The media game

The news is the NHS is in a helluva state: nurses treating patients in the back of ambulances because there's no room for them in hospital corridors; ambulance staff stuck in hospital car parks for hours because they can't offload their patients; hospital corridors blocked with trolleys because all the wards are full; operations postponed because hospital beds are needed for emergencies; nursing and medical staff at breaking point. 

Winter in the NHS. It happens every year. But wait a wee minute.

The horror story being described on TV, radio and in the UK newspapers right now is about the NHS in England. It may even be about the situation in Wales and Northern Ireland but there's no way to tell because the headline is always just 'the NHS.' We know it's not happening in Scotland. At least, some of us do. Some of us know that health is a devolved issue and the NHS in Scotland is actually doing a lot better than it is elsewhere, despite an ageing population and the usual outbreak of winter flu.

The same applies to the distribution of broadband: the Labour Party faults the Scottish Government for not setting up rapid broadband communication faster, but never mentions the fact that this issue is reserved (that's the right word) to Westminster and the Scottish Government has no control over the project. So the newspaper headlines and TV reports finger the Scottish Government, not Westminster.

This week, farmers in Scotland demanded the Scottish Government tell them what subsidies will be available after Brexit, although Brexit is again an issue that is reserved to Westminster.

But some of the Scottish public think postponed operations and total chaos on the wards apply to Scotland too, that the Scottish Government is failing to deliver broadband and somehow the Scottish Government is responsible for farming subsidies.

So it's turned into a wee game: it's not that Sky News and all the other news outlets like ITV and STV don't know that the NHS in England is different from the service in other countries of the UK. They just prefer to ignore the fact. And they have to know which matters are devolved to Scotland and the other devolved authorities and which are reserved to Westminster. Unless they are totally stupid. And even this lot are not that stupid.

Who is responsible for feeding false information to the public on these matters? I can't decide if it's the TV news channels which seem to miss out the word 'English' when dealing with matters that don't affect any other area of the UK. As if they think the word 'England' somehow covers the whole of 'Britain.'

Or maybe it's the constant flood of non-information put out by the Tories and Labour, often using Freedom of Information requests to provide false information, like this week's revelation that some ambulances in Scotland go out manned by a single person. Yes, they do: they always have - those are the ambulances doing non-emergency work, picking up and dropping up patients. But suddenly this is presented by the Tories in Scotland as a problem.

The ramifications for Scotland when another independence referendum comes are quite clear: the media (TV, radio, and almost all newspapers) will say anything, tell any lie, spout any kind of nonsense on behalf of the union. And since those of us who believe Scotland is capable of being an independent country have no other outlets, we have to keep battering away in the pages of the National and the Sunday Herald. And we have to demand - honestly, demand - that Scottish
Government spokespeople get out there and make it known how the news is being distorted. It's not that hard: most TV and radio journalists these days seem to be gutless: won't press home any point but just allow their interviewees to spout tosh. And if we can't rely on 'mainstream media' there are plenty of us out here online happy to spread the word.

Who runs Scotland?

I came across a reference to a 'Lord Lieutenant' in something I was reading today and realised I'd no idea who this person is or what he or she does.

So I googled it:

<<The Lord-Lieutenant is the British monarch's personal representative in each county of the United Kingdom...the Lord-Lieutenant is largely an honorary position, usually awarded to a retired notable person in the county>>.

I'm guessing here that the LL is picked by her maj from a suitable list of notable persons and that's not going to be made up of the local butcher or the crossing patrol woman who retired last year or the village postmaster. So who are these people? The last LL of Ayrshire was a retired soldier (officer class). The current one is a former sheriff in Kilmarnock. There doesn't seem to be any information about the LL in other areas.

The Lord Lieutenant it seems has deputies. They don't get paid a wage but they do get a military-style uniform and expenses to cover their costs, secretarial help, mileage allowance and a driver.

A driver of what, I wonder? 

The 'modern' responsibilities of Lords-Lieutenant include:

• Arranging visits of members of the royal family and escorting royal visitors;
• Presenting medals and awards on behalf of the sovereign, and advising on honours nominations;
• Participating in civic, voluntary and social activities within the lieutenancy;

Well, this is just so much flannel - the kind of stuff I associate with the royal family. Utterly irrelevant to real life. But wait, there's more...

• Acting as liaison with local units of the Royal Navy, Royal Marines, Army, Royal Air Force and their associated cadet forces;
• Leading the local magistracy as chairman of the Advisory Committee on Justices of the Peace; and
• Chairing the local Advisory Committee for the Appointment of the General Commissioners of Income Tax, a tribunal which hears appeals against decisions made by the HM Revenue and Customs on a variety of different tax related matters.

