Does Gleneagles Display Denigrate Robert Bruce? Kill the Birds to Save the Planet; Is this Swinney’s Isla Bryson Moment? …. but first ….
Should Carers Have a Salary and Pension?
Is it fair that carers in Scotland do not have a proper salary or pension? The job they do saves the state an immense amount of money, and probably denies them a career in the process. Yet their work is not valued as much as it should be. The fact it is unpaid often diminishes carers.
Add to that the fact that in many European countries, as well as Canada and Australia, carers receive generous salaries, in Germany’s case a salary of about £36,541, and in Switzerland as much as £71,000 annually.
A survey by The Young Academy of Scotland, part of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, consulted 50 carers around Scotland, and the results showed strong support for a proper salary and pension.
At the moment, carers often lose support if they wish to access education themselves, and obtaining respite care can often be a challenge. A system which put caring on the footing of a career with a salary and pension would give the carer value and standing as a person and they would no longer be unpaid, often 24-hour, help. Or the money could be given to the relative who would otherwise be a carer to allow them to employ a trained carer and themselves go out to work.
Are we serious about Carers or not?
Autistic Teen Loses Respite Care
A severely-autistic 14-year-old Dundee boy has lost his 3 HOURS of funding for respite care following a 45-minute home visit and what appears a somewhat arbitrary decision by the Children and Families Disability Services panel, who deemed his needs ‘low level’, despite him being severely intellectually disabled and non-verbal.
He was actually in receipt of a self-directed funding package, not even specific care through care providers. Isn’t the whole point of self-directed funding that he decides how he spends that money? And his needs have not changed since his assessment. All he got from the council was signposting to Barnardo’s to get volunteer befrienders and possibly take part in Barnardo’s activity days.
His mother then sent in a Subject Access Request to Dundee City Council to try and find out the reasons for the decision, only to get an almost totally redacted reply, leaving the family still in the dark. With no right of appeal, she has been forced to lodge a complaint against the council, which is ongoing.
Are we serious about people with special needs or not?
Is this John Swinney’s Isla Bryson Moment?
Just as the Scottish government is continuing to argue in court FOR the ‘right’ of men to be housed in women’s prisons, step forward trans-identifying male Alexandria Stewart, previously known as Alan Baker, who has just been charged with sexual assault on a woman in HMP Greenock.
This is another one of those things that can’t happen, what with the SPS having a ‘robust system of risk assessments’ in place. According to that policy, no male guilty of serious offences like murder, assault, robbery, abduction, rape and sexual harassment should be held in a women’s jail without a strong risk assessment.
So how was Stewart even in the female prison estate, given that his conviction was for murdering a father-of-two in 2013, whereupon Stewart promptly began identifying as a woman?
Stewart ‘had no previous record’
The answer, incredibly, is that when records were routinely checked for previous convictions, Stewart’s previous conviction for murder did not appear, as his record had mistakenly been ‘wiped clean’ when he began identifying as a woman.
So the SPS ‘risk assessment’ was in any case not worth the paper it’s written on. It is an irrelevant distraction. Males with reduced testosterone are still stronger and therefore more of a danger to women, especially in, of all places, a confined space … like prison. Males are to be excluded because they are males, not because they are deemed safe enough by those who do not have to live with the consequences.
JK Rowling has said she holds the Scottish government responsible for Stewart’s attack and is offering to pay the woman’s legal costs in any civil action for damages.
Swinney Still Backs Men over Women
At the final First Minister’s Questions Swinney doubled down on his ludicrous position on trans-identifying males, saying that ‘housing biological men in women’s prisons was the “correct” decision’!
It is to be hoped that Alexandria Stewart has the same effect on Swinney as Isla Bryson’s self-ID had on Nicola Sturgeon, coming as it did just after Scotland had passed the GRR bill, later overturned by the UK government. She was later left spluttering and unable to say whether rapist Adam Graham/Isla Bryson was a male, and it led to her resignation.
Or better still, just vote him out.
Kezia’s Running Scared
The new chair of Stonewall, Kezia Dugdale, appeared to be trying to carve her own niche in her new organisation, going so far as to say that she had huge respect for JK Rowling, but alas for Kezia this was a step too far. Respect for JK had incurred the wrath of trans activists to the extent that she felt she must issue a grovelling apology to them for all the ‘worry, anger and upset’ allegedly caused to the trans ‘community’.
ScotRail enters Gleneagles Stooshie
Was Robert Bruce an ‘independence party leader’ who ‘bankrupted’ Scotland? A display at Gleneagles Rail Station suggests so, speaking of the ‘Bannockburn myth’ and denigrating the Declaration of Arbroath as Scots going with a begging letter to the Pope, with a list of ‘mainly fictional independent Scottish kings’, many of whom were in fact real. The station display clearly says Bruce’s ‘independence party’ ‘bankrupted Scotland’, led to civil war and decades of extreme poverty.
