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.
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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?”
Sean Bell: Everything is political, and it is futile to pretend otherwise
“What are the costs of little or no governance, scrutiny and understanding of multiple health data initiatives when governments, academics, public sector organisations and businesses can avoid the normal controls and transparency?”
Covid-19 and questions of data
September 18th. The sixth anniversary of Indyref. I’m sure I am not alone among Source Direct subscribers in wondering if we will ever see as politically vibrant times again as the summer of 2014, when it felt like there wasn’t a person in Scotland who wasn’t actively engaged in shaping the country’s future. So much […]
Don’t lose sight of what made 2014 special
“Those of us on the side of the poor souls who hold our society together when they hardly have the cash to hold their own lives together have won the moral argument. Great, but that’s not enough.”
Robin McAlpine: We’re losing the bunfight so we must win the battle of ideas
Free Our City is a campaign being launched by Get Glasgow Moving calling for public transport to be made free to use. “This radical policy is a necessary one: to address the climate emergency and gross inequalities in our society and ensure we make a just and green recovery from the pandemic.”