and storage facility was greeted with a range of reactions yesterday – shock, disbelief, anger and also something like ‘what did you expect anyway?’  Many well informed sources had hoped – indeed expected – that the Acorn Project at St Fergus would be supported and go on to begin operations within a decade. After all the Project ‘owners’ had been working towards this for a long time, working to survive prior set backs caused by Westminster! On social media I’d spotted allusions … Continue reading The Unionists’ art of blending ‘threat’ and ‘promise’ to deceive – a case study

At 6:08pm, Sarah Smith reported with the above graph, on the BBC News that ‘Covid cases have been falling in Scotland’ and there has been a ‘rapid decline’ but later, Reporting Scotland were having none of that whitaboutery. Things are bad here, it’s a crisis, don’t go think you’re any better, or heaven forbid, that SNP Government might be managing the pandemic better. BBC 1 News staff have a different agenda. They’re mostly Blairite, Europhile and Toryphobic. They have to be reminded to be Unionist. Several times, they’ve dropped their northern colleagues in it: Continue reading Sarah Smith tells the UK things are different in Scotland but BBC Scotland won’t tell us

…..are rising by at least 10% week-on-week. BBC News at 1 today Well, only if your researchers are not including Scotland or Northern Ireland because infection levels are pretty much flat there, after falling even faster than 10%, week-on-week to below that of England and Wales: As for hospital admissions, in Scotland they’re falling steadily and ICU admissions are disappearing, as the total falls to 51, down from more than 100 in September. In England, hospital admissions are climbing. Finally, deaths: Haven’t they flattened? Hey, Reporting Scotland Badly, Scotland has the highest death rate in the UK but the other … Continue reading Across the UK all is the same bad if you don’t bother looking at the figures too closely

Apparently ‘parents and teachers’ are against the wearing of masks in classrooms. On reading the above and the Daily Record version, we see it’s only those wee Facebook parent groups, often run by former Tory activists and with far too few members to be representative of Scotland’s 1.5 million parents of schoolchildren. As for the teachers, TWO, anonymous. This is just more anti-SNP propaganda. What about ‘teachers’ in a real sense, ie thousands of them? The EIS has welcomed the announcement. What about the science? Covid-19: Don’t abandon mask wearing in schools, say health experts, BMJ May 2021: https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1186 How … Continue reading Campaigning against masks in schools is a disgrace