General Politics Thread

[DeeTillEhDeh]

Picking up the 'remainers' vote?
If you voted to stay in Europe in England they'd be your only option just now.

Nah - it's because Libby left.

[emoji1]

[McSpreader]

2 hours ago, DeeTillEhDeh said:

He is though you moron.

He has a history of it going way back before Brexit.

Well I'm not familiar with his posts and my point was a general one tbh.

Not appreciating the moron tag but insults are par for the course on here!

[topcat(The most tip top)]

Picking up the 'remainers' vote?
If you voted to stay in Europe in England they'd be your only option just now.

That and Corbyn dragging labour further away from the centre ground

[doulikefish]

18 hours ago, Baxter Parp said:

Sturgeon must answ...oh.

Its all gps fault today seemingly

[DublinMagyar]

Its all gps fault today seemingly

Be thankful she hasn't yet blamed the elderly for being sick. No doubt that'll be next.

[Cyclizine]

People turning up to Emergency Departments with non-urgent "GP" problems are not really the issue. They either get told to see their GP at triage or they can sit in the waiting room and take five or ten minutes to be dealt with several hours later. The issue is chronic underfunding of social care and closure of inpatient beds for non-existent "Community Care". Different budgets, you see, and social care is funded by... local councils, who've born the brunt of austerity and slashed social care funding. When we have an increasingly frail and co-morbid population, with significant and complex disease the hospitals are going to fill up. Once hospital beds are full, where are these patients in the ED going to go? They wait for someone to be discharged (either home or vertically).

This seven day a week GP opening would be lovely, but for several issues:

• we don't have enough GPs to run a five day service
• this has been piloted before; evening and weekend routine appointments are not in demand
• there isn't any evidence that this will stop people attending the ED (which isn't the issue, anyway)

The bizarre way the NHS is run in England seems to have exacerbated the problem there. We have been insulated more in Scotland, but the cracks are beginning to appear.

[NotThePars]

There's a strong argument that it's being engineered by the Tories to further privatisation. The major worry is that by the time we eventually vote for independence, will we have an NHS left to us?

[Ad Lib]

6 hours ago, NotThePars said:

There's a strong argument that it's being engineered by the Tories to further privatisation. The major worry is that by the time we eventually vote for independence, will we have an NHS left to us?

No this is nonsense.

The NHS in Scotland has been a devolved matter for the entirety of Holyrood's existence. The UK Government has no influence over whether the private sector gets to be involved in Scottish healthcare provision. That is solely a matter for the Scottish Government and Parliament.

There is not even a financial argument. Whatever the funding shortages relative to demands that currently exist, health spending in England has risen consistently in real terms pretty much without exception for over two decades and even rose well above inflation under Thatcher. The same, by the way, is not true in Scotland, where the Scottish Government has declined to pass-on the full Barnett consequentials of increased English health spending in the last 5 years. Even if the phoney argument about privatisation is right, the experience of private healthcare globally is that on any substantial level it actually leads to a commensurate increase in government spending on healthcare, not a cut (possibly because of precisely the criticisms people make about the inefficiency of markets and insurance schemes in this particular sector). This, and its Barnett consequentials, would lead to more money for the Scottish NHS, not less, making it less prone to poltiical difficulties bringing about opportunism for privatisation in Scotland.

[NotThePars]

Well it's good to know I can rest easy then. God bless the SNP.

[Ad Lib]

On 13/01/2017 at 22:33, DeeTillEhDeh said:

Nah - it's because Libby left.

 

If I lived in England I wouldn't have left the Lib Dems and I would vote for them.

But I live in Scotland. Where they want to go out of their way not to have anything to say to half of the electorate, and at that a half that has hundreds of thousands of people who should have a lot in common with them.

[Pearbuyerbell]

1 minute ago, Ad Lib said:

 

If I lived in England I wouldn't have left the Lib Dems and I would vote for them.

But I live in Scotland. Where they want to go out of their way not to have anything to say to half of the electorate, and at that a half that has hundreds of thousands of people who should have a lot in common with them.

Since you're online.  Any opinions or view about fellow Liberal Dem Carole Ford ?  