It's these last bits I'm bothered about. Well, no, I'm a liar: I don't like the idea of the monarchy having any role in my life. But this is starting to look like another layer of government. Or an alternative government that we don't get to vote on. Who pays for this liaison with the troops, and the chairing of this and that? I'll bet it's not her maj. And what on earth can a LL possibly contribute to HM Revenue and Customs appeals or the appointments of justices of the peace? 

I expect a lot of the people who take up these 'grace and favour' positions are thrilled to be asked to do so. And, I'm sure, they carry out their duties to the best of their ability. But we don't need them and, above all, they are not accountable to the voters of the country. 

It's just like the House of Lords, which is a racket in my opinion: a way of keeping a layer of government in place that is not answerable to any of us and is, thus, above the people and not of the people. The House of Lords is the opposite of democracy: it's a way of perpetuating the 'ancien régime' that the French got rid of in 1789. And as long as we keep allowing this group of people to go on promoting each other, making decisions on the future of the UK and - most of all - raking in enough cash in expenses so they don't have to actually earn a living, there can't be democracy here. 

A Facebook surprise

I think maybe I don't understand Facebook. Today I got a notification of a message from someone on 'Messenger.' I don't use Messenger. To be honest, FB is complicated enough for me without adding  Messenger. But this message could have been important or from some one I knew so I thought I'd check it. 

I clicked on Messenger (top left hand side of my page). The message I was trying to check out wasn't there but, as I scrolled down, I found dozens of messages from way back in 2015 and 2016 from total strangers and all of them insulting. All referred to my appearance or my age or my political views and a few pretty menacing messages warned me that I'd better give up posting on FB - or at least stop posting this kind of 'stuff.' All of them were anonymous: 'from a Facebook member,' nothing more. 

So here's what I have to ask: I can't remember what I posted that could have provoked this rage - and it is pretty rabid - but can I do anything about it? I don't mind the usual back and fro of FB discussion, but this is different: there's an air of menace here. It seems to have to do with my nationality, my sex and my politics, and although I'm happy to admit I'm in favour of independence, nowhere have I ever stated I am SNP. 

Is this how things are these days? People can be anonymous on FB so they can send offensive messages to total strangers and there will be no come-back?

What bothers me is that in among all this shite from trolls were two messages from people I really wanted to get in touch with, because really we need to keep human discourse going.

'Nationalism' but not as we know it

This is a twitter classic, isn't it? It has all the hallmarks of British nationalism: the writer thinks 'English' and 'British' mean the same thing. Gets a derogatory comment about 'immigrants' in in the first sentence. Is contemptuous of any poor soul who is not English/British. Thinks everyone outside the golden circle of English-Britishness is a poor soul.

Can we examine a wee bit what being English means?

In Scotland, we say anyone who has committed to living and working here, pays their taxes and contributes to our society is Scottish. Nothing to do with where you were born or what colour you are. Most of us don't really know much about our ancestry but we - I think - accept that we're probably a mix of several nationalities. In my own family, there's a bit of Gaelic Scottish along with southern Scottish, some Polish, a bit of Irish, a bit of Chilean. I think that's a typical definition of 'Scottish.'

Nationality is not our main concern in life. We are interested in what we can do to earn money, keep the family in one piece, get a home to live in, save for a wee holiday. We happily pay for the NHS (and would maybe pay more), we pay our council tax, we mostly don't try to evade the taxes we owe. All in all, we are good citizens.

It seems to a small section of English people that's not enough. So let's ask the question: who are these people of 'pure English or British heritage'?

It depends what you mean by English. Since Great Britain (the island, not the island state) was among the last places to lose the ice after the last Ice Age (When was that? 13 centuries BC? Forgive me, I'm doing this from memory), everyone who lives on this island is an incomer. So do you have to trace your ancestry back to that time to be 'pure English'? I'm not sure how you would do that. Or maybe you can count your ancestry from the arrival of the Celts (2 centuries BC?) or the Romans (55BC), some of whom forgot the way home? Or the Jutes, Angles or Saxons late 4thC AD onwards)? Or from the Normans - 1066 onwards? Is it okay to claim you're English if your ancestors were Huguenots - like Nigel Farage? Or German - again like Farage, not to mention the current royal family.

I'm happy to say all this talk of passports, nationality and loyalty by the 'English Brexiteer' is just so much tosh. What people like him really hate are brown or black faces; people who look different  from him: Jews, Sikhs, Muslims, Africans, West Indians. People whose values and principles are held over from a previous life. This is pretty rich when people in many parts of England seem to be happy to ditch 'English' habits and traditions in favour of the worst of American traditions: trick or treat, the Easter bunny, shopping at the mall, running up vast credit card debts, not to mention tax-dodging and corrupt politicians, buy-to-let, etc.

