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Salmond and Sturgeon Want the English Fish for More Fat Subsidies
Comments
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It still stuns me how much power the SNP have, there's a lot of frothing at the mouths accompanying the whole SNP rhetoric ... I would've thought by now their power would've diminished ... But the hatred for them on here proves me wrong ... So many people must be terrified of the Scots
That makes me laugh I must say
Personally, I'm not scared of the SNP I just hate Nationalists and Socialists. The SNP combine the two into one party.
I find it interesting that SNP fanatics think the English are scared of them. I've never heard an English person say they are scared of the SNP and I'm not sure why they would be. They're insignificant really apart from their desire to break up the Union. That failed.0 -
Ermmmmm there's a lot of English loving the SNP, certainly not scared of them, there's even a London branch office now
The humour if that does not escape me0 -
Funnily enough, there are quite a few Scottish people in London. There's also a branch of the Hibs Supporters Club, my mate used to attend regularly as a London-based Scot. I'm not sure either thing has any great significance beyond the fact that being in a United Kingdom makes freedom of movement trivially simple between England and Scotland.0
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SNP in action:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/19/snp-cure-for-scotland-health-crisisAs things stand, the contribution of the SNP 56 will require only a short entry from future chroniclers of UK parliamentary democracy: they were enthusiastic about making speeches and posting them on social media. If the fabled 56 get any more intoxicated on their own conceit at Westminster some may soon require to be reminded why they were elected in the first place.
It seems, though, that the self-congratulatory froth into which the SNP at Westminster is in danger of disappearing is thickening. The priority now, according to Angus Robertson, the party’s Westminster leader, is to go on a charm offensive across England to show our fellow Brits that they are all nice and inclusive. Back home in the real world, though, the NHS is coming apart at the seams. Quite clearly, it is not fit for the 21st century.
Last week, it was revealed that a crisis in GP recruitment has led to more doctors’ surgeries being taken over by health boards. More than 40 practices are now under health board control. This means that efforts by the Scottish government to improve and expand primary care and relieve the pressure that currently threatens to submerge hospitals are being rendered irrelevant.
The response by the Scottish government was predictably trite when addressing concerns over health service provision: there’s no crisis and we’ll just lob £50m at the problem, “ensuring patients get the service they deserve”. Meanwhile, the CEO of NHS Lothian insists that more government cash is needed to tackle a £70m funding gap. Perhaps they could get Angus Robertson to organise some “outreach planning”.
One of the modern indicators of life in 21st-century Scotland is the “missed health target”. Hardly a week passes, it seems, without news of another failure to reach an arbitrary measure of competence and commitment to patients. The most serious of these is the target of treating 90% of patients within 18 weeks. At the end of last year, more than one in 10 patients had to wait longer, the second time the target had been missed. During the final quarter of last year, the NHS also failed to meet a legal obligation for treatment to start within 12 weeks of its being agreed by a specialist. The Scottish government also pledged that 95% of patients would be treated within four hours in accident and emergency. They’ve been missing that target every week for the last six years or so. Some of these targets, at first glance, might seem unrealistic and, admittedly, many of them are missed by very small margins. But when you discover that the Scottish government spends more than £11bn on health, one-third of its overall budget, there is no excuse for failing on so many levels.
The birth of the new £842m South Glasgow University Hospital, now renamed the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, has been beset by so many difficulties that it probably now requires the attentions of its own midwife in an intensive-care ward. The hospital was the worst performing in Scotland for patient waiting times, with a mere 78.3% of patients being seen and treated within four hours.
After describing such figures as “a dip”, the health secretary, Shona Robison, said that “experts” would be sent to the hospital to improve management systems. Presumably, these weren’t the same “experts” who were sent to Paisley’s Royal Alexandra Hospital earlier this year in similar circumstances. They’ve never been heard of since and a search party has been dispatched.
In recent years in Scotland, the most lucrative game in town is “let’s all play at being CEO of a major health board”. Thus an assortment of unremarkable, usually male, executives with the right sort of management qualification and golf club membership tour the country picking up top jobs in Scotland’s dysfunctional health service. These are inevitably followed a short time later by six-figure pay-offs until such time as their pension pots are sufficiently full and the kids’ school fees have been paid off. In Scotland right now, one of our biggest health boards is being run by an individual whose record of failure in England and Wales is the stuff of legend.
Don’t let’s kid ourselves that any of this will be solved by privatisation. When you create a situation where preference is given to the most lucrative procedures, then you are applying market forces to measure the value of an individual’s health. This is immoral, though not as immoral as the way in which we permit consultants, trained and funded by the state, to top up their already considerable salaries by devoting 50% of their working week to private sector work.
