General Politics Thread

[Cream Cheese]

1 minute ago, The Chlamydia Kid said:

I would also serioiusly question if falling crime rates were directly linked to whether we have an extra 1000 police officers or not...

Why would it not have a direct link? More officers on parole to prevent crimes from occurring, or to prevent minor crimes into turning into more serious crimes. You'd have to be a complete moron not to think it would make any difference.

[Fide]

8 hours ago, Glen Sannox said:

 

And of course all the Nat nutters like Mason, Hosepipe, Pishfart etc are so receptive to criticism, right enough.

 

 

8 hours ago, Glen Sannox said:

The utter tragedy that is Fide having an imaginary wife makes this outstanding! Just when I thought all these tartan loon balls couldn't make a bigger twat of themselves, along comes Fide, pretending he's got a woman!

 

7 hours ago, The Chlamydia Kid said:

Crime is at an all time low across the western world. Don't try and claim it as a result of some SNP brilliance...

 

6 hours ago, The Chlamydia Kid said:

 

You got a source to support that claim?

 

 

6 hours ago, The Chlamydia Kid said:

I would also serioiusly question if falling crime rates were directly linked to whether we have an extra 1000 police officers or not...

LAWLZ

[Alan Stubbs]

Since getting into office the SNP and Tories have added 1000 and cut 17,000 officers respectively. If the Tory policy on this was applied to Scotland proportionally, we'd have just shy of a couple of thousand officers less.

Are we supposed to believe that if the numbers were reversed that Unionists wouldn't be greeting away about it instead of claiming officer numbers don't matter?

Thank f**k we at least have our own Government in charge of some things.

[Fide]

1 hour ago, The Chlamydia Kid said:

No you would have to be an utter simpleton to believe that reductions in crime were achieved simply by recruiting more police officers I'm afraid.

I will humour you and explain why. There are 32 local authority areas in Scotland. If you allocate 1000 police officers across each area that means an extra 31 officers per area.

An officer presumably works 37 hours per week which means before you even consider annual leave each local authority area would have on average an extra 6.8 officers on shift at any point.

Now how many of they extra 1000 are only performing front line patrol duties?

Do you think that would have a significant impact on deterring crime?

Your talking complete and utter dross just give up now and stop embarrassing yourself. You are taken in by SNP headline chasing policies.

You're SUCH a Scottish cringer, my eyes almost can't take it.  Take this snippet from your favourite political blogger:

"The manpower of England and Wales’s force has dropped by 14% in a period where Scotland’s has stayed the same. (Scotland now has 14% as many police as England and Wales despite only having 9% of the population, meaning it has around 55% more police officers per head of population than the largest part of the UK.)

Northern Ireland, meanwhile, has seen its officer numbers fall by 20% since 2005, while Scotland’s have increased by around 7% over the same timespan.

What’s even more extraordinary is that the numbers have been maintained at these levels despite the stresses of amalgamation and the Scottish force suffering from massively unfair financial treatment by the UK government for the past three years.

"

To suggest there's no link between extra officers and crime in Scotland being at a 41 year low is just wafer thin SNPbad rhetoric.

[Fide]

Here's David Torrance greeting about name calling.  The same David Torrance who called all SNP supporters "vacuous".  What a snivelling child.

[Cream Cheese]

I like how it says at the bottom of that article "David Torrance is a political commentator". He must have to put that at the end of all of his articles, otherwise you'd think he was a snivelling 10 year old child.

[Gordon EF]

5 hours ago, The Chlamydia Kid said:

No you would have to be an utter simpleton to believe that reductions in crime were achieved simply by recruiting more police officers I'm afraid.

I will humour you and explain why. There are 32 local authority areas in Scotland. If you allocate 1000 police officers across each area that means an extra 31 officers per area.

An officer presumably works 37 hours per week which means before you even consider annual leave each local authority area would have on average an extra 6.8 officers on shift at any point.

Now how many of they extra 1000 are only performing front line patrol duties?

Do you think that would have a significant impact on deterring crime?

Your talking complete and utter dross just give up now and stop embarrassing yourself. You are taken in by SNP headline chasing policies.

