Talking-up Scotland

From Scottish Housing News today:

‘Additional capacity for night shelters and extra staff to help get more people into accommodation are among the actions being taken to tackle rough sleeping this winter. Recommendations to tackle the issue were made by the Scottish Government’s Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Action Group in November, and immediately accepted by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.’

The money will be used for these:

• An increase to the Bethany Christian Trust night shelter capacity for the winter period in Edinburgh
• The Night Stop service, which already operates in Edinburgh, will start in Glasgow
• Flexible funding allocated to front-line teams to enable them to explore other options with people
• Outreach capacity expanded across the main cities, with additional staff to reach out to and support those sleeping rough
• Winter survival packs made available, as a last resort, to keep safe those people who do not take up other options

http://www.scottishhousingnews.com/19136/scottish-government-delivers-actions-tackle-rough-sleeping/

The SNP administration has already committed itself to end homelessness in Scotland and we have seen it fall here as it rises in England. See:

Could Scotland end homelessness?

Homelessness falls in Scotland as it rises in England, mainly driven by heartless Tory welfare reforms

Meanwhile from Windsor, we read:

‘Councillor Simon Dudley wrote to Thames Valley police this week, seeking action against what he describes as “aggressive begging and intimidation” and “bags and detritus” accumulating on the streets. He doesn’t want the VIPs attending Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s big day to have their experience spoilt by the sight of those at the sharp end of austerity.’

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/04/ending-homelessness-royal-wedding-windsor-council-rough-sleepers-harry-meghan

And, across England, we see:

‘Homelessness in England ‘a national crisis’, say MPs’

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42421583

Once again, I ask the questions: ‘Are we a bit different and different enough to want to run things ourselves?’

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?

From the Scottish Business News Network, based on a Bank of Scotland survey at the end of last year:

‘An increasing number of Scottish adults can see themselves starting their own business, according to the latest How Scotland Lives research from Bank of Scotland. With the prospect of starting a business enabling Scots to create their own success and take on more responsibility, research from the Bank shows that almost equal numbers of men and women expect to start-up in business in the next year.  57% of men and 43% of women are looking to start their own business.’

https://sbnn.co.uk/2017/12/22/increasing-number-scots-planning-starting-new-business/

This is another example from numerous indicators of the increasingly robust nature of the Scottish economy, reported here. See, for example:

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.

£226 million given in relief to small businesses in 2017-18 as part of most generous scheme in the UK

40% increase in number of new Scottish businesses mainly under SNP government

If you need more, search the blog for ‘business’ or ‘expertise’ and you’ll find many more.

See this recently published response from the Scottish FOI office to an anonymous request:

________________________________________________________________________________________

FOI reference: FOI/17/03047
Date received: 29 November 2017
Date responded: 22 December 2017

Information requested

How many Freedom of Information Requests BBC Scotland submit to the Scottish Government &/or Parliament each year, for as many years as records are available & the overall or average cost associated with handling these requests.

Response

How many Freedom of Information Requests BBC Scotland submit to the Scottish Government each year.

The information you have requested is detailed in the table below. For the purposes of this request we have include FOI requests received from both BBC Scotland and BBC Scotland News:

Year	Number of FOI requests
2008	8
2009	3
2010	8
2011	2
2012	0
2013	1
2014	2
2015	13
2016	20
2017 (to 19 Dec)	11

Overall or average cost associated with handling these requests.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have asked for. This is because although requests are considered under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act (FOISA), they are allocated to the policy area responsible for that topic, and answered accordingly by an appropriate official as part of their normal duties. Officials are not required to record what proportion of their time is spend handling requests for information and therefore we do not hold a figure for the overall or average cost associated with handling these requests.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

https://beta.gov.scot/publications/foi-17-03047/

University College London did some costing estimates and came up with an average cost of a request from survey data of £189 and a maximum of £3 033.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/research/foi/countries/cost-of-foi.pdf

The BBC is exempt from FOI requests relating to ‘journalism, art or literature’ and tends to tell applicants:

‘The BBC is not required by the Act to supply information held for the purposes of creating the BBC’s output or information that supports and is closely associated with these creative activities.’

