“Care homes are asked to ‘undertake individual risk assessments to assess the rights and needs of individual residents’. The whole point of human rights surely is that no-one should be able to ‘assess’ anyone as not having them?”
Coronavirus
“We now know what the UK is going to look like in the final years before we reach those irreversible climate tipping points and the planet stops caring how fast our economy is growing. With Scottish elections and possibly another independence referendum now looming, it’s time for the various parties to show their support for an alternative future”
Analysis: UK Budget 2021
“Tenants were already being driven into poverty by unaffordable rents before the pandemic, but the situation is now beyond repair, and we need to undo the damage that has already been done before we start to talk about stabilising things.”
Gordon Maloney: “The Scottish Government had multiple opportunities to freeze rents over the course of the pandemic, but they rejected all of them”
For now, issues of Salmond and independence are subsumed in the public mind by the question of managing the pandemic. And here, in the shadow of May’s election, the news is (superficially) good for the SNP.
Source Direct: Reasons to be Cheerful
“In order to care about journalism, one must care about journalists. That care must be demonstrated through advocacy, organisation and a clear articulation of what will and will not be tolerated.”
Sean Bell: To save the Scottish press, listen to those who defend its journalists
“Whatever replaces the council tax should not insult either the intelligence or the sense of justice of those required to pay it. It should not be levied against those who have no means of paying it. It should not support an industry of debt collection that turns despair into the background noise of its victims’ lives.”
Sean Bell: The Scottish people cannot afford to ignore council tax, so why can our politicians?
“People in Scotland deserve far better, but we will not get that so long as those responsible for the current system are responsible for redesigning it.”
Nick Kempe: The Feeley review on Adult Social Care offers only more of the same
As Nicola Sturgeon addresses Holyrood on the future of lockdowns, questions arise concerning Scotland’s wider relationships to the UK and the European Union.
Source Direct: Virus Free Adolescents
“It takes more than a headline to change a country. The policies must match up too. And this is where the government all too easily slips back into old language, old rhetoric and old ideas of the old ‘normal’ of the pre-pandemic world.”
Analysis: Scottish Budget 2021-22
Coronavirus, many imagine, is the great equaliser. However, new figures from Oxfam paint a very different picture.