Tag: scotland

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Scotland’s health board restructuring is not unusual and wee local groups cannot be trusted with complex medical issues

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Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 Lesley Riddoch in the National yesterday, with the above and: Leaving aside her invitation to ‘islanders’ to make me ‘walk the ferry gang plank’ after I questioned their awareness of just how much the SNP Government has done for them, I still trust Lesley Riddoch as an honest and constructive, not to mention, very articulate, critical friend of the SNP. I have my own concerns on the SNP leadership, especially on foreign affairs, but if you work to destroy them you will regret it … Continue reading Scotland’s health board restructuring is not unusual and wee local groups cannot be trusted with complex medical issues

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Oil, Renewables and Data Centres

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Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going Or 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 There is something very revealing about the way Scotland’s resources are discussed and pumped into our living rooms via our television screens. During the 2014 independence referendum, North Sea oil was presented as nothing but a risk to everyone living in Scotland. We were warned about falling production, volatile prices and the dangers of over-relying on oil revenues. Alistair Darling described relying on oil as “gambling with our children’s future.” On Sky News, June 2014, Gordon Brown ‘England’s Lord … Continue reading Oil, Renewables and Data Centres

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Minimum wage shame list reveals Scottish firms significantly more likely to pay staff minimum wage than in other parts of UK

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Top story at BBC Scotland Business and front page on the BBC Scotland News site but barely mentioned across other BBC sites, ‘Minimum wage shame list reveals Scottish firms that failed to pay staff.’ Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 From BBC Scotland today: Fifty firms in Scotland have been revealed on a UK government list naming and shaming employers that failed to pay staff minimum wage. Three of the companies topping the list in Scotland – including North East bakers Murdoch Allan & Son – each owed more than … Continue reading Minimum wage shame list reveals Scottish firms significantly more likely to pay staff minimum wage than in other parts of UK

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Jackie Baillie’s hypocrisy as Keir Starmer spends £60 130 of taxpayer money on a private jet trip to watch the Leopardesses 

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Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 By Liz S Jackie Baillie posted this on X on 20 August (based on a BBC article that had a headline “John Swinney defends £45,000 business-class flights to World Cup”). “Such luxury in a cost-of-living crisis is not the lived experience of most Scots. Perhaps the FM should have considered the expectations of taxpayers before spending our money. It’s not the first time the SNP have been cavalier with the company card”. Meanwhile I am sure that the same Jackie Baillie was not so ‘concerned’ at these stories: “Sir … Continue reading Jackie Baillie’s hypocrisy as Keir Starmer spends £60 130 of taxpayer money on a private jet trip to watch the Leopardesses 

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Glasgow Labour’s new giant incinerator upwind of the QEUH associated with congenital anomalies, infant death and miscarriage

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Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 From Ends Waste & Bioenergy in January 2015: Plans to build the UK’s largest waste management complex [image at top] and energy-from-waste plant have come to an end, it has emerged. Lifetime Recycling Village Ltd, which had planned to build the £640m plant 12 kilometres south of Glasgow, was officially wound up in February, according to government records. Proposal to build the facility were first unveiled in 2010 by three waste and construction entrepreneurs. Its three gasification lines would have processed a total of … Continue reading Glasgow Labour’s new giant incinerator upwind of the QEUH associated with congenital anomalies, infant death and miscarriage

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How the Labour/Lib Dem coalition in 2002 hid the facts from the Scottish Parliament in a sham consultation to make sure the new South Glasgow Hospital was built on a filthy site no other city in world would think suitable for its people

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Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 By stewartb With apologies for the length of what follows. It’s hard to do justice to such a topic – to offer an authoritative account – without quoting extensively from the Scottish Parliament’s record of debate from c.25 years ago. I and others on TuS discussing the siting of a new ‘South Glasgow Hospital’ have referred to a debate in the Scottish Parliament on 17 January 2001, noting the cross-party concerns about proposed location.  Nearly two years later, these concerns about location of the … Continue reading How the Labour/Lib Dem coalition in 2002 hid the facts from the Scottish Parliament in a sham consultation to make sure the new South Glasgow Hospital was built on a filthy site no other city in world would think suitable for its people

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Greenock – If you don’t keep RAAC dry it all needs knocking down

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was really upset about everything. Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 BBC Reporting Scotland Down today, hear about flats in Greenock with RAAC in them, to be puled down and have a evidence of the above upset. What’s this all about? BBC England on 9 September 2025, has: A hospital which has its ceilings held up by thousands of props has been rated the worst performing in the country. The Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, came bottom of the league table of 134 acute hospital trusts in England. … Continue reading Greenock – If you don’t keep RAAC dry it all needs knocking down

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Why ‘the English Left’ including Gordon Brown will happily let Northern Ireland go but hypocritically and desperately insist on keeping Scotland

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Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 In terms of GDP, energy, food and drink exports, number of graduates, universities, water and other resources, would Scotland be a far greater loss for the rest of the UK? Yes. On those real-economy measures, Scotland would be a far larger loss to the remaining UK than Northern Ireland. Scotland is about 8 per cent of UK GDP; Northern Ireland is about 2 per cent. Scotland’s sales to the rest of the UK are on the order of £50 billion-plus a year and around … Continue reading Why ‘the English Left’ including Gordon Brown will happily let Northern Ireland go but hypocritically and desperately insist on keeping Scotland

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Approach with caution – Mark Smith’s ‘new’ made-up crime stats

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Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421 I haven’t bothered with the The Herald’s Mark Smith for years now. In 2022, I wrote ‘Herald’s Mark Smith does a Ross Kemp and gets out of Holyrood before a few elderly feminists ‘kick off’ and thrust their merkins at him,’ but have not looked for fear of upsetting myself. It’s at: https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2022/12/26/heralds-mark-smith-does-a-ross-kemp-and-gets-out-of-holyrood-before-a-few-elderly-feminists-kick-off-and-thrust-their-merkins-at-him/ Approach with caution. Today, we have another of his biographical proud diversions in an attempt to seem clever: It is a constant disappointment to my parents that, despite the fact I … Continue reading Approach with caution – Mark Smith’s ‘new’ made-up crime stats

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Off the Table — at Your Peril

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Help Talking-up Scotland keep going Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going Or 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 This week, our new ‘listening’ Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, took both Scottish independence and Irish reunification “off the table”. Why? I can only assume that a border poll in Northern Ireland, granted under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, would make Westminster’s refusal to allow Scotland another referendum increasingly difficult to defend — both domestically and internationally. But there is something else about this that should alarm everyone living in the United Kingdom. A Prime Minister hiding behind … Continue reading Off the Table — at Your Peril