Take your 'thought' experiment further. Let's say there are 2,000 extra officers, or 5,000 extra officers, or 1,000,0000 extra officers. If you're saying that 1000 wouldn't make a difference, at what number do you think we'll start seeing a difference? Presumably you think the 'difference' switches on at some point like a fucking light bulb? There's only one person (Glen Minter aside) who's embarrassing themselves on this thread - you.

[Dipped Flake]

so according to the unionists on here, the SNP government is to blame for the police numbers falling and they are also to blame for having an extra 1,000 police officers in the first place as they make no difference to the crime rates. Sort of a 'have your cake and eat it' argument is it not?  The facts are that Scotland has the lowest crime rate and the highest detection rate that we have had for many years. That is despite the MSM telling us every day that the police service is in disarray 

[Fide]

13 minutes ago, The Chlamydia Kid said:

The western world has the lowest crime rates it's ever had. It's a worldwide trend. Stop trying to take political credit for it. The SNP are no more responsible for falling crime rates than they are for a good summer.

Police numbers would have some impact on crime rates, detection and deterrence. However, The impact would not kick in at 1000 extra officers for a population of 5 million people.

There are far more important issues influencing crime than the number of police officers available.

 

11 minutes ago, The Chlamydia Kid said:

If you want to talk about cuts talk about the 100,000 fewer college places available because of the SNP. 100,000 scots denied the opportunity to progress in life.

Ok champ, so what other country has crime at a 41 year low?

Re college cuts: Since you clearly haven't a clue, I'll let your favourite Scottish political blogger school you for the 2nd time today:

Here’s Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale:

Except that’s not quite EVERYTHING we need to know, is it, Kezia?

 

As you can see from the top two lines in the above graph, the total number of people in colleges has indeed gone down significantly. But does that mean that there’s a third less teaching and learning going on? To find out, we probably need to hear what the Scottish Funding Council, which produced the graph, has to say about it.

“A substantial fall in student numbers was expected as SFC moved away from funding very short programmes of study (under 10 hours) and leisure programmes in favour of more substantial courses designed to improve the student’s employment prospects.

Under both the headcount and enrolment measures a student studying for one hour would be counted the same as a full-time student studying for 600 hours or more.

As SFC pays colleges to deliver a specified number of learning hours a move towards more substantial programmes of study will mean that colleges deliver their learning hour targets whilst recruiting fewer students.

The learning hours and Full-Time Equivalent measures are more comparable measures over time when measuring funded activity and are favoured when comparing high level volumes over time.”

(Pages 5 and 6, our emphasis.)

For that reason, the SFC measures college activity not by headcounts but in things called WSUMs, or Weighted Standard Units of Measurement, which give a much more accurate picture of how much studying is being done overall. And how do those figures look, you might be wondering? Luckily, we can show you.

As you can see, there’s still been a fall in the total amount of teaching and learning in Scotland’s further-education colleges by the WSUM measure since the SNP took power. To be precise, it’s a cumulative fall of just over 3% across seven years (which for unalert readers is under 0.43% a year), a period spanning a massive economic crash which has seen a stranglehold put on Scotland’s budget by Westminster.

Kezia Dugdale knows only too well that retaining 97% of college output, under those extreme financial pressures, while refocusing the college sector on more practical and useful employment-targetted courses, keeping tuition free across the board and ending Labour’s £2,000 graduate endowment charge for good measure, is in fact something approaching a miraculous achievement by the Scottish Government.

But that’s no good to Ms Dugdale, so she spouts massively misleading figures instead in order to give a completely distorted impression without actually lying.

Fine. That’s politics. We’re just here to fill in the gaps so Scots get the full picture, and so they can know who’s playing straight with them.

[SweeperDee]

(Pages 5 and 6, our emphasis.)

For that reason, the SFC measures college activity not by headcounts but in things called WSUMs, or Weighted Standard Units of Measurement, which give a much more accurate picture of how much studying is being done overall. And how do those figures look, you might be wondering? Luckily, we can show you.

As you can see, there’s still been a fall in the total amount of teaching and learning in Scotland’s further-education colleges by the WSUM measure since the SNP took power. To be precise, it’s a cumulative fall of just over 3% across seven years (which for unalert readers is under 0.43% a year), a period spanning a massive economic crash which has seen a stranglehold put on Scotland’s budget by Westminster.