I want you to understand I don't hate English people. I don't hate anyone - it just takes so much effort. But I am really horrified that decent English working people (with a lot in common with me) having been let down by generations of politicians since Thatcher's time (takes time to spit) have now been suckered into thinking the likes of Nigel Farage, Theresa May and the 'English Brexiteer' are their best hope.

Watching from the sidelines with all my hopes pinned on independence for Scotland in the next three years, all I can say to decent English people is: follow the money. Nigel Farage is complaining he's skint on a pension of £73,000 from the European Parliament, after doing nothing - nothing - for 18 years. Damien Green (I used to be a teacher and I promise you you should never trust anyone called Damien) gets sacked and picks up a redundancy 'settlement' of £17,000. Who stands to gain from leaving the EU? Not people like us, that's for sure.

Good guys and bad guys

How do you feel about nurses? You know, the backbone of the NHS. They are unfailingly polite, kind and helpful to patients. These days they've all spent 4 years getting a degree and doing on-the-ward training, so they're well-qualified. A lot of them are women with children who have to spend some of their wages on childcare to accommodate their work, and come off hellish 12 hour shifts to resume their lives looking after their families. In Scotland at least, they don't have to spend money on parking, but they often still have the nightmare of finding somewhere to park because modern hospitals don't seem ever to provide enough parking spaces in their grounds. Not for staff anyway. They're not that well-paid but at least this coming year they're getting a pay rise.

How about GPs? Yep, good people, all of them. We need more. Consultants in hospitals, do we approve of them? Oh yes, they're highly skilled and very hard-working. The same goes for people like radiographers, physiotherapists, the pharmacists who provide your drugs when you're being discharged from hospital and all the other support workers. They're great, right? Ward cleaners, are they okay? And porters? I'm not sure most of us even see them, but hospitals can't run without them. The GPs and consultants are pretty well paid but the rest? Not so well.

How about the admin staff that arrange our appointments at surgeries and hospital clinics. Well, yes, they're okay, although we really only approve of actual clinicians because know that the medics and the nurses do but we're maybe not too sure what the admin people do. Just shuffling bits of paper. And as for managers - well, we hate them. Too many of them. All pulling down enormous salaries. Doing nothing. That's not true, of course. We just don't know what they do.

Then there's local councils. Over-staffed. Sit around all day drinking coffee. So some of them have degrees in business management and accountancy or personnel management, but they've no real idea of how a business runs, have they? Yes, they collect council tax, but what else?

Apart from the ones who work in education teaching our kids and working as teachers and classroom assistants to support kids with learning difficulties. Not to mention educational psychologists who do their best with diminishing resources to support families and young people with learning or mental health issues.

And the social workers who arrange day care for members of our families with learning disabilities and residential care for the elderly. And the staff who hire folk to supervise crossing patrols, make and serve school breakfasts and lunches in the canteens. And the health & safety bods that everybody hates till something goes wrong. And the maintenance guys who keep the buildings working and the ICT people who keep the technology working. How about the janitors? Ask a teacher who the most important people in a school are. Not the heidie. The office staff and the janitors.

I hope you can see a pattern developing here: for every highly-qualified 'expert' in public services, whether it's medicine and local council departments, we need an army of backroom people to make their work - well, work. But when there's a squeeze on resources, it's the people at the bottom of the wages heap that do worst. First to be paid off. Last to be given a pay rise.

Frankly, we need to rethink the idea of work, start to see work as teamwork and bring the wages of the poorest paid closer to the wages of the best paid. We may be able to do that in Scotland through our own parliament. But we need to take steps now. Do we have any powers in Holyrood to stop Westminster removing the protection of the EU's Working Hours Directive which it seems they are planning? We've seen that Holyrood can use tax breaks for the NHS and local councils to protect the poorest paid. The 2017 budget was a fair start. But can we do more? Can we challenge the Scottish Government to be more daring?

Yet again, let me say I'm not SNP - I'm a Green with my own Green ideas who is looking for more. I was pleasantly surprised by the tax bands put together by the Scottish Government. I'd seen tax-raising for Holyrood as a huge trap put in place by the last UK Labour government and then by the Tories. I was wrong. There was some clever thinking went into these tax bands. Now that the Scottish Government has started to think radically, what else can we do? 

Goodwill

Two stories have stayed with me this week.

A woman on benefits saved up £2,000 to give her 6 kids a good Christmas. I can't tell you much more than that, because I don't read arsehole tabloids. But I do know arsehole tabloids are published in London and written by people who earn a helluva lot more than £2,000. The newspaper in question disapproved of the woman's actions and splashed her photo all over their front page. I don't know and I don't want to know what her circumstances are but I'll bet there's more to the story than the tabloid revealed.

