From Reuters Health yesterday:
Heart attack rates dropped among older adults in Scotland in the decade after a nationwide indoor smoking ban took effect, a new study suggests. Scotland banned smoking in all enclosed public spaces and workplaces in 2006. There was a 17% reduction in heart attacks in the first year after the ban took effect, compared to just a 4% decline over the same period in England, where public smoking rules didn’t change, the study team notes. In Scotland between 2000 and 2016, there were [sic] a total of 117,161 heart attacks.
Talking-up Scotland 
McKenna is a Brit Nat false flag merchant who appears regularly in the colonial press.
He postures as a YESSER, but ALL his comments are against the main party of independence.
He rails against the condition of Glasgow without once mentioning the decades of Labour miss-rule.
He brings up women’s equal pay without once mentioning that the Labour party were in collusion with the trade unions to sell these women short in wage negotiations for year after year..
LikeLiked by 2 people
I disagree, Gavin. He has, indeed, been hostile to the SNP and, in pro-union papers has produced articles which with appropriate headlining are skewed as anti-independence. I think he is a pretty sincere Roman Catholic and that is a big element in his thinking, particularly on matters such as abortion. He also has what some would call an ‘old Labour’ perception on social issues, such as housing. But I and many of the ‘100 000 old men’* who voted YES in Glasgow have a similar perspective. This perspective is shared to a fair degree by the SNP. I think he and Michael Fry, for example, are, indeed, sincere about independence. When Scotland becomes independent it will be a pluralist democracy.
* this was the disparaging phrase used by former Lord Provost Michael Kelly when he was describing support for independence in Glasgow as a ‘mass delusion and that people needed to come to their senses’.
LikeLike
I wish I could fall into line with that Alasdair, but his “journalism” is too one-sided and bitterly partisan to let any religious views excuse his attacks on the one party on which independence largely depends. Nor could any serious person could accept the modern Scottish Labour party(I was a member, once) as being a vehicle for progressive social or constitutional change.
Indeed, many of the problems complained about by McKenna were instigated/exacerbated by Labour and its corrupt petty fiefdoms in local government. Nor do they have much of a record on housing, helping the Tories sell off social housing stock—see *houses/flats to let* in any local paper. The last labour government ushered many of its Cabinet to substantial personal wealth, or tenure for life in the Lords. Its why so many object to Corbynism.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Gavin, We will just have to disagree regarding Mr McKenna’s attitude towards independence. Like you and many others I find some of his articles a pain in the arse and his readiness to type out the SNP BAAAAD phrases to suit his paymasters as hackery. I am not religious and I strongly support women’s right to choose with regard to abortion. However, I think he is sincere about independence.
I agree with you entirely with regard to the venality of many in Labour – old and new – and that many of the issues affecting Scotland and the rest of the UK can be laid at the door of the last Labour Government. I think it was noteworthy that Bodger Broon released his latest proposals to ‘strengthen the union’ in the pages of The Daily Mail. When he was PM he was very cosy with the then Daily Mail editor who was one of the most snobbish, colonialistic, right wingers that it is possible to meet.
LikeLike
More than happy to be on the same page as you, Alasdair.
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”.—– Another context, but fitting.
LikeLike