The Smell of Pee

Back in April Calton wrote that Nicola Sturgeon reeked of exceptionalism. Now she stinks of urine - the pee some care home residents had to lie in due to the Scottish Government's mismanagement of the Covid crisis and care homes. Whenever someone dares to raise this issue with the First Minister, she complains that they are trying to make out that she did it deliberately. She plaintively protests that she did her best at the time and that, if mistakes were made, (note the 'if'), they will be examined at some future inquiry. She deeply regrets every death and, really, it's her we should be feeling sorry for because those nasty journalists and opposition politicians are trying to make her out to be a murderess.

No Nicola, the charge is not murder - it's manslaughter. Not intentional, pre-meditated killing but killing through incompetence. At the height of the pandemic you and your hopeless Health Secretary Jeanne Freeman shifted lots of vulnerable elderly patients from hospitals to care homes without testing them while at the same time lots of care home workers were having to stay at home for 14 days. You created a situation where an increase in residents coincided with a decrease in staff numbers and you did nothing to mitigate this. That is incompetence. The results of what you were doing were forseeable - you did not forsee them. The situation was exacerbated by a blanket directive (now deleted) that care home residents should not be moved to hospital if they got Covid.

Sturgeon's hands are not stained with blood - it's pee and no amount of washing will take away the smell.

Angels and Demons

Some time ago, when Jackie Baillie was Shadow Health Minister, Calton took a pop at her for being overweight in a blog post entitled Where Angels Fear to Tread... Well, Jackie is looking pretty angelic now in comparison with current Health Minister Jeane Freeman.

This is the woman who (deliberately in Calton's opinion) tried to mislead the Scottish Parliament over the number of NHS patients transferred from hospitals to care homes at the start of the Covid-19 crisis. She had to apologise. Nicola Sturgeon made excuses for her, saying that she was 'tired'.

Under Freeman's direction the Scottish Government bought up care home beds in order to empty hospital wards. What they failed to do was to ensure that the care homes had adequate PPE and adequate staff to deal with a highly infectious respiratory virus. It took weeks and numerous awkward questions from journalists at Sturgeon's daily briefings before Jeane got her act together with respect to PPE for care homes. At time of writing, the Scottish Government has still not got its act together with respect to regular testing of care home staff, in spite of Nicola Sturgeon announcing two weeks ago that this would happen. Freeman has also still not sorted out the problem of care home staff having to survive on statutory sick pay if they test positive.

Early Scottish Government guidance to care homes and the GPs who look after them said that it was not advised that patients with Covid-19 should be transferred to hospital but be cared for in the care home.  This was subsequently amended but only after the Scottish Government realised that the general population actually care about their old folks and want them to receive the best of care, including hospital treatment when required. How many care home residents could have survived the virus if the early guidance had not stipulated that they be refused transfer to hospital? The blanket issuing of DNRs (Do Not Resuscitate notices) in care homes, sometimes to people without capacity to agree them is also a real cause for concern.

Freeman has defended her actions in the ongoing coronavirus care home deaths scandal, saying that she did her best with the information available at the time. Even if this is true, her best was not good enough. People have died on her watch, some of them unnecessarily. Surely that is grounds for her resignation. Sadly there is no-one of Jackie Baillie's calibre in the SNP to replace Jeane.

PS. When she became Health Minister Jeane said she was going to lead by example and give up the fags. Is she still smoke-free?

No-one Said It Would Be Easy

In his last post Calton talked about Nicola Sturgeon making decisions in good faith. Now he just wishes she would actually MAKE a decision. Instead, we were told today, not that some lockdown restrictions would be eased, but that we would be given a route map. On Thursday. The century is young but Calton thinks that this will still qualify as one of its biggest let-downs. On that basis, don't hold your breath for any of the teasingly promised relaxations to actually happen at the end of the month. That would involve Sturgeon actually making a decision, something which she seems increasingly incapable of doing. Think rabbit caught in headlights.

