Talking-up Scotland

Though typically headlined by BBC Scotland as ‘Scotland sees surge in unemployment’, the increase was only 3.6% for the period April to June after a longer period of more than a year falling below that of the UK:

16 years-old statistics pupils will of course tell us that a three-month change is not a reliable indicator of a trend. Has anyone at Reporting Scotland passed mathematics at O, Standard or National 4 level?

Other good news: The employment rate of 75.4% was close to the highest figure on record – 75.9% and very near to the UK rate despite the latter being distorted by the rate in the hyper-subsidised South -East and London..

 

 

In Energy Voice yesterday:

An Aberdeen-headquartered firm has agreed a multi-million deal to construct a ground-breaking new tidal turbine from its port-side facility in Dundee. Texo Group, who employ 35 staff in Dundee, said the deal with Orkney-based Orbital Marine Power to manufacture its new O2 tidal turbine will look to create up to 100 jobs at the firm. The deal is understood to be a substantial portion of the overall build cost, which is between £8-9 million. Texo Group’s managing director, Robert Dalziel, said the deal would show the “very best” in Scottish engineering as the firm switches over from oil and gas to renewables. Orbital Marine Power, formerly Scotrenewables, reported an industry benchmark last August as its SR2000 tidal turbine generated more power in the past year than the entire Scottish marine energy sector managed in the 12 years prior to its launch.

https://www.energyvoice.com/otherenergy/205397/exclusive-texo-group-inks-multi-million-tidal-turbine-deal-with-orbital-marine-power/

Scotland has both massive wave and tidal resources and now the expertise to exploit them. This research report sums them up:

If there is one region of the world that is synonymous with marine renewable energy, it is Scotland. With 16,500 km of coastline and a population density of 64/km2, Scotland is in a strong position to make use of its abundant wave and tidal resources to generate meaningful levels of electricity. Scotland sits on the western fringes of the northwest European continental shelf, exposed to waves propagating from the north Atlantic – the main source of its wave energy resource. In addition, numerous narrow channels, seaways and “firths” interspersed around Scotland lead to the formation of some of the strongest tidal currents in the world, with the Pentland Firth, in particular, often nicknamed the “Saudi Arabia of tidal power”.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148117302082

Go to the actual report for sources for the claims above.

Where is he? There he is, unnamed and unlabelled down at the bottom. Who is he we wonder? Let’s open it up and read on. Oh, it’s former Deputy Provost of Aberdeen, Alan Donnelly. Why is his story down there? Oh, you’ve got another Alex Salmond story. That’s more in the public interest?

Have any other Tories been accused of sex crimes? See these earlier stories:

BBC UK silent on the Tory child rapist and the Tory serial child sex offender yet Reporting Scotland offer all-day headline coverage of the SNP MSP’s inappropriate text

Tories- the real sex pests

Conservatives FAIL to protect England’s children in care from sexual exploitation!

Conservatives FAIL to protect England’s children in care from sexual exploitation!

In sharp contrast to the Tory Government, there have been NO complaints of sexual misconduct in any area of SNP Government

 

 

The demand for primary knee or hip replacements in Scotland has almost doubled, from 7 562 in 2001 to 15 091 in 2018. Despite this, overall length of stay has fallen by nearly 50%.

More important, kidney failure, an important complication associated with surgery has fallen from 2.3% in 2016 to only 1.5% in 2018.

These are major improvements worthy on media coverage.

Here’s what the researchers say about their methods:

We identified NHS trusts in England that received more than 30 000 patients through the emergency department in the fourth quarter of the 2016/2017 period.

https://emj.bmj.com/content/early/2019/07/10/emermed-2019-208436

Clear? Despite that, the Guardian gave us:

Half of key UK hospital doctors ‘ill-prepared’ for major incident Half of key hospital doctors likely to be involved in responding to a major incident in the UK are not properly prepared, a survey has suggested.

Then, clearly not awake, quoted the primary author, Dr Jamie Mawhinney:

The take-home message from my study is that the majority of middle-grade doctors in England are not confident in the role that they should play in a major incident.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/aug/12/uk-hospital-doctors-ill-prepared-major-incident

 

‘Two life-changing cystic fibrosis drugs are rejected for routine use by the NHS in Scotland because of their cost.’