[Wee Willie]

48 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

Well it's good to know I can rest easy then. God bless the SNP.

Amen tae that

[mjw]

See the rise in NHS spending we keep reading about, how much of that goes back out the door to companies with links to MPs or their associates?

[Cyclizine]

As Ad Lib has said, it is important to distinguish between which home nation you are talking about when you mention the NHS. Health has been devolved in Scotland and NI since the dawn of the NHS in 1948. Wales only since 1999 It is interesting to see how the different systems have diverged over time.

England went down the lines of separation of primary and secondary care, with primary care stakeholders - initially trusts, but now basically GPs (the cynical would say to deflect criticism on...). These stakeholders purchase services from providers (public or private). Given that this is a public funded service, I think many would feel that bringing in a fake market is a bit pointless, as public hospitals compete for patients. The idea was to introduce patient choice, but in the grand scheme of things, I think most folk would want to go to their nearest hospital.

In Scotland, there is no primary/secondary care split. All services are run by the regional health boards (Grampian, GGC, Forth Valley, etc) in different areas. I'm not sure how a private service would work in a nation like Scotland; the Central Belt would probably be okay, but further north and south I can't see how it would be profitable given the small populations. Taken to the extreme, it would probably involve services disappearing from the islands and rural areas and people having to travel even more than they do at the moment.

[Ad Lib]

21 hours ago, Pearbuyerbell said:

Since you're online.  Any opinions or view about fellow Liberal Dem Carole Ford ?  

If we've met I don't think I've ever spoken to her.

[Ad Lib]

9 hours ago, Cyclizine said:

As Ad Lib has said, it is important to distinguish between which home nation you are talking about when you mention the NHS. Health has been devolved in Scotland and NI since the dawn of the NHS in 1948. Wales only since 1999 It is interesting to see how the different systems have diverged over time.

England went down the lines of separation of primary and secondary care, with primary care stakeholders - initially trusts, but now basically GPs (the cynical would say to deflect criticism on...). These stakeholders purchase services from providers (public or private). Given that this is a public funded service, I think many would feel that bringing in a fake market is a bit pointless, as public hospitals compete for patients. The idea was to introduce patient choice, but in the grand scheme of things, I think most folk would want to go to their nearest hospital.

In Scotland, there is no primary/secondary care split. All services are run by the regional health boards (Grampian, GGC, Forth Valley, etc) in different areas. I'm not sure how a private service would work in a nation like Scotland; the Central Belt would probably be okay, but further north and south I can't see how it would be profitable given the small populations. Taken to the extreme, it would probably involve services disappearing from the islands and rural areas and people having to travel even more than they do at the moment.

The logic behind the English system, which isn't even remotely private healthcare even by European standards, is that there isn't a universal wisdom as to how healthcare services should be provided and that some degree of internal competition for resources encourages experimentation with best practice and to find ways of rooting out redundant, underused or inefficient ways of doing things.

In some instances undoubtedly it offers more choice. Some operations get done faster if you're willing to go to a hospital that isn't your nearest one and patients can make decisions based on independent care quality indicators that serve more quickly to see resources redirected away from areas that aren't treating enough patients well and quickly enough.

The downside is it can get very expensive for government if a trust/CCG makes some catastrophically poor operational decisions, and that risk is higher when there is less direct control over how the money is spent. It is also difficult to maintain incentive structures to ensure a comprehensive healthcare system when certain procedures, expertise and diseases are easier or harder to treat than others.

I don't know enough about healthcare economics to say whether taking on some of England's practices would improve healthcare in Scotland. What I do know is that there are significant problems with underfunding and bad resource allocation in the Scottish NHS and we can't blame the private sector for it. Particularly in Grampian the main hospitals are badly understaffed and waiting lists for certain treatments vary wildly depending on which local government area you find yourself in.

[WaffenThinMint]

Deeply worrying business down in Leeds Crown Court today:

http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/15028718.UPDATED__Teenager_accused_of_terror_offence_called_Jo_Cox_s_murderer_a__hero___court_told/#articleContinue

A teenager accused of making a pipe bomb in preparation for an "all-out race war" celebrated the killing of MP Jo Cox on the day she died, praising her murderer as a hero, a court has heard.