It might be interesting to compare how many lucrative private hip procedures these consultants can rattle off in a day with the rate at which they do them on the NHS. And who scrutinises their weekly job plans and what constitutes their 30% “administration” time. That’s “administration” spelled “G-O-L-F”.
The Scottish government is right to focus on primary care, but Shona Robison must show leadership in ensuring that health boards promote and enable more patients to be cared for in their communities for as long as possible. Thousands of patients are being treated in hospitals when they require only primary care by nurses or physiotherapists. And the GP crisis could have been averted years ago if the government had shown a more enlightened approach to the reality of female doctors with families who want to work part time. Quite simply, this should have been planned for by recruiting more over the past five years.
The NHS in Scotland has changed little in more than 40 years and so there are questions about how fit it is for the 21st century. Why, for instance, do you have to queue on a phone for a GP appointment when most of us use Skype, smartphones and tablets? Not very long ago, women spent more than a week in hospital to have their babies. Now they spend little more than a day before they are back home being looked after by community midwives.
The SNP has had eight years to get the NHS right. Only when it finally does should it start thinking about independence once more.If I don't reply to your post,
you're probably on my ignore list.0 -
SNP in action:
Oh, it gets far worse than that....
The SNP 'State Appointed Guardian' scheme for all children is already a complete shambles....The SNP's highly controversial and sinister state named guardian scheme is facing its biggest ever crisis after Police Scotland revealed that vulnerable children are being left in the hands of abusers due to red tape.
Police Scotland have warned ministers that youngsters are being exposed to "further criminal acts" due to the "significant time delay" created by the extra layers of unwieldy bureacracy.
The force has said that "specific examples can be provided", suggesting that an unknown number of children have been subjected to physical or sexual abuse or neglect as a direct result of the Named Person legislation.
Last night, campaigners demanded the Scottish Government make a public statement "as soon as possible" to explain how many youngsters have been left in danger and for how long.
And the creation of Police Scotland has led to exactly the sort of issues many people warned about due to centralisation of services and loss of local knowledge.
A young couple died last week after the car they were travelling in crashed, was reported to Police Scotland, but it took officers 3 days to respond despite them being reported missing.Lamara Bell, who had been placed in a medically induced coma after suffering a head injury and broken bones in the crash and kidney damage as a result of dehydration, died on Sunday morning at the Queen Elizabeth University hospital in Glasgow.
Bell, 25, who has two young children, lay undiscovered from early last Sunday until Wednesday morning next to the body of her boyfriend John Yuill after the couple’s blue Renault Clio left the road on the M9 southbound near junction nine at Bannockburn.
Police Scotland is facing a barrage of criticism after it emerged that a call reporting the crash on the morning it happened was not entered into its systems.
They found the woman alive in the wreckage.... She'd been strapped in next to her dead boyfriend for 3 days, but subsequently died in hospital.
And now this...
No wonder the SNP politicians like to distract their supporters with flowery speeches and selfies at Westminster on social media...
Their incompetence is killing people back in Scotland.:(“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
-- President John F. Kennedy”0 -
More on the Police Scotland issues....SINCE its creation in 2013, Police Scotland has lurched from one crisis to another. The single force unilaterally adopted a national policy on armed police officers, used stop and search on an industrial scale, and nearly destroyed Edinburgh’s long-standing tolerance of saunas without any consultation.
Individual operational decisions also confirm that Police Scotland is an organisation not fit for purpose.
The death in custody of Sheku Bayoh raises disturbing questions, while the recent failure to respond to a car crash on the M9 for three days was a disgrace.
Our story today that Police Scotland is refusing to say whether it has broken the law on spying on journalists is a further stain on the force’s reputation. Following an investigation by the Interception of Communications Commissioner into the use of surveillance laws to flush out journalists’ sources, the previous coalition Government required police forces to seek judicial approval before accessing a reporter’s texts or phone records.
However, as the Commissioner noted last week, two forces have ignored the law and snooped on journalists without the say-so of a judge.
When asked if Police Scotland was one of the offenders, a spokesman repeatedly dodged the question.“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
-- President John F. Kennedy”0 -
Funnily enough, there are quite a few Scottish people in London. There's also a branch of the Hibs Supporters Club, my mate used to attend regularly as a London-based Scot. I'm not sure either thing has any great significance beyond the fact that being in a United Kingdom makes freedom of movement trivially simple between England and Scotland.
That is true. There aren't any particular areas with large concentrations of Scots (like Barga in Italy or Corby in the English midlands). Apart from westminster of course.There is no honour to be had in not knowing a thing that can be known - Danny Baker0 -
If this is true it sounds like Scotland is walking down the path to becoming a police state. Typical of Nationalists of course that they will not tolerate dissent. They've shown it in Parliament with their own MPs and now the police are tracking down critical journalists.
Hopefully it remains within the power of the UK to rein them in.0 -
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