Talking-up Scotland

Though apparently accepting the meaningfulness of those useless GDP estimates, a survey of Scottish businesses carried out for the SCC gives cause for optimism in the year ahead. Here’s what they said without providing any detail:

‘The cause of such optimism? The Scottish Chambers of Commerce quarterly economic indicator. It is suggesting that the nation’s businesses are coping admirably in the face of much uncertainty (for uncertainty, read Brexit). Among the sectors providing much optimism are manufacturing, financial and business services.’

https://www.insider.co.uk/news/scottish-chambers-commerce-economic-indicator-11868404

In a linked report available in the full text at the url above, the optimistic headline is then swamped with a trail of ‘ah buts’ but still no sign of the positive indicators the two positives headline suggests they had gathered – strange?

Why haven’t they given us any numbers? Are they too good for us?

Once more, the BBC Scotland website presents good news without the usual sting in the tail from Murdo Fraser or Jackie Baillie. A presumably unsupervised young webmaster still to do the SNPBaaad staff development module produces a factual piece I can’t complain about, writing:

‘Holyrood is taking on responsibility for a raft of social security powers including disability living allowance. The Scottish government is to amend its social security legislation to give people the right to have someone with them during welfare assessments. A bill is currently under consideration at Holyrood to set up Scotland’s own devolved social security system.’

They even let Jeanne Freeman say that this was proof that Scotland will do things differently. That’s what I’ve been saying here for some time. See below.

Holyrood will be responsible for other social security powers including:

• Disability Living Allowance
• Personal Independence Payments
• Carer’s Allowances
• Discretionary Housing Payments
• Winter Fuel Payments

They even let her go on to say:

‘Under the current system, people who attend assessments aren’t able to have someone with them during the assessment. We have all been in situations where we could do with a helping hand from someone who knows us, or just a bit of moral support. This is proof that Scotland will do things differently and one of the first ways we can show people we mean exactly what we say.’

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-42739130

Brilliant, I love it. As you know, I never miss an opportunity to remind you of earlier reports here saying something similar, so see:

In a year of terrible events, we can still feel that this wee country is getting better as it drifts away from the callous, post-imperial, values of Tory Britain

Ah, too late, here comes Murdo or Ruth:

‘SNP allow alleged benefit fraudsters to advise the disabled on how to cheat.’

(c) Daily Record

From gov.scot yesterday and perhaps linked to my previous piece on record investment in Scottish hotels last year and under the headline:

‘20% more visitors from Europe choosing to come to Scotland.’

we read:

‘The latest statistics show the number of overseas tourists coming to Scotland has increased by 15% in one year – driven by a substantial rise in European visitors. Figures released today by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) show 20% more visitors from Europe came here in the 12 months to September 2017 – a total of 1.8 million people – and spent £1.1 billion, 24% more than during the previous 12 months. For the UK as a whole, the increase in European visitors in this period was lower, at 6%, with expenditure up 1%.’

https://news.gov.scot/news/international-visitors-on-the-rise

This is very marked contrast between Scotland and the UK which requires explanation. While it is impossible to be certain, it seems likely that a combination of the quality of the attractions, the Outlander effect and a perceived sense of greater security away from the terrorism-afflicted capital cities will be behind much of this. The benefits of the weaker pound apply to the whole of the UK and cannot be responsible for this difference between Scotland and the rest. See these recent reports for more:

Scotland wins two Rough Guide Readers’ Awards – Favourite destination and most welcoming country.

‘Outlander links see visitors to historic sites soaring’

‘BLOODY HELL Robert the Bruce movie Outlaw King will feature some of the bloodiest battle scenes in cinema history’, put Braveheart in the shade and boost tourism like Outlander.

North Americans lead surge in Scottish tourism because they feel safer here

I appreciate that the evidence of avoiding perceived terrorist threat is, so far, only from North American tourists.

(c) hoteldirect.co.uk

Reported in Insider yesterday, a survey by Savills revealed a massive £195 million investment in 2017. All of Scotland’s cities recorded increases with Edinburgh accounting for 64% of the total.

This makes Edinburgh the second largest ‘target city’ outside of London pushing Birmingham out of that position. Overseas investors accounted for £57.4 million of the total and, notably, invested seven times the 2016 figure. This is a major change.

Increases in tourism will be a factor in this – dramatic report coming.

https://www.insider.co.uk/news/scottish-hotel-investment-soars-60-11872924

This is one of several indicators of ‘real’ economic health in Scotland reported here in the last year. See:

Reports of a strong Scottish economy just keep coming. Now debt decrees down 93% in the last three months

More evidence Scottish economy is strong: Demand for office space in Glasgow highest for ten years

Business booms in Scotland under SNP-rule

77% of Scotland’s small and medium-sized businesses report success as Scottish Government reports record numbers exempt from rates and in the wake of figures revealing much greater signs of distress among rUK businesses.