Police found a device in a desk drawer in the 17-year-old's Bradford bedroom after they were alerted through his Snapchat messages, prosecutors told Leeds Crown Court.

One of these messages was a cartoon-like image of a mosque being blown up along with the words: "It's time to enact retribution upon the Muslim filth."

Another was a picture of a pipe bomb with an image of the Bradford skyline and the message: "Incendiary explosive and home-made black powder. More to come."

A jury heard how officers found the defendant's bedroom covered in flags, including the Swastika and the symbol of the Waffen SS as well as a laptop with wallpaper featuring a Nazi eagle over a Swastika and the German phrase: "One Nation, One Empire, One Leader".

Barnaby Jameson, prosecuting, said that on the day Mrs Cox was killed by Thomas Mair in her Batley and Spen constituency on June 16 last year, the defendant posted a picture of Mair on Facebook.

He also posted the message: "Tommy Mair is a HERO. There's one less race traitor in Britain thanks to this man."

Shortly after, on another social media site, the defendant posted the same picture with the post: "Absolute f****** legend. He's a hero, we need more people like him to butcher the race traitors."

The prosecutor said: "(The teenager's) political views were so extreme that he celebrated in the murder of a democratically elected MP - presumably because she had voted to remain in the EU. In (the defendant's) view this was race treachery."

The judge, Mr Justice Goss, reminded the court that Mrs Cox's murder happened before the EU Referendum.

Mr Jameson took the jury through a number of social media postings and messages detailing what he said was the defendant's racist, white-supremacist views.

Many of these related to his links with National Action, which the prosecutor described as "a small, secretive Neo-Nazi British youth nationalist organisation."

He said: "Little is known about its internal structure or the size of its membership. It is known to be a white supremacist group.

"At public meetings, members make the Nazi salute and keep their faces covered."

Mr Jameson said messages from members of a National Action chat group found on the defendant's phone included phrases like "should we just blow up Leeds or some s***?"

During one message exchange, the defendant said: "'I don't use cookers, but I make miniature pipe bombs and s***. Just f*** around with them'."

Mr Jameson told the jury: "As we will hear in due course, (the defendant) did something with a pipe bomb that was less to do with 'f***** around with them' and more to do with an ideological war he was waging."

After he was arrested, the teenager told police he had made the pipe bomb out of sparklers, the prosecutor said.

The teenager said in a statement when interviewed: "I've simply been fooling around with fireworks and showing them off to my peers in my naivety I have never had the intention to cause any harm to any person."

Mr Jameson said the pipe bomb was tested and was "a viable device - technically known as an Improvised Explosive Device or 'IED'."

Summarising the case to the jury of six men and six women, the prosecutor said the incident "places (the defendant) squarely in the terrorism legislation as a man with a political and racial and ideological cause".

He said: "This was not, as the defence will suggest, a bad joke gone wrong. This was the opening stage of (the defendant's) all-out race war and that is why the crown leads it case with an allegation under the terrorism legislation."

The blond-haired teenager, who cannot be named, denies a charge of preparing a terrorist act and an alternative count of making a pipe bomb.

He sat in the dock wearing a suit and flanked by a security guard.

The trial was adjourned until Wednesday.

I hope those in the media who have been bigging up those wee shits of National Action - little more than sad spotty wee fuds who did nothing more than troll the net twelve months ago - are proud of themselves. Having given them all the encouragement possible to act even more "mental" to keep up with the expectations of their "fame", now they're graduated to full blown bomb making - something even the loudmouthed thugs of Charlie Sargent's Combat 18 drew the line at.

[doulikefish]

Tsk Tsk

http://www.itv.com/news/border/2017-01-18/15million-eu-flood-fund-spent-on-paying-off-government-fine/

[Wee Willie]

4 minutes ago, doulikefish said:

Tsk Tsk

http://www.itv.com/news/border/2017-01-18/15million-eu-flood-fund-spent-on-paying-off-government-fine/

FFS - Yet numpties still vote for them

[Sooky]

So Surrey council, Tory controlled, is going to have a referendum on raising council tax by 15% to pay for social care costs.