No-one ever said that being a leader was easy but, boy, this virus has a way of separating the women from the girls. The First Minister is the queen of spin but events are spinning out of control and her inability to lead is being exposed. As journalist Paul Sinclair so aptly put it: "If only we had an FM trained to govern rather than just media trained." Ouch. Brutal but true. There are no easy answers in this current situation. Covid-19 causes deaths and long-term ill-health in some people. Lockdown also causes deaths and ill-health plus bankruptcies, job losses and financial hardship. The risks have to be weighed up and balanced. Then a decision needs to be made. Nicola has got stuck at the first step. In a time of crisis Scotland is being led by a frightened little girl. How did we get ourselves into this mess?

The Problem with Care Homes

In one of her lunchtime briefings this week Nicola Sturgeon pointed out, rather pointedly, that most care homes are private businesses. Calton thinks that she was trying to suggest that they pull their weight in the current crisis. Chutzpah on stilts. Here's why:

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, Scotland's care homes were underfunded. This is because local councils do not pay enough to cover the cost of care for those who are not self-funded. They are subsidised by those who are paying for their care out of their savings or the sale of their home. If the ratio of council-funded clients to self-funded clients in a home gets too large the home becomes financially unviable. If a care home becomes financially unviable it may have to close. For years the Scottish Government has been cutting the cash it gives to local councils, causing them in turn to look for savings in things like the cost of care, so the buck stops with the First Minister here.

In normal times, care homes manage infectious diseases like norovirus and they use disposable gloves and aprons, which they procure like any other business on the open market. Now they have been faced with a new, highly infectious, respiratory infection which also requires the use of face masks at time when there is a world-wide shortage of all PPE and associated price-hiking. This is costing them extra, unexpected expenditure when they are already cash-strapped (see above). Health Secretary Jeane Freeman patted herself on the back recently because she had distributed one week's worth of PPE to every care home in Scotland. One week's worth!!! I'm sure it was welcome but it's hardly going to plug the ongoing hole in the dyke!

Care homes have also been asked to take a lot of extra residents at short notice recently as the NHS cleared out its hospitals in preparation for an influx of Covid-19 patients. This was a huge transfer of liability from the state-funded NHS to the private sector. None of these patients were tested for the virus for the first few weeks. Now we have a massive problem with Covid-19 in Scotland's care homes, including one on Skye. Oh but never mind - according to Nicola Sturgeon they are private businesses who need to step up to the plate. Problem solved.

Sturgeon's comments were in response to a journalist pointing out that many private care homes are on their knees and may not survive the current crisis. What Sturgeon needs to realise, and realise fast, is that care homes are essential businesses. ESSENTIAL. If the Scottish Government can find the cash to prop up Prestwick and Ferguson, it should find the cash to support our care homes. Otherwise where are the residents still left after Covid-19 has done its worst going to live?

On Competence

Calton has no doubt that the First Minister was sincere when she said how much she supported health care workers and wanted them to have the correct PPE in her press briefing today. Unfortunately sincerity doesn't provide PPE - competence does and Nicola Sturgeon is a bit short on that quality. She's great at presentation and carefully crafted speeches - her responses are slicker than her hairdo and more pointed than her shoes - but this Covid-19 crisis is showing her up for what she is - all fur coat and nae knickers.

What Scotland needs right now is a leader who gets things done. What we've got is someone who talks the talk but can't walk the walk. Nicola Sturgeon is all show, from the top of her immaculate hairdo to the tips of her stiletto heels. When she was Health Minister some described her as a helicopter - landing with lots of noise and disturbance, staying for a few minutes then taking off again in a flurry of rotor blades. Now we have Jeane Freeman who has provided guidance about what PPE to use and a helpline to report it if you don't have PPE but doesn't actually seem to have managed to provide PPE. Less helicopter more submarine, sinking without trace when what the troops need is a Hercules, full of supplies.

Sturgeon's response to a letter from 100 medics about PPE was basically "I understand and I will act". If she doesn't do the latter and do it soon, she and her Health Minister will look like WW1 generals, miles behind the front line, saying everything is fine when thousands are dying. It's not a good look.

