No progress on A&E after a year of Humza Yousaf as FM Rennie responds to David Tydeman sacking Scottish Liberal Democrats respond to housing figures No progress on A&E after a year of Humza Yousaf as FM Responding to new figures showing only 62.9% of people attending A&E were seen within the 4 hour target in the week ending 17th March, just as bad as when Humza Yousaf became First Minister, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader and health spokesperson Alex Cole-Hamilton said: Waiting times in A&E are just as bad as they were a year ago when Humza Yousaf moved from ...
The obituary for Rigby Graham quoted at the beginning of this video describes him as an "irascible painter whose idiosyncratic landscapes are among the 20th century's best". Though I met Graham as a teenager, I never experienced that irascibility, but I agree with the obituarist's judgement of his work. I wonder that Graham is not better known, even wildly popular. The best place to see his work is at Goldmark gallery, which is also one of my lost bookshops of Uppingham. In the video, the gallery's owner Mike Goldmark, who published Iain Sinclair's early novels at Uppingham, talks about Graham, ...
He jumped before he was pushed, Blackpool South MP Scott Benton resigned yesterday meaning he won't be ejected from the House of Commons by a recall petition. Who says there's no good news? In a crowded field Benton was one of the most abrasive and obnoxious MPs on the Government benches. This is the latest ... Continue reading Bye bye Benton, Bone and Bridgen
One of my favourite music podcasts is The Strange Brew, and it recently had a stellar episode that interviewed Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas. She gave a great picture, not just of the rise and fall of her own band, but also of the Sixties folk scene in the US. You may never see the Byrds in quite the same light again.
Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP has today warned the SNP Government that its new cancer strategy risks "becoming meaningless" as new figures show that waiting times for cancer treatment are amongst some of the worst ever. Public Health Scotland figures reveal that in the quarter ending 31st December 2023, only 71.1% of patients were treated within the target of 62 days from referral. This is a mere 2% increase from when figures were at their worst ever level in the quarter ending 31st March 2023, when just 69.4% were seen within the standard. 80% or more of patients ...
Tue 26th
11:49
The dangers of schismogenesis: Beware of adopting a view because of the people it will upset
The problem is not so much that social media has led us to support policies on the grounds that they will "upset the right people": it's that we go on to invent principles that will justify this understandable but ultimately base instinct. So it was fine to smile when Nigel Farage had his account closed by Coutts - he has done a great deal of damage to this country, after all. What worried me was when people who imagined themselves on the left started defending the proposition that banks are private business with a right to act they choose within ...
The Guardian wins our Headline of the Day Award. As the judges noted, North Korean has banned jeans since the early 1990s because it sees them as a symbol of US imperialism. Lord Bonkers's gardener Meadowcroft, I feel convinced, still wears a smock.
Over on the Midweek Herald, Richard Foord MP writes about the threat to high street pharmacies: ...these important facilities are under threat, and we are risk seeing them disappear from some of our high streets altogether. More than 1,000 pharmacies across England have shut their doors since 2015 and many more are facing an uncertain future as funding for these services has been cut by 30 per cent in real terms over the past seven years. There's a vacancy rate of 14 per cent in community pharmacies in the West Country, compared to eight per cent across the UK. Communities ...
We knew that the Tories were losing any sense of reality, especially when it comes to understanding the British public, but the least we should be able to expect from politicians soliciting our vote is to know what city they are standing in. Unfortunately, that is also a lost art for the governing party. The Mirror reports that bungling Tories have been forced to delete an election campaign video that showed New York instead of London. They say that in the weird clip, the party claimed "the metropolis [is] teetering on the brink of chaos". But rather than depict the ...
Fraser's weekly ward surgeries take place later today and every Tuesday during school term time. They are as follows : Tuesdays at 5pm prompt - Blackness Library Tuesdays at 5.45pm prompt - Ancrum Road Primary School All residents welcome - no appointment necessary. Please note that Fraser has no surgeries during the school Easter holidays and, after tonight's, his surgeries return on Tuesday 16th April. Michael has his last surgeries before the holidays this Thursday evening.