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/418460/response/1011080/attach/2/RFI20171026%20Response.pdf?cookie_passthrough=1

So, what is clear is that BBC Scotland has significantly increased its FOI requests to the Scottish Government since 2014 and the risk of independence became more real to them. I could find no evidence of the BBC elsewhere in the UK making any FOI requests of the UK Government. Also, these figures do not include BBC Scotland’s FOI requests to health boards or to individual hospitals nor does it include those requests made by the Labour, Tory and Lib Dem parties in their attempts to dig dirt which they can use to attack the SNP or to undermine the case for independence. Regular readers will have seen two recent reports by STV based on Tory and Lib Dem FOI requests.

Today, the Heralds told us:

‘New figures show that 1,609 Scots-qualified nurses trained north of the Border have filled in verification requests from the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) – which enables them to practise in other countries – over the past five years. It comes as vacancy rates for nurses and midwives reached a record high last year and left wards across the country struggling to plug the gaps.’

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15808810.Hundreds_of_Scottish_trained_nurses_planning_to_work_abroad/

So that’s just, on average, 323 nurses per year and no evidence of how many actually left or of wards struggling to plug the gaps, actually offered.

How many nurses are there in Scotland? Well, in Nursing, excluding Midwifery, there were 56 468.2 FTE in September 2017 with 0.58%. thinking of leaving 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

I suppose if NHS Scotland is very tightly stretched in terms of nurse staffing, even a small number would matter. As I did yesterday with teacher numbers let’s have a look at NHS England nurse staffing as a comparison.

When I saw the figures, I found them hard to believe at first so I double checked them:

The Kings Fund state:

‘The number of nursing staff (nurses and health visitors) has increased by 1.8 per cent from 281,064 FTEs in 2010 to 286 020 FTEs in 2017.’

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-staffing-numbers

I checked again with the UK Government site to find confirmation:

‘There were 314,966 Nurses & health visitors, an increase of 2,790 (0.9%) since 2014. There were 281,474 FTE Nurses & health visitors, an increase of 2,494 (0.9%) since 2014.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/511519/nhs-staf-2015-over-rep.pdf

Can you see why I doubted the figures? They suggest that Scotland with only 10% of England’s population has 19% of the number of nurses or nearly twice as many per head of population. Now, I know we have more remote and underpopulated areas where you would expect to need more teachers, GPs or nurses, per head of population but that still looks like a very big difference which could, of course, be a factor in NHS Scotland’s superior performance.

Also, the number of nurses in Scotland is increasing. See this table:

https://www.isdscotland.org/Health-Topics/Workforce/Publications/2016-06-07/2016-06-07-Workforce-Report.pdf

That’s a 5.6% increase in only 4 years, in Scotland, as opposed to only a 1.8% increase over 7 years in England.

I stand ready to be corrected but I’ve searched and searched and can find no different figures or any reasons to question the ones I have.

This is all over the Scottish and UK media including the Times and the Telegraph.

NHS Lanarkshire asked its office staff to consider volunteering to help with cleaning duties as pressure on its frontline departments soared during the festive period.

There was a ‘tremendous’ response across the three affected hospitals including Wishaw General. I have family connections in Wishaw. So far, I’ve only read of what might be a great nephew arrested for firearms offences, so this helps to balance my impressions of the toon.

BBC Scotland, like most of the others, used the story as an excuse to quickly move to, and to spend more time on, reports that ‘some’ health boards were postponing elective operations and that A&E targets were being missed. Mind you, if you read nearly to the bottom you’d see that NHS Tayside actually surpassed the target with 96% seen in four hours or less.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-42557093

Most reports, with Scottish Tory, Labour and/or Lib Dem voices crying in the background, found a way to turn this into a failure of NHS Scotland to cope with soaring demand, desperately trying to associate Scotland with the all-too-real crisis in NHS England.