Professor Murray Pittock of the University of Glasgow on the other hand called the piece a ‘disgraceful piece of propaganda posing as history’, while Dr Neil McGuigan, senior tutor in medieval history at the University of St Andrews, called it ‘amateurish’ and ‘partisan’.
ScotRail have said they will now review its contents. About time, since the display has been around since 2015, although ScotRail was not at that time in public ownership.
Ferry Chaos ‘Breaches Human Rights’
The Scottish Human Rights Commission says the ongoing ferry chaos appears to be so bad as to breach islanders’ human rights, with disruption to normal family lives and the economy, and posing significant barriers to islanders for the realisation of their rights to healthcare, education, food and employment.
The Road Haulage Association waded in saying that their island operations had become ‘significantly more difficult’ and the Scottish Wholesale Association highlighted ongoing problems with food getting to the islands, and businesses losing revenue, but Transport Scotland could only say the Scottish government are working closely with CalMac to resolve ongoing issues.
£2 billion Nature Investment Partnership falls flat
The scheme, introduced by Lorna Slater in March 2023 to try and entice the City to invest in tree planting and peatland restoration, has sadly not attracted any investment, with NatureScot blaming the attractiveness of gold prices for the lack of interest in green schemes.
One late arrival to the scheme, Aberdeen Investments, has since departed, having failed in attempts to raise £50 million-worth of investment, and with it the UK government has also left, as it was only pledging to invest the same amount as Aberdeen Investments raised for the scheme.
Deposit Return Scheme costs ScotGov millions
The scheme which collapsed in 2023, mired in problems including incompatibility with the rollout of the UK-wide scheme in 2027 and the perceived clash of the Scottish scheme with UK-wide trade, will cost dearly. The collapse of the industry-funded Circularity Scotland left debts including £9.2 million which they had received from the Scottish National Investment Bank and £65 million owed to private firm Biffa, who invested in new equipment. Only £1.2 million has been recovered thus far, with more unlikely to follow.
Hogwarts Express Yet to Resume
The famous trip over the Glenfinnan Viaduct has not gone into service yet this year between Fort William and Mallaig due to the ongoing row over replacing its outdated carriages with modern carriages with central locking. The operator said this requirement would be unpopular with customers and that a diesel carriage would also have to be added to trains to provide air conditioning as the newer windows cannot be opened. Only the older carriages have windows which open, but passenger numbers would dip if air conditioning was added to trains, due to the limit on train length for safety reasons leading to fewer carriages per train.
The operator is complaining that installing central locking would possibly cost over £5 million. A decision is expected soon, but already a month has been lost of this year’s summer season.
Kill the Seabirds ….. to Save the Planet
The strong winds in the North Sea provide the ideal support to a multiplicity of birds including puffins, kittiwakes, guillemots, gannets and razorbills, but the winds are also ideal for wind turbines, with a giant wind farm due to be built at Berwick Bank, 30 miles out in the Firth of Forth.
The UK government has guaranteed developers SSE a ‘generous’ fixed minimum price for the electricity it will generate. Berwick Bank, sanctioned by the Scottish government, will have 300 turbines covering an area four times as big as the city of Edinburgh.
It has been calculated that it will generate enough electricity to power six million British homes, avoiding 8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide output from dirtier energy generation; but it will likely slaughter thousands of Scotland’s iconic seabirds in the lifetime of its operations:
2808 guillemots; 814 kittiwakes; 260 gannets; 154 razorbills in the first year alone; with 65 nesting pairs of puffins dying in the first year (of a total of 52,000 pairs), although likely rising many-fold in years to come.
These figures come from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) quoting research commissioned by …. the Scottish government, the same body which could not approve Berwick Bank fast enough, with all its dangers to birdlife.
So the government has approved a ‘green’ project which will decimate another ‘green’ project, protecting and promoting birdlife.
Finally,
Protect The Hedgehogs
Ironically, given that it is Hedgehog Awareness Week from 3rd to 9th May, a Markinch hedgehog had a very lucky escape when he got stuck in a rusty underground drain. He was spotted jammed in a tight ball deep inside the drain, and would-be rescuers initially thought he was dead.
But the next day a passer-by saw its face peering out at her, still alive, and he was finally rescued with vegetable oil and pliers by volunteers from Burntisland Hedgehog Haven and is getting stronger every day. The 40 Haven volunteers can collect hedgehogs from Fife, Edinburgh, the Lothians and the Borders.
HOLYROOD 2026
And as if you could get away from it, don’t forget the Holyrood election next week on Thursday, 7th May.
Your peach ballot paper is for the regional party vote.
In seven out of the eight regions, the Independence for Scotland Party (ISP) will be standing on the regional list (only South Scotland is not being contested), so it is a great chance for us to make an electoral breakthrough and put as many as 7 actually pro-independence MSPs into Holyrood.