Professor John Robertson OBA I’ve already recommended the excellent, highly researched, ‘Social Murder? Austerity and Life Expectancy in the UK’ by David Walsh and Gerry McCartney (U of Glasgow), Policy Press. In the opening pages, they justify the term ‘social murder‘ for the fatal consequences of economic violence against the disabled and the poor. They estimate the level of social murder by comparing the observed mortality rates in the UK from 2012-2019 with the rate that should have emerged in those years if the prior improving trend in life expectancy had continued, uninterrupted as it did in other parts of Europe not … Continue reading Researchers find UK Government’s austerity policies ‘murders’ 335 000 across the UK and inadvertently reveal SNP mitigation saved more than 8 000 lives

Professor John Robertson OBA Glenn Campbell’s opinion piece on the SNP, after its budget, is the lead story on its website today, titled: SNP rediscovers its political confidence with wily Budget Hah! We know what to expect and, within one line, we get: In the last couple of years its independence strategy has hit a brick wall, the party has tied itself in knots over gender reform, and it has fallen in and out of love with the Scottish Greens. There have been three first ministers during that period and one of those remains under police investigation as the Branchform … Continue reading Glenn Campbell and the ‘significant underperformance in key public services like the NHS’ that does not survive a collision with the evidence