At 6.30pm yesterday, the headline and the opening statement are simplified for tabloid impact, incomplete, and thus inaccurate. The drugs have not been rejected in an absolute sense at all, as the screen message implies, but only for routine use. The drugs have not been rejected because of their cost but because there was insufficient evidence of their effectiveness.

The report then allows a single parent to express disappointment before telling us:

Two cystic fibrosis medicines that are described as lifechanging by campaigners will not be made routinely available on the NHS in Scotland. The Scottish Medicines Consortium that recommends which drugs should be funded said it had heard powerful testimonies about the potential benefits of Orkambi and Symkevi (?) but said there wasn’t sufficient evidence to justify the costs of the medicines.

What ‘routinely available’ actually means is not explained nor are the SMC allowed to explain their decision. STV do allow that. Might we not expect such a group to have an evidence-based argument for their decision to balance the understandably emotional accounts of one or two parents? Surely, we could be told just what ‘insufficient evidence’ means?

In their place we get an extended single case with Lisa Summers then we meet a group of campaigners then we get an interview with one campaigner.

In total we have six excerpts with unqualified parents and campaigners or reporters using their words (‘lifechanging’) against two from medics, short and unemphasised, but none actually with qualified medics. Where is the balance that journalists love to talk of?

After a quick mention of the cost of the drugs, Lisa finishes with:

Historically people with cystic fibrosis can face a considerably shortened life. Treatments like this give hope that the condition will be halted while the hunt goes on to find a cure.

This rounds off a report which began with emotional drama and lies, which had four unqualified sources and no medical ones, and which referred to lack of evidence for the drugs and the (enormous) cost of the drugs, only quickly in passing.

Readers might remember Reporting Scotland disgracefully describing NHS Tayside’s Oncology department as ‘dysfunctional’ when no one else had done so, only to discover, too late, a St Andrews professor who disproved the notion. Once again Reporting Scotland are prepared to exploit any personal trauma in an attempt to politicise it.

Dysfunctional Reporting Scotland dabble in complex cancer treatment and cause damaging patient anxiety

‘Dysfunctional’ NHS Tayside fights back as BBC Scotland fiddle with their vocabulary to fool you

Why does Reporting Scotland’s ‘dysfunctional’ breast cancer department have ‘average’ death rate?

Reporting Scotland ‘detectives’ think they’ve found a ‘dysfunctional department.’ They have.

 

I’ve had to correct repeated errors in this Energy Voice report from yesterday. FOUR times they wrote UK when they should have written SCOTLAND. It’s an easy mistake, for some, but equally easy these days for me to sort out. So, here’s the corrected draft:

A huge Highland (sic) wind project has pushed SCOTLAND to the top of the European installed capacity league table. The 84-turbine Beatrice Offshore Wind Farm, situated near a former oil field in the Moray Firth, was officially opened by developer SSE Renewables last month. It is able to power up to 450,000 homes in SCOTLAND. The 588 megawatt (MW) project, when combined with other installed wind farms in the first half of 2019, makes up the lion’s share of the total UK capacity of 931 MW. Across, Europe, 1.9 gigawatts (GW) of new offshore wind was installed in the first half of the year, up from the 1.1 GW added in the same period in 2018.

SCOTLAND (623 MW), Denmark (374 MW), Belgium (370 MW) and Germany (252 MW) accounted for these installations.

https://www.energyvoice.com/otherenergy/205278/beatrice-project-pushes-uk-to-top-of-european-offshore-wind-power-table/

Note: Wind power in Scotland is the fastest-growing renewable energy technology, with 8423 MW of installed wind power capacity as of December 2018. This included 7800 MW from onshore wind in Scotland and 623 MW of offshore wind generators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Scotland

Note: 83% Increase in Electricity Transfers FROM Scotland TO England & Wales missed by our NoMedia

 

In a poll of 2003 UK adults (169 Scots) by Opinium for the Observer on 8-9 August, when asked:

If requested, the UK Government should allow the Scottish Government to have a second referendum in the next 5 years	or
	The UK Government should prevent the Scottish Government from holding a second referendum in the next 5 years

46% said YES and only 34% said NO.