Kezia Dugdale knows only too well that retaining 97% of college output, under those extreme financial pressures, while refocusing the college sector on more practical and useful employment-targetted courses, keeping tuition free across the board and ending Labour’s £2,000 graduate endowment charge for good measure, is in fact something approaching a miraculous achievement by the Scottish Government.

But that’s no good to Ms Dugdale, so she spouts massively misleading figures instead in order to give a completely distorted impression without actually lying.

Fine. That’s politics. We’re just here to fill in the gaps so Scots get the full picture, and so they can know who’s playing straight with them.

Telt. Good Job.

[Gordon EF]

24 minutes ago, The Chlamydia Kid said:

The western world has the lowest crime rates it's ever had. It's a worldwide trend. Stop trying to take political credit for it. The SNP are no more responsible for falling crime rates than they are for a good summer.

Police numbers would have some impact on crime rates, detection and deterrence. However, The impact would not kick in at 1000 extra officers for a population of 5 million people.

There are far more important issues influencing crime than the number of police officers available.

I didn't see anyone claiming the drop in crime rate was down to the SNP until you brought it up.

What number would the impact kick in at? Are you just going to keep squatting out stupid statements, run away and then repeat them over and over?

[AUFC90]

Going on my very recent experience of college and university.... If you have the grades you'll get a place.

[Fide]

Just now, AUFC90 said:

Going on my very recent experience of college and university.... If you have the grades you'll get a place.

Of course you will.  All the Scottish Government did was realise no one was applying for part time courses in puppetry, wood chip assembly and advanced Croatian and rightly binned them.

[strichener]

2 minutes ago, Gordon EF said:

I didn't see anyone claiming the drop in crime rate was down to the SNP until you brought it up.

What number would the impact kick in at? Are you just going to keep squatting out stupid statements, run away and then repeat them over and over?

An equally valid question would be how many civilian staff can you lose from the police force without having to backfill?  There are less people employed by the police force now that when the SNP came into power.

[AUFC90]

An equally valid question would be how many civilian staff can you lose from the police force without having to backfill?  There are less people employed by the police force now that when the SNP came into power.

There's also less money. To maintain the numbers as much as the SNP have in the face of swinging police cuts down south is very good. Anyone saying otherwise is a bit daft.

[AUFC90]

An equally valid question would be how many civilian staff can you lose from the police force without having to backfill?  There are less people employed by the police force now that when the SNP came into power.

There's also less money. To maintain the numbers as much as the SNP have in the face of swinging police cuts down south is very good. Anyone saying otherwise is a bit daft.

[Fide]

2 minutes ago, AUFC90 said:

There's also less money. To maintain the numbers as much as the SNP have in the face of swinging police cuts down south is very good. Anyone saying otherwise is a bit daft.

Indeed.  As said earlier, Police Scotland are the only force in the UK to pay VAT.

[WaffenThinMint]

16 hours ago, Glen Sannox said:

The utter tragedy that is Fide having an imaginary wife makes this outstanding! Just when I thought all these tartan loon balls couldn't make a bigger twat of themselves, along comes Fide, pretending he's got a woman!

The far greater tragedy is you having an imaginary life. Really, if P&B closed forever tomorrow, you would be suicidal.

Glen Minter!

[strichener]

Just now, AUFC90 said:

There's also less money. To maintain the numbers as much as the SNP have in the face of swinging police cuts down south is very good. Anyone saying otherwise is a bit daft.

They haven't maintained numbers in the police force, they have maintained the number of police officers by cutting significantly more staff from the non-uniformed ranks.  Just to be clear this is not just admin staff but specialised staff such as forensics and police support roles.

 

1 minute ago, Fide said:

Indeed.  As said earlier, Police Scotland are the only force in the UK to pay VAT.

I agree that it is totally unfair that this is the case but the SNP government must carry the can for this as they instigated the centralisation of the police force.  The fact that they now have to count the Police and Fire services in central government employment shows that they knew what they were doing was going to change the VAT situation.

[williemillersmoustache]

Fair pleasing amount of telt being handed out today, pray continue...