As part of his Apocalypse Of Doom Revue this week, Gordon Brown provided the Daily Record with a no-questions puff-piece the paper summarised as, “we must continue to share costs of health care and welfare with rest of the union – or pay the price”.
So that’s nice and positive.
This last week has seen the publication of a report that saw the NHS in Scotland deliver its “best performance ever”. The NHS Scotland Chief Executive’s Annual Report 2010/11 was full of praise for the organisation and the efforts it has made to improve safety, service and value in times of dwindling budgets.
“Few issues are as important to us as our health and the quality of the health services we receive. When we come into contact with the health service, we want to know that we are receiving the best possible care – care that is compassionate and safe, delivered by the most competent practitioners and planned with us at the very heart of the decisions about our care. We want to have confidence in the quality and effectiveness of any treatment.
“Some of the most significant improvements in quality include the achievement of the shortest ever waiting times for outpatient and inpatient appointments, including progress towards achieving a maximum wait of 18 weeks between referral and treatment, significant reductions in Healthcare Associated Infection to the lowest levels ever recorded and other measurable improvements in safety in hospitals.
There have been impressive increases in the numbers of people accessing smoking cessation and alcohol brief intervention services, increases in the proportion of older people being supported to stay at home through improvements in services for those with long term conditions, and reductions in the need for people to stay overnight in hospital for treatment or procedures.”
The findings were reported in the national news in a generally positive manner, such as this BBC article published on the 24th of November, detailing the efforts of the management and staff in Scotland and the results they’d managed to achieve.
As the Scottish people ponder the merits of independence, it can be useful to examine areas in which Holyrood rather than Westminster already controls policy, and one of the most obvious is healthcare. The NHS is in almost all operational senses already independent in Scotland, and operates in a markedly different manner to the way the service is run in England and Wales.
But as we recently revealed, the Scottish NHS remains subject to hidden budget cuts as a result of the Barnett Formula, as well as the headline cuts imposed to Scotland’s block grant under Westminster austerity. The question, then, is whether this devolved form of “independence” is enough to maintain the standards of healthcare Scots have come to expect.
On 5 April 2021, I sent a short and simple Freedom Of Information (FOI) request to the Scottish Government asking for:
“All written evidence to James Hamilton’s QC investigation into the FM under the ministerial code. This includes evidence from the FM, her chief of staff Liz Lloyd and any other individuals within the Scottish Government who have submitted evidence.”
Over four and a half years later, because of the government’s pathological aversion to transparency and accountability, we’re still not there.
But we’re inching closer.
There’s an interesting piece in the Sunday Times today.
They’re not the only ones.
At some point, we’re all going to have to have a discussion about the word “normal”.
Because suffering from a debilitating mental illness that supposedly causes you to commit suicide if medical professionals don’t pump you full of wrong-sex hormones and/or mutilate or remove healthy and functioning parts of your body, and which affects no more than 1 in 300 people, is NOT, in fact, “completely normal”. Nor is having a physical disorder affecting less than 1 in 5,000 people. They’re the exact opposite of that. They’re extremely abnormal.
(“Abnormal” is not an intrinsically pejorative term, it’s a simple neutral statement of fact, meaning something that’s uncommon or unusual.)
But that’s not the main problem with NHS Fife’s “LGBTQI+” website.
For the combatants in the gender wars, it’s been quite a spring and summer here in the TERF Island theatre of battle.
In February, polling company YouGov revealed the vast extent to which public opinion has shifted around the issue (significantly though not entirely in the wake of the Cass Review last April), which we reported on via a snazzy Stalingrad metaphor. But just as with Stalingrad, it was only the precursor to the recapture of territory on an epic scale.
So let’s recap what we’ve won and what it means.
Regular readers of Wings won’t need any reminding that Dani Garavelli of the Herald is, among some very stiff competition, one of the most contemptible pieces of nightsoil currently operating in the Scottish media.
But if you’re new here, we can give you a quick illustration.
If the sneering piety of that opening paragraph made you feel a little revolted, a bit angry and somewhat nauseous, then congratulations, because that means you’re still something minimally approximating to a decent human being. But unfortunately it gets a lot worse from there.
We’ll be honest, readers, we gasped out loud when we saw this.
That such a basic, fundamental truth of human existence should ever be front page news with the capacity to shock 100,000 years after we invented language is a sign of just how insane our world has become since 2015.
But magnificent as it is, it’s not even today’s BEST front cover.
It’s increasingly common now for the Scottish news to feature another prison scandal or employment-tribunal judgment highlighting the extent of gender-ideology capture in the country’s public authorities.
But it’s normally quite hard to get an overall picture of just how captured any particular public body really is, so we should offer some thanks to the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) who’ve helpfully provided us with a comprehensive primer in the form of a briefing for a board update later this week.
Innocent readers might have thought that the people managing a national park would be most concerned about attracting visitors, protecting wildlife, repairing paths and keeping local businesses sustainable, that sort of thing. But that’s not how things work in Scotland any more.
Because the CNPA are about to present the organisation’s 19 board members with an 91-page report and annex detailing all their vital work on… equalities issues.
Y’know, in case Ben Macdui isn’t queer enough.
The Presiding Officer has finally reluctantly deigned to allow the Scottish Parliament to discuss the issues arising from Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife, in the shape of a debate taking place in the chamber this afternoon brought forward by the Scottish Tories.
We suspect that watching it will be profound waste of time and a grave danger to our monitor screens, but we’ll certainly at least tune in for the votes at the end, because which motion/amendment the Parliament puts its name to will be a revealing moment.
Let’s quickly run those through a translator.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