Support was even stronger in London with 48% in favour but across the UK (Jo, Willie) 60% of Lib Dems! 50% of Labour supporters too.

https://www.opinium.co.uk/political-polling-8th-august-2019/

 

 

In an extended report by the BBC today we heard:

Recorded drug crime is increasing in many small towns and villages even as it falls significantly in city centres, the BBC has found. Drug crimes in England and Wales have fallen by more than 50,000 in the past five years, according to a BBC analysis of police-recorded crime data. But the national averages hide a major shift in where drug crimes are being committed. In the village of Westhumble in Surrey, which has a population of 649, drug crime has more than quadrupled in the past five years, from nine cases to 42.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48343369

There’s no mention of Scotland at all in the report. Are these gangs respecting the border and staying out of Scotland? Well no, of course, they aren’t. See this from the Sunday Post in February 2019:

PEOPLE living in rural communities around Scotland are being targeted by ruthless “county lines” gangsters who want to take over their home to sell drugs. The criminals from the north of England use threats and violence to force vulnerable people in countryside towns and villages into helping them sell drugs. Police say the problem – first seen in Scotland’s north-east – has now spread across the country and a dedicated team of detectives has been set up in response.

https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/threats-violence-and-death-as-county-lines-drugs-gangs-seize-homes-in-towns-and-villages-across-rural-scotland/

Police Scotland reported the problem in January, triggering presumably, the Sunday Post piece and announced an initiative by Crimestoppers:

The charity Crimestoppers is today 14th January 2019 launching a campaign to highlight the pain and suffering that criminals from English cities are inflicting on vulnerable people in Scotland’s rural and coastal towns.

https://www.scotland.police.uk/whats-happening/news/2019/january/campaign-launched-appeal-for-help-tackling-county-lines-drug-networks

The Times covered the story in October 2018, but as far as I can see, no other major mainstream media outlet in Scotland has. Why doesn’t this appeal to editors? Subconscious aversion to stories that might make us want a hard border?

Footnote: Presumably, drug gangs based in Scottish cities are not doing this kind of thing?

AND, come on BBC Scotland Disclosure Team! Here’s a real story that doesn’t just involve interviewing auld folk in a hospital ward or in their living rooms about how there aren’t enough nurses or doctors or pan drops or……..

In the National today, Stuart Cosgrove repeats the same kind of indignant protest we see over and over again from Yes-supporting mainstream media-insiders. He writes:

There are many hundreds of Yes supporters working within BBC Scotland and to categorise the organisation as a stooge of London is to misrepresent a much more complicated reality.’

Leaving aside his typically journalistic willingness to represent his gut-based guesswork on how many Yes-supporters there are in Pacific Quay, as fact, the rest of this statement is a classic of the type so commonly used to misunderstand and to confuse the nature of propaganda. Independence-supporting editors at the Sunday Herald and even at Newsnet.scot have tried to portray me as a simple conspiracy theorist before and to characterise clear propagandists at the BBC as rare ‘bad apples.’ Even George Monbiot tried to do the same to Chomsky when the latter reminded him that in the end, he (Monbiot) was inside the corporation-controlled bubble that is mainstream media.

You see, I’ve said over and over before that BBC Scotland is not home to a cabal of scheming cauldron-circlers but that bias FOR the status quo emerges naturally from it. Starting with an organisation recently headed up by Labour-party Unionist insiders, openly anti-independence, such as John Boothman and Kirsty Wark and perpetuated by Sarah Smith, a hostile environment toward any reporting supportive of the cause, the SNP, the Scottish Government, NHS Scotland and so on, has developed. The evidence for this is everywhere. Readers need only search this blog for ‘bias’ or, indeed, for ‘NHS.’

Into this environment have come new staff who, wishing to get on, learn quickly what to write and how to write it. No one need tell them what to do and, soon, it seems the right thing to do, the natural thing to do.

Making the above go smoothly, the new entrants arrive already socialised from homes saturated with the messages that constitutional change is risky and that we are better together, from broadcast media and the thoughts of parents indoctrinated in schools with British imperial history classes. The latter has become less so in recent years. If they come from one of Scotland’s ancient universities, there is also a good chance that they have had a heavy dose of Atlanticism and of positive views on the status quo in the UK.

Finally, to return to the fact that there may be a number of yes-supporting folk within BBC Scotland (I doubt ‘hundreds’), the output of the two news programmes that matter, Reporting Scotland and Good Morning Scotland, suggests they’re damn few or they’re keepin’ their heids doon. Can Stuart name an editor at either of these two prepared to come out?