Scottish businesses report much greater optimism about their futures for the third quarter in a row but the Fraser of Allander ‘Institute’ can’t help scratching their ‘buts’.

Scottish businesses continue to show signs of health with insolvencies down 23% as the Scottish economy holds strong

Ruth and Kezia sob as they hear Scotland is ranked as the best place in the UK to start a business. Will this good news never end?

Scottish businesses showing signs of greater health than those in the rest of the UK

Of course, our media prefer to report on GDP and GERS despite their demonstrable lack of value as measures. Both, in the Scottish case, are largely based on estimates which cannot be confirmed. GERS was, of course, initially developed as a political tool to undermine the case for Scottish independence while GDP is heavily criticised by academic economists as it tends to reflect mostly growth in profits for corporations and shareholders with little if any feeding into wages and consequent real economic growth for the benefit of the mass of the population. See this for more on GDP:

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2018/01/18/beware-gdp-it-can-be-seriously-misleading/

Unable to access the Herald or Times subscription-restricted sites and with YouGov not publishing its survey results yet, I rely on the Shropshire Times for this. I could have used the Scotsman, but I was feeling queasy at the time. Under the headline:

‘More than half of Scots support income tax rise, poll says’

we read that 54% supported the tax increases proposed by the Scottish Government, 27 % opposed it and 19% were ‘don’t knows’. Women were more supportive than men but there was no age-related difference. Now, if you ignore the ‘don’t knows’ which is what they deserve for not keeping up to date, 66.6% supported the tax changes which 70% won’t even pay.

https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/uk-news/2018/01/18/more-than-half-of-scots-support-income-tax-rise-poll-says/#HpMdDlSbk56rXqRx.99

OK, feeling better, I had a week sneaky peek at the Scotsman report, only to find what I feared would be there – Murdo Fraser. He said:

‘It will stunt growth and hand an advantage to our competitors. That all means less cash for vital public services like schools, hospitals and roads.’

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/poll-most-scots-back-snp-s-tax-rise-plan-1-4664721

Murdo didn’t offer any evidence for his claim but then he doesn’t have to, in the Scotsman, or the Herald, or on the BBC, or on STV or…………

Is this another wee bit of evidence that we are different enough to want to be independent? Here are some earlier examples from dozens I’ve presented:

8% of the UK population and 28% of living wage employers. More evidence that we are different enough to want to run the whole show?

Scientific evidence that Scots tend to be different from the other groups in rUK?

In a year of terrible events, we can still feel that this wee country is getting better as it drifts away from the callous, post-imperial, values of Tory Britain

Search the blog for ‘different’ if you need more.

(c) penileboost

I heard on Sky News this morning that NHS England is not alone in being in crisis. It’s the same in Scotland too and the Irish newspapers are saying the same he noted confidently. Other than the short winter overload in A&E caused by massive increases in flu, I’m at a loss to identify any other part of NHS Scotland struggling while NHS England is in crisis almost across the board(s).

However, returning to GPs, we already know that Scotland is better staffed per head of population than other parts of the UK:

As anti-SNP media scrabble desperately for a crisis in NHS Scotland, GP numbers hold constant and access for patients remains far better than in any other part of the UK

The welcome for the new contract here seems to be just another indicator of good management of the NHS by the SNP government akin to the recent evidence of nurse numbers also holding up at a higher level than elsewhere in the UK and the wise decision not to bully the junior doctors into accepting worsened conditions:

NHS England ‘haemorrhaging’ nurses as 33 000 leave each year. NHS Scotland Nurse staffing increases.

As the Herald attempts to worry us with 0.58% of nurses planning to work abroad, official statistics show NHS Scotland has many more nurses per head of population than crisis-ridden NHS England, after 10 years of SNP administration.

Here’s what the BMA Scotland reported today:

‘To inform the Scottish GP Committee’s decision on whether to implement the proposed new GMS contract in Scotland, a poll of the profession was held to establish whether the contract had the backing of GPs in Scotland. The poll was held between 7 December and 4 January and was open to all GPs working in Scotland, including trainees and locums. The poll asked the question: ‘Do you wish to see the proposed new Scottish GMS contract implemented?’