The Torygraph, not surprisingly turned this good news into evidence of a crisis with:

‘Office workers at Scottish health board redeployed to hospital cleaning amid NHS ‘meltdown’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/03/office-workers-scottish-health-board-redeployed-hospital-cleaning/

I suspect many Torygraph readers will have reacted with disgust at this headline while I, as many of you I think would have, felt a warm glow. As you know there has been no such thing as a ‘meltdown’ in NHS Scotland though it might be a reasonably accurate way of describing some parts of NHS England after years of Tory misrule. Does anyone really think we should staff hospitals, year-long, at the maximum level required for surges in demand of up to 40 or 50%? Also, is actually coping, as they did, somehow a failure because they asked the team to pull together in extreme times? It doesn’t seem like that to me. It seems a glowing success rich in human behaviour at its very best. Had NHS Lanarkshire turned patients away in droves or spent millions on temporary staff, would the media have treated them more kindly? I doubt it very much.

Finally, is this another wee indicator that we are just a bit different in how we do things and different enough to want to run our own show, foregrounding a different set of values? I searched but could find no comparable case in England. How would the office staff of Buckinghamshire have reacted? See these earlier pieces on this theme:

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

Scots more likely to give to charities, to volunteer or to sponsor others

Scottish Government to fight alongside UN to defend disabled against Tory cuts.

Could Scotland end homelessness?

Scotland has lower poverty rates than England: JRF Excerpt 1

If you search the blog for the word ‘different’ you’ll get many more pieces of evidence for this idea.

See this from WWF Scotland:

‘New analysis from WWF Scotland published today (Thursday 4 Jan) maps out how the carbon footprint of homes across Scotland has fallen since the Scottish Climate Change Act was passed in 2009. The climate change footprint of each individual’s household energy consumption has been cut by an average of 25% across Scotland, thanks to the growth of renewables, more efficient homes and appliances, and governments’ climate change policies. The charity’s analysis shows how the ‘climate damage’ caused by people using electricity, gas and other fuels to power and heat their homes has fallen rapidly since the first Climate Change Act was passed.’

The WWF goes on to credit the Scottish Parliament with putting Scotland at ‘the forefront of a global energy transition.’

https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/new-analysis-renewables-helping-cut-homes-carbon-footprint-across-all-scotland

Readers will have seen many reports here on Scotland’s progress toward 100% electricity supply from renewables. The government target is 2030 but it may come much earlier in 2020. See:

Scotland rushing toward 100% electricity supply from renewables by 2020

Another familiar type of headline here: With only 8% of the population, Scotland generates 24% of the UK’s renewable electricity and surges toward 100% sustainability well before 2030.

Though I’ve tended to concentrate on the economic benefits of the growth of renewables generation in the context of the debate over independence, it is, of course, very pleasing to hear of the environmental benefits. Further, if we can reduce our carbon footprint by 25% in only 8 years, presumably we can go much further in the years to come.

Footnote: Should WWF Scotland change their logo to a Polar Bear cub now that the pair in Scotland have successfully bred? I’m beginning to give up on these expensive pandas.

*Credit @MoFloMoJo for the clever headline opener.

I’ve already reported on the strong performance of the Scottish Ambulance Service over the festive period. There was no crisis of the kind hoped for by the Unionist media and politicians. Not even one death they could blame on SNP management of the NHS. Predictably, they have scraped the barrel to find something, anything, they can use to worry their audience and to undermine the reputation of the SNP-led government. See:

Scotland’s finest, our ambulance workers, fail Scotland’s media as they cope with Hogmanay demand

BBC Scotland news found something which they felt could be built up and stretched into a bad news story. Today we read:

‘Thousands of ambulances dispatched with single crew. More than 10,000 ambulances have been dispatched with one crew member on board in the past four years.’

As we read on we do get a bit of context. With a grim smile we see that the story comes from the Scottish Conservatives. Don’t BBC Scotland have any reporters out there finding stories for themselves? What are we paying them for? We, also read, now that the headline, which many only read, has had its hoped-for impact, that this accounted for only 1.5% of shifts or 2 204 out of around a quarter of a million shifts in total, in 2016.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-42557798

Also, we see that this figure is down from 3 514 in the previous year but are not offered the percentage reduction. I wonder why not? It turns out to be an impressive 37% reduction worthy of a headline itself, I’d say.

So, it’s not a big story in a quantitative sense but there’s worse than this dishonest inflation of the issue, in the language used in the headline to sensationalise, to distort, to scare and to undermine.

