“Wales is now taking a much more serious approach to independence than Scotland is, even though it is almost certainly further away.”
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The title of what Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced yesterday, ‘Job Support Scheme’, flatters to deceive. The key thing to be aware of is that employers are being asked to pay one-third of the topping up of a worker’s wage who has been moved from full-time to part-time hours, which many of them are not going […]
Sunak’s ‘Job Support Scheme’ is a deception
“Lots of you think that ‘tampons on the NHS’ is the direction we’re going. I think it’s going to look more like ‘buy your own insulin’.”
Robin McAlpine: I fear Covid will be used to change Scotland’s NHS for the worse
Are you a ‘Kurzarbeit’ or a ‘chômage partiel’ person? UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak will make an important statement to the House of Commons this afternoon about what will replace the furlough scheme at the end of October, with debate rife about whether German or French models will be preferred, or something completely different altogether. The Kurzarbeit […]
Beyond furlough
Shelter Scotland have released a report calling for an increase in the amount of social housing promised by the Scottish Government – to the equivalent of an additional house built every day for the next five years.
Scotland Needs 37,100 Social Homes to Meet Demand
Exactly six months today since full lockdown, Scotland is back in a mini-lockdown again. This time, only other people’s homes are off-limits. As in England, pubs will shut at 10pm. There are good reasons to be sceptical that these measures will be sufficient to contain the spread of covid-19. They appear suspiciously like applying maximum […]
Six months since lockdown, is ‘Test and Protect’ ready?
“Scotland is now fighting Covid with precisely as much testing capacity as the UK will permit us… What it means is more than that Scotland isn’t taking a distinctive approach – it means it can’t.”
Analysis: Scotland is now locked into a Four Nations Covid strategy
“We’re taking one step forward, five steps back,” Devi Sridhar, professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh and on the Scottish Government’s covid-19 advisory group, wrote yesterday, in summing up her exasperation about the covid-19 situation in the UK. She’s not wrong. Lockdown was a big social sacrifice, one where the vulnerable suffered […]
‘One step forward, five steps back’
“Remember that the stock market value of oil and gas firms is based on their oil and gas reserves. They are worth what the stock market thinks these can be sold for. So for them, these reserves must be part of the solution to climate change; this is why they place dirty, fossil fuel-based hydrogen at the heart of their plan.”
Iain Black: Beware green Trojan horses
Scottish Labour have proposed a ‘right to food’ bill, that was out to community consultation until last week. With Scotland facing increasing levels of food poverty, could this be what is needed?
Could the ‘Right to Food’ Bill Heal our Broken Food System?
“Regulation of the care home market is very weak, with almost no attention is given to issues like sector consolidation, let alone questions about whether the owner of a care home is prepared to put care before profit.”
Nick Kempe: Why we should be concerned that Real Estate Investment Trusts are expanding into the care home market
Another year, another banking scandal. They’re like clock-work these days. This time, it’s the FinCEN files: a leak of 2,657 documents from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the US Treasury that deals with money laundering. The files total $2 trillion worth of transactions, and contain 2,121 ‘SARs’, Suspicious Activity Reports which […]
The FinCEN files: What you need to know
“Those few interesting questions which might have emerged from the controversy have been almost entirely overlooked. The first is not whether Nicola Sturgeon has used her briefings for political purposes, but rather: should we care?”