The overall results were:

Yes       71.5%

No        28.5%

Spoilt   5%

I couldn’t help laughing at the idea of GPs spoiling votes. Did they draw willies on the form but more anatomically correct ones?

https://www.bma.org.uk/collective-voice/committees/general-practitioners-committee/gpc-scotland/contract-negotiations-scotland/gp-contract-poll-results

I’m watching with slack-jawed astonishment the level of corruption in ‘House of Saud: A Family at War’ on BBC 2 and must admit my headline is a bit over-the-top. I’m having a bit of a laugh not that I need one after watching Scottish Labour’s launch of their budget plans:

https://twitter.com/nonideefixe/status/953787304845377537

The story is that a lobbyist for Carillion and firms involved in blacklisting construction workers is sitting on its governing body! Former MSP, Cara Hilton has been the policy and public affairs manager for the construction sector’s trade body since December 2016. Only two months after starting the job she was elected to the Scottish Executive Committee and she has the backing of, don’t laugh, the Campaign for Socialism.

You couldn’t make it, or them, up.

Footnote: did she get the job because her name kind of sounds like a variant of Carillion? Cara Illion? Spooky?

Footnote 2: ‘Building Scotland’s Future and Blacklisting Workers since 1895?’

BBC News in England, yesterday, headlined:

‘NHS ‘haemorrhaging’ nurses as 33,000 leave each year’

before going on to report:

‘The NHS is “haemorrhaging” nurses with one in 10 now leaving the NHS in England each year, figures show.

More than 33,000 walked away last year, piling pressure on understaffed hospitals and community services.

The figures – provided to the BBC by NHS Digital – represent a rise of 20% since 2012-13, and mean there are now more leavers than joiners.

Nurse leaders said it was a “dangerous and downward spiral”, but NHS bosses said the problem was being tackled.

The figures have been compiled as part of an in-depth look at nursing by the BBC.’

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42653542

No comparable media reports are being made of nurse staffing levels in Scotland. Indeed, official figures to September 2017, actually show a modest increase in numbers of 0.4%, from September 2016.

http://www.isdscotland.org/Health-Topics/Workforce/Publications/data-tables2017.asp

Indeed, NHS Scotland already has a far superior ratio of nurses to the population than NHS England. See:

As the Herald attempts to worry us with 0.58% of nurses planning to work abroad, official statistics show NHS Scotland has many more nurses per head of population than crisis-ridden NHS England, after 10 years of SNP administration.

Clearly disappointed by their inability to talk down their own NHS and scare their mostly elderly readers, the Scotsman did find a few wee scraps back on the 5^th January 2018. They headlined dramatically but inaccurately:

‘Hundreds of nurses are leaving Scotland every year to seek work abroad while hospitals here struggle to attract staff, official figures indicate.’

and told us, ominously that since 2012-13,
1,609 nurses who qualified in Scotland have filled out verification requests to go and work in other countries – and the numbers have been rising in recent years. Of course, we don’t know how many actually left as opposed to just filling in a form

https://www.scotsman.com/news/hundreds-of-nurses-leaving-scotland-to-work-overseas-1-4654060

So that would be about 330 nurses who have filled out a form each year. They clearly couldn’t tell us how many had actually gone in this time nor did they put the figure in perspective in any way.

How many nurses are there in Scotland? Well, in Nursing, excluding Midwifery, there were 56 468.2 FTE in September 2017 with 0.58%. apparently thinking of leaving to go abroad in any one year. You’ll recognise the basic propagandist technique of using the larger five-year figure rather than the more informative one-year figure.

http://www.isdscotland.org/Health-Topics/Workforce/Publications/data-tables2017.asp

So, 330, is that a lot, even if they had all left? If they had, would it even matter when staffing levels actual went up a wee bit? Is it a crisis anything like that afflicting NHS England?

Well, 300 is 0.58% of the total nurse staffing in Scotland. Bearing in mind that we don’t even know how many of them did leave and that overall numbers still went up, it’s a non-story. Finally, when the BBC tell us it is 10% per year actually leaving England, 0.59% is not even a nick never mind a haemorrhage.

(c) BBC

Leaving school in 1969, I remember being afraid to take up my place at Glasgow School of Art such was the reputation of the city, as gangs of knife-carrying teenagers terrorised the housing schemes and even fought in the city centre streets. My walk to Queen Street Station, often after dark, was a time of barely suppressed panic and I often ran, on hearing voices calling ‘Tongs ya bass’ or something like that, from side streets not too far away.

Much has clearly changed in these nearly 50 years. I lost my fear of Glasgow streets some time ago and knife crime in the city is very much reduced judging by headlines like the one above, taken from the Guardian in November. More recently, we even had four murders by knife, in one night, in London.