Calderwoodgate

Calton is so mad he could spit nails. After nearly two weeks of looking longingly over the Forth to the Fife coast when all he could do was a once-a-day flight round Arthur's Seat he finds out that the SNP Government's Chief Medical Officer has been nipping across to Earlsferry for the weekend. Twice. During lockdown. She has now, quite rightly, been spoken to by the police and has offered her resignation. Astonishingly, the First Minister has refused to accept it in a colossal error of judgement which is, as Calton writes, turning the episode into a question about Sturgeon's decision rather than the original offence.

Sturgeon is usually a canny political operator who is perfectly willing to throw someone under a bus if they get in the way and so it is a measure of how rattled she has become with the Covid-19 pandemic that she has made such a poor decision in this case. She should have sacked Calderwood immediately or at least accepted her resignation with alacrity. Surely there are other suitably qualified people in Scotland just as able to give her advice? Such as Professor Hugh Pennington?

Presumably the First Minister hoped that today's press conference (described as "excruciating" on Radio 4 news) would put the whole thing to bed. She was wrong. A quick scan down the associated twitter hashtags indicates that far more people think #Calderwoodshouldgo than the minority who see this as a media conspiracy to bring down Sturgeon. More worryingly for the SNP, a number of people are now saying that they will henceforth take their guidance from Westminster, not Holyrood, when it comes to Covid-19. Calton has a lot of sympathy with that view. In a crisis like this, are the devolved powers a help or a hindrance? In Scotland it looks very much like the latter now. Sturgeon's response to the Calderwood incident may well prove to be her Watergate.

The Post-Resilient Society

Covid-19 is exposing some fundamental flaws in the way we live today. If schools had had to be shut 50 years ago it wouldn't have been a problem as most children came from two-parent families with one parent at home. Shops and industry hadn't yet heard of "just-in-time" delivery and so would have had more stocks available to cope with shortages and panic buying. People still understood the concept of rationing and the idea of selflessness. Most Mums knew how to make food stretch and most kids loved beans on toast and home-made chips from the sack of tatties in the bottom of the larder. We were resilient. Not now.

Now we have a guy filling his trolley with pasta and refusing to give a packet to a pensioner. We have had a run on toilet paper even although Covid-19 does not cause the runs. Parents are panicking because they can no longer rely on schools, nurseries and grandparents to do their parenting for them. Chinese people have been abused in the street and woe betide anyone who coughs in public.

The government has responded by throwing money at the problem. A lot of money, which is devaluing Sterling. It's a quick fix for an urgent problem but the real issues are much deeper. We have a housing shortage which has pushed up prices, forcing both parents in families to work just to afford a home. We have far too many workers on zero hours contracts or in pseudo-self-employment with no sick pay entitlement. Family breakdown and the idea that kids don't need both a mother and a father has meant a rise in single-parent families, which, unless there is wider family support, are less resilient and usually less well-off.

The only positive thing Calton can see so far in this epidemic is the sign that it may kill off or at least weaken the rampant individualism which began in the Thatcher years and has only grown since. For every pasta hoarder there is a selfless helper. May the latter grow in strength!

Humble Pie

Three years ago Calton wrote a post in which he lambasted Ruth Davidson as an "out-of-touch Tory" over her proposals to re-introduce prescription charges in Scotland. How times have changed. Not only are the Tories now the 2nd largest party in Holyrood and the official opposition but their leader has also changed her mind over prescription charging. Well if Ruth has the guts to do a U-turn then Calton needs to summon up the guts to swallow some humble pie. *gulp*

When Davidson was elected leader of the Scottish Conservatives Calton was not convinced they had made the right choice. How wrong he was. She has transformed the Tories into a credible opposition at Holyrood and, indeed, a government in waiting. For some time now Calton has seen Ruth as our next First Minister and he is now not the only one. Sturgeon is on the skids, replaying the same old arguments that lost Salmond the independence referendum in 2014. If she lasts as long as the next Holyrood election (and that is not a given), Davidson is well placed to boