Tag: politics

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Decades ago Scottish Labour planted the seeds of Glasgow’s ongoing equal pay troubles

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Help Talking-up Scotland keep goingCrowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-goingOr by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 By Liz S Michael Marra posted this on ‘X’ “It beggars belief that the SNP council is threatening to railroad through fire and rehire before it is made illegal in this country by the UK Labour government. It may not break the letter of the law but it certainly breaks the spirit of it. It’s a despicable way to treat working people. It’s straight out the Tory playbook. All parties need to get round the table and hammer out a deal,and working people should never be threatened like this … Continue reading Decades ago Scottish Labour planted the seeds of Glasgow’s ongoing equal pay troubles

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DRUG DEATHS – SIMPLE LANGUAGE. NOT SIMPLISTIC SOLUTIONS.

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Help Talking-up Scotland keep goingCrowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-goingOr by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 By Mark E. Saunders of “The Scottish Minuteman” https://www.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61575625542197 Scotland is regularly described as having the highest drug-death rate in Europe. Although there is an argument to be made that this comparison is based on a false equivalence, today has been no different. And as a quick-fix, Reform UK MSPs are scapegoating and supporting calls for the abolition of the Scottish Parliament. But what exactly would abolishing Holyrood achieve? Scotland’s drug problem did not begin with devolution. It began decades before it. During the 1980s and 1990s, Scotland developed a particularly large population … Continue reading DRUG DEATHS – SIMPLE LANGUAGE. NOT SIMPLISTIC SOLUTIONS.

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Anti-immigration protest – Why is the Ferret ‘fact-checker’ so desperate to make Scotland look like the rest of the UK when it’s demonstrably not?

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Based on the above in June 2026 More in Common poll graphic, we can see that immigration matters less to voters across most of Scotland than in most of England. The purple areas in the South-west and in the North of Scotland may well be, at least in part, a result of English, middle-class, entitled, retiree internal migrants pushing house prices up and loudly dominating local organisations. The Ferret today with another vain attempt to talk Scotland down and and to drag us into the swamp with the rest of the UK. Help Talking-up Scotland keep goingCrowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-goingOr by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort … Continue reading Anti-immigration protest – Why is the Ferret ‘fact-checker’ so desperate to make Scotland look like the rest of the UK when it’s demonstrably not?

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As Maggie’s ‘broken children’, drug users from the teenage wasteland of the 1980s, fall off the graph, Scotland’s drug deaths will fall below those of England in ten years or less

johnrobertson834

Channel 4 News tonight reminded me of something important, positive, about Scotland’s drug deaths – age. Look at this – Age-specific mortality rates of drug use deaths by broad age group, registered in 2000 to 2025: https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/publications/drug-related-deaths-in-scotland-2025/ There were 21.4 drug use deaths per 100,000 people in 2025, after adjusting for age. However, when you have a think about the rate in each of the 5 age groups, you should be able to see signs of a tipping point coming when overal drug deaths plummet. This drama all started more than 40 years ago, in the years after Margaret Thatcher … Continue reading As Maggie’s ‘broken children’, drug users from the teenage wasteland of the 1980s, fall off the graph, Scotland’s drug deaths will fall below those of England in ten years or less

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Much as he’d like to James Cook does NOT know that Scotland’s drug death figures ‘remain worst in Europe’ – Nobody with half a brain thinks they do

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Help Talking-up Scotland keep goingCrowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-goingOr by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 With the help of Aimee Stanton, data journalist, James Cook has produced an extended piece with the above headline but little evidence for it. It’s utterly untenable. More on that below. I suppose I’m disappointed more with Aimee who has even had the Royal Statistical Society’s Award for Statistical Excellence in Journalism 2020. James, ‘a British journalist and broadcaster’, unless he’s modestly hiding stuff, is described only as ‘Educated at Forfar Academy, Cook began his career at Radio Tay in Dundee where he first read the news at the age … Continue reading Much as he’d like to James Cook does NOT know that Scotland’s drug death figures ‘remain worst in Europe’ – Nobody with half a brain thinks they do

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Drug deaths – one-year increase does not change overall trend which is down 15%

johnrobertson834

Last year, the NRS graph, after a one year fall, showed also the trend in a dotted line with a shaded bandwidth of confidence and a fall from the peak of 1 339 to 1 017, 24%. https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/publications/drug-related-deaths-in-scotland-2024/ For some reason, time maybe, this year’s graph does not show the trend. Help Talking-up Scotland keep goingCrowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-goingOr by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 Today, to a gleeful media feeding frenzy, we see they’ve gone up again, ‘by 11%’ to 1 133, so the fall from 2020 is now 15% but the trend, sorry MSM, is still down. They had a nice … Continue reading Drug deaths – one-year increase does not change overall trend which is down 15%

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How Scottish Labour’s betrayal of Glasgow in the 1980s created a place of excess child death that even 20 years of Scottish Government success in reducing child poverty cannot remove

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rate of any UK nation. Help Talking-up Scotland keep goingCrowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-goingOr by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 It’s true, 10.1 deaths among 1 to 15s in 2024, compared to 8.5 in England, 6.4 in Wales and 10.0 in Northern Ireland. It’s been like this for decades. Why? These guys knew 10 years ago: The RCPCH report itself states that social and economic disadvantage in early childhood is closely linked to higher child mortality. What follows is based on the research published by the above researchers, comparing Glasgow with Liverpool and Manchester. The long-standing “Scottish effect.” Even after researchers adjust for current … Continue reading How Scottish Labour’s betrayal of Glasgow in the 1980s created a place of excess child death that even 20 years of Scottish Government success in reducing child poverty cannot remove

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To compare an English region to Scotland

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Help Talking-up Scotland keep goingCrowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-goingOr by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 By Liz S Here’s something the BBC website has added as an article onto their local news page for Yorkshire (region of England). “MP calls for Yorkshire to get its own parliament” “A Liberal Democrat MP has called on Prime Minister Andy Burnham to go further with his devolution plans and give Yorkshire its own parliament” Why ? Well according to this Harrogate and Knaresborough Lib Dem MP , Tom Gordon: “Yorkshire had a population larger than Scotland and an economy larger than Wales, and, as such, it should … Continue reading To compare an English region to Scotland

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How Scotland went from being the murder capital of Europe to one of the safest places in the world – On BBC Latin America but not BBC Scotland? – Por el amor de Dios, ¿por qué?

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From the BBC’s Latin America service and on the BBC Future site but kept away from the main BBC UK site, far less BBC Scotland, the above, and: Help Talking-up Scotland keep goingCrowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-goingOr by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 How Scotland went from being the murder capital of Europe to one of the safest places in the world – In the early 2000s, the likelihood of experiencing an assault in Scotland was more than three times higher than in the United States. However, when Scottish authorities began to address violent crime as a public health issue, the figures plummeted, and … Continue reading How Scotland went from being the murder capital of Europe to one of the safest places in the world – On BBC Latin America but not BBC Scotland? – Por el amor de Dios, ¿por qué?

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Scotland’s drug deaths are expected to rise to maintain the reputation BBC Scotland love to trot out but deaths in England being seriously under-counted

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official figures are published on Wednesday. BBC Scotland seem to know already that drug-related deaths will be up on Wednesday coming, and that their ‘Scotland is drug death capital of Europe’ line will be still available to them. Help Talking-up Scotland keep goingCrowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-goingOr by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 We won’t be hearing this from them to put things in context. Drug deaths in England being seriously under-counted Opioid deaths in England 50% higher than recorded In September 2025 (most recent data for this purpose) , BBC UK reported: More than 13,000 heroin and opioid deaths have been missed off … Continue reading Scotland’s drug deaths are expected to rise to maintain the reputation BBC Scotland love to trot out but deaths in England being seriously under-counted