Also and related, I wrote only yesterday, that the level of violence with injury in Scotland’s university cities is much lower than all of those in England:

Scotland’s university cities by far the safest places to send your children

Here’s what the Guardian had to say:

‘Knife crime has killed 35 children and teenagers in England and Wales so far this year, meaning that 2017 is likely to be the worst year for such deaths in nearly a decade. Official figures exclusively obtained by the Guardian show that this year will be the worst since 2008 when 42 young people aged 19 and under lost their lives as a result of an attack with a knife.’

https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2017/nov/28/child-knife-deaths-in-england-and-wales-set-for-nine-year-peak

So why have things changed for the better in Scotland? The reasons for this kind of change are usually multiple and complex but according to another piece in the Guardian, in December:

‘Treating knife crime as a health issue has led to a dramatic drop in stabbings: of the 35 deaths of young people in Britain this year, none were in Scotland. In 2005, Strathclyde police set up a violence reduction unit (VRU) in an effort to address a problem that had made Glasgow, in particular, notorious. Later that year, a United Nations report illustrated why that strategy was so urgent. The study concluded that Scotland was the most violent country in the developed world. Based on telephone interviews with crime victims conducted between 1991 and 2000, it found that excluding murder, Scots were almost three times as likely to be assaulted as Americans and 30 times more likely than the Japanese.’

The Scottish Government and the Scottish police forces then took action:

‘The VRU, which is directly funded by the Scottish government and has an arms-length relationship with Police Scotland, was later rolled out across Scotland. It has adopted a public health approach to knife crime, in which the police work with those in the health, education and social work sectors to address the problem. The results so far have been dramatic. Between April 2006 and April 2011, 40 children and teenagers were killed in homicides involving a knife in Scotland; between 2011 and 2016, that figure fell to just eight.’

https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2017/dec/03/how-scotland-reduced-knife-deaths-among-young-people

Scotland is changing for the better in related ways too. Domestic violence, hate crime and even homicide are all falling. See these recent reports:

Reported domestic violence in Scotland falls. Is this part of wider change?

Racial hate crimes increase by 33% in England & Wales while falling by 10% in Scotland: Who says we’re not different?

Scotland’s homicide rate falls by 47%, is lower than the rate for England and Wales and has fallen faster than many other countries in the ten years of SNP government

Don’t we all need to see more of this kind of thing reported without having to look for it in the English press?

Footnote: While not wishing to discount initiatives like the VRU, we’ve seen elsewhere, such as in New York’s crime reduction, the possibility of other factors being influential such as a reduced population of young males in deprived areas, the greater appeal of life indoors with new entertainment technologies or even the removal of lead from petrol.

Here’s the argument for lead removal reducing crime but of course it wouldn’t entirely explain the fall in Scotland at the same time as the rise in English cities:

As major global cities like London struggle with pollution, levels in Scotland have dropped by more than 66% since 1990. Has this contributed to falling crime levels too?

 

Didn’t Brian Monteith implement a no comparison policy in the Scotsman to stop the SNP saying NHS Scotland was much better than NHS England? Here’s the policy statement:

https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/brian-monteith-snp-will-be-under-fire-for-handling-of-nhs-1-4655785

Here’s what they wrote in the Scotsman today, Brian:

‘Scotland’s economy is continuing to expand but growth remains at half the wider UK rate, official figures today showed. It emerged that GDP north of the border grew by 0.2% in the third quarter of 2017 after an improvement in manufacturing. This is below the UK level of 0.4% over the same period, but an increase on the 0.1% hike in GDP which Scotland saw in the previous quarter.’

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/scottish-economy-grows-but-still-trails-uk-1-4663531

So, the UK’s economy, including the City of London’s subsidised and mostly making money for bonuses and for shareholders, economy, grew by a measly 0.4% in the third quarter of 2017 but never mind that Scotland’s only grew by 0.2% let’s focus on that. To paraphrase Brian:

‘This tactic of deflection has now worn thin and the evidence that the UK’s economy is in really serious trouble is growing.’

The whole report by Scott McNab is actually quite fair if he hadn’t made the cardinal error of ‘whitabootery.’

Finally, though, how useful is GDP as measure of economic health? See this:

‘Gross domestic product (GDP) is increasingly a poor measure of prosperity. It is not even a reliable gauge of production.’

https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21697845-gross-domestic-product-gdp-increasingly-poor-measure-prosperity-it-not-even

Even more finally, might balance of trade be worth mentioning? Only Scotland and Northern Ireland* have a positive balance of trade and parts of the UK including London cost the UK a bloody fortune in necessary debt to pay for their imports. See:

* for the first time