I wish she hadn't appeared on the front page of a newspaper, but I hope she got paid well for allowing the great British public to sneer at her and her kids. If only someone had said to her: Letting this newspaper put your photo on its front page is not meant to help you. It's meant to encourage the great British public to come to the conclusion that people on benefits are scroungers and can salt away their benefits, whereas you and I know people on benefits often get into debt, sometimes to illegal money lenders, at this time of year and struggle to pay the cash back for most of the next year.

The second story was about a homeless guy called James. It's a complicated story but James found a car left with a window rolled down and a bag inside with a lot of cash in it. He guarded it for several hours in the rain and the cold. To thank James for his honesty - and common decency - it was decided to put up an appeal for funding to help him on social media.

I followed the appeal on Facebook:

Manage

Jean Nisbet 735 quid raised for him in an hour!

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 · Reply · 14 December at 21:22

Manage

Jean Nisbet 1,950 quid raised in 9 hours! Fantastic!

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 · Reply · Yesterday at 04:58

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Jean Nisbet 5,230 quid (more than the target set) raised in 17 hours.

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 · Reply · 

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 · 16 hrs

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Jean Nisbet The total raised is now well over 11,000 quid. The first 5,000 goes to James and the rest to homelessness charities. I just hope James gets the help he needs to get his life back on track.

Why would so many people be moved by James's actions and be willing to donate to his cause? It's not like the people donating are sending vast sums of money (a lot are sending a fiver or 10 quid, and only a few have sent sums like 100 quid). I'll bet the people donating are not rich. 

But it's topical: homelessness is right there in front of us, much more so than in previous years. It's a  disgrace to the UK. We keep being told how rich the UK is and yet homelessness has risen by 65% in the last 3 years. 

The homelessness issue involves much that is going wrong in the UK right now. First of all, there are no homes for people to go to because houses are not being built to meet our needs. Housing has become part of the Tory dream: a way to make money, rather than a way to let people live a decent life. So land is bought up and either permission to build is refused or builders just let it lie while they wait for land prices to go up. Benefits are now so low that people can't afford to rent. That means young people suffer, but older people are also suffering because a lot of people are trapped in houses where they've lived all their lives because they can't find a smaller place to live. 

To be fair, the Scottish Government is rowing against this tide, but it is hampered by the number of tax areas where it can't intervene to improve its cash flow. And it is also hampered by the 'main' political parties' (main in England and Wales, not in Scotland) obsession with independence. The only political parties that talk about independence here in Scotland are the Tories, Labour and the LibDems. 

There's a lot of negotiation going on between the SNP and the Greens right now, to do with getting the Scottish budget through Holyrood. You won't hear about that on UK TV or read about it in the UK press. And you won't hear about the issue of homelessness, not unless it serves the agenda of the Westminster government. 

The weather where you are...

I switched on the TV very late on Sunday night. It was already snowing in some parts of the British Isles and the news was full of warnings about staying off the road unless you knew how to drive in snow and staying at home unless your journey was urgent.

On Monday I turned on the TV at teatime to find whole news bulletins taken up with the weather. Snow had hit southern England and boy, did we hear about it. Along with the pictures of children out playing on their sleds, there were four hour traffic jams in Oxfordshire and pictures of cars, vans and lorries that had overturned in the snow. Bits of London were described as snowy, although to be fair, it looked as if they had a light dusting or at worst a couple of inches of the white stuff. Schools were closed. In one of those ironies, a Christmas market was cancelled somewhere. 

There are places in the British Isles where having snow in winter is normal and people are ready for it. I'm talking about the rural north-west of Northern Ireland, north-west Scotland, parts of Perthshire, the Cairngorms, bits of Argyll and the Borders, some of Yorkshire, central and north Wales and Lincolnshire. It's got to do with where our islands lie: some areas get the snow straight off the Atlantic and other areas get it from Siberia. But folk know it's coming.

People who live in these areas tend to buy sturdy cars that have good road holding and don't spin like a top when they encounter snow. They tend to have practice at driving in snow and they also take advice, carry provisions and a blanket and a shovel in the car in case they need it - and they don't go out if it's not safe. When I worked in Argyll, I knew the phone number of Arrochar police station off by heart. They always had an update on whether the Rest and be Thankful was shut - or if it was likely to shut in a couple of hours. We also knew how fast snow could blow in. 

It seems to me some of the UK is now peopled by folk who think weather can be ignored. Or rather, they think nothing should happen to them when 'bad' weather hits. Maybe we need to remind these people that road gritting and ploughing, along with road accidents, cost the economy more than taking a day off your work or keeping your kids off school for a day or two.

And maybe southern England could give the rest of us a break from complaining about 'bad' weather. There's no such thing as 'bad' weather, in my opinion. Just weather. Live with it.