The headline refers to ‘single crew’ rather than ‘single paramedic’, a highly-skilled person and trained well-beyond that of most nurses or GPs to deal with emergencies and to save lives. This is important.

Second, the headline refers to ‘10 000 ambulances’ when it should refer to ‘call-outs’, painting a picture of a flood of separate single-crewed vehicles when often it would have been the same ambulance and the same paramedic called out several times in a single shift and, we must assume, sent to the cases identified by the shift supervisory staff, as manageable by a single paramedic.

Are there even 10 000 ambulances across the whole country?

Remember, we’re talking about 2 204 such call-outs in the last year or 6 in a night. In an 8-hour-shift, it seems quite plausible that it could be the same ambulance and paramedic sent to these call-outs where one paramedic was thought to be able to cope. If the truth is anything like this then we’re talking about 365 single-paramedic ambulances going out in a year and maybe 1 500 over the four years.  You can see why they chose to put 10 000 ambulances into the headline.

Finally, the decision to use the four-year figure of 10 000 rather than that for the most recent year, 2 204, is a clear case of deliberate sensationalism designed to inflate and to titillate those in need of anti-SNP stimulation. Given that the figure changes from year to year, the four-year figure has no information value.

As NHS England doctors start to report ‘third-world conditions’, you can see why BBC Scotland News and its political bottom-feeders panicked and started to thrash around in the mud looking for anything they could find to attack the SNP with.

Under the headline:

‘Rise in pupils staying on at school ‘exacerbating’ teacher recruitment crisis’

We read:

‘TOO many pupils are staying on at school until sixth year putting further pressure on Scotland‘s scarcity of teachers, according to an expert.’

Emeritus Professor and former Dean of Education at Strathclyde University, Douglas Weir, is the expert and provides the supposed evidence. Douglas is the real thing. Hugely well-qualified and experienced in educational management and a prolific researcher too. I agree with much of what he goes on to write about alternatives to staying on, but he’s wrong to have lent his status to the Herald’s underlying strategy which is, as usual, to try to undermine the SNP government, with spurious suggestions of incompetence or flawed policies.

I should admit that, after reporting my former higher education employer to the Scottish Government and to the ombudsman, for the waste of public funds, on vanity projects and jaunts to the Seychelles and elsewhere, they didn’t offer me retirement as emeritus professor but left me to depart as naemeritus professor.

There are apparently 700 unfilled teacher vacancies in Scotland mostly in Science and Mathematics. There were around 51 000 teaching staff in Scotland’s secondary schools in 2016.

http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/School-Education/TrendTeacherNumbers

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15803312.Rise_in_pupils_staying_on_at_school__exacerbating__teacher_recruitment_crisis/

So, that’s 1.37% short or, as we soft social scientists might say, just a smidgeon? Now, if a system with 51 000 staff can’t get by just 1.37% down then it clearly lacks the robustness you’d expect of it, or it was already dangerously over-stretched. Was it?

There are 51 500 teachers in Scottish secondary schools and the pupil/teacher ratio is now 13.6 pupils per teacher, down from (better than) 13.7 in 2016.

http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0052/00528868.pdf

In England, there were 457 300 teachers in 2016. The pupil/teacher ratio in 2016 was 17.6 pupils per teacher. England’s population is almost exactly ten times that of Scotland, so you might have expected there to be around 515 000 teachers there.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/620825/SFR25_2017_MainText.pdf

So, thanks presumably to the Scottish Government, Scotland’s secondary schools are significantly better staffed than English ones. Also, I know from personal experience they are better staffed than universities. I commonly did mass lectures to as many as 200 and conventional class teaching with groups of 20 to 30. As for small group tuition or interaction with individuals, I had to make use of new technologies such as ‘virtual learning environments’ or VLEs for this.

We’d also need to look at changes in the number of pupils being taught. Perhaps they’re under pressure from dramatic growth in the number of pupils being taught? No, they’re not. See this graph which shows secondary pupil numbers currently at a low point since 2000 though projected to rise a bit in the next two years:

http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/School-Education/TrendPupilNumbers

The article in the Herald alludes to the pressure of these unfilled posts being a factor in teachers quitting and quitting early, but are they? ‘Research’ by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, in 2014, found that only 51% of Scottish teachers were considering quitting while 80% of English teachers were considering quitting. However, the research was based on a small sample of only 900 UK teachers (90 Scottish teachers?) Finally, this was trades union research not academic research. Ask the members of any occupation whether they’ve considered quitting because of unmanageable workload –100% of cleaners, 100% of carers, 100% of hospital laundry workers? I did the last one for 6 months and feel sure of the figure.

Scottish Teachers Less Likely to Consider Quitting

More robust research from Bath found quite a different picture:

Scottish teachers report lower job demands, better relationships and lower perceived stress levels than those in England and only 4% are considering leaving their jobs

(c) Independent

The UK media is utterly dominated by reports of massive cancellations in NHS England. Under the headline:

‘NHS extends suspension of all non-urgent care as doctors warn of winter crisis’

the Independent, today, reports that officials estimate this could lead to up to 55,000 deferred operations [in January] and that one senior doctor has apologised for ‘third world conditions’ in his hospital.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/nhs-non-urgent-care-suspended-winter-crisis-warning-latest-a8138646.html

On Sky News today, Jeremy C…Hunt was asked if he was ashamed. It reminds us of the accusation of a ‘humanitarian crisis’, in NHS England last year, from the Red Cross. The Scottish media is quiet though I doubt they’re content. There are no reports of NHS Scotland advising its hospitals to plan for major cancellations in January. Indeed, the most recent statistical data suggests that it has entered the winter period with an improved performance in November.

In November 2016, there were 2 871 planned operations cancelled. Should that really be ‘postponed’? In November 2017, the figure was 2 720 out of a total of 30 820, down from 9% or 2 871, to 8.8% of the total number of operations.

It’s important to note that 977 of these were cancelled by the patients themselves with only 664 or 2.2% cancelled (postponed) due to capacity or non-clinical reasons. Remember, the 55 000 figure for NHS England refers only to this type of cancellation, due to lack of capacity.

https://www.isdscotland.org/Health-Topics/Waiting-Times/Publications/2018-01-03/2018-01-03-Cancellations-Summary.pdf?50968569518

Constructing a Winter crisis in NHS Scotland is going to take some doing. Are our Unionist media up-to-it? They will try. Be ready to laugh.

(c) heraldscotland.com

Here’s what Kirsty Blackman, SNP deputy leader actually said:

‘I don’t think most folk in their daily lives give two hoots about whether Scotland is a member of the union.’

Here’s the Herald headline today:

‘Voters don’t give “two hoots” about independence, says SNP Westminster deputy Kirsty Blackman’

See what they did there? The headline and the actual statement mean two quite different things. I’m sure she’s correct that most people are not talking about independence everyday as they go about dealing with the many and increasing other concerns we all have under this awful Westminster government. Regardless of that, even I spend lots of time on other matters and don’t debate independence every hour of every day. I’m not sure the choice of ‘two hoots’ was a good one but no doubt it was said quickly in the flow of an interview.

Going back to the Herald headline it implies that all voters don’t give two hoots at all times, about independence, and that’s clearly not true. When actually asked about it, a very large number of Scots do seem to give more than two hoots about the issue. You only have to look at the recent polls. Back in mid-September 2017, Panelbase had support at 43% and Survation had it at 46%. An earlier Panelbase poll had it at only 40% but a new Panelbase poll for Wings over Scotland puts support at 49% for an independent Scotland in the EU.

So close, even before campaigning begins, as new poll puts support for independence at 49%

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15802922.Voters_don_t_give__two_hoots__about_independence__says_SNP_high_flyer/

Now, sometimes, journalists claim lack of responsibility for headlines, but I doubt if Tom Gordon doesn’t get the chance to approve his headline.

Propagandists always have excuses designed to suggest critics are paranoid and don’t understand journalism as if the latter is complex code that ordinary folk wouldn’t get:

‘It would have been too long for a headline with that phrase in.’

‘It was done very quickly at midnight.’

‘It was done by a junior sub-editor.’

‘If you read the whole article, it explains.’

All of the above is, of course, excrement of the male bovine. Many readers only scan headlines. Headlines overpower any subsequent reading.  The Herald has an anti-independence agenda and it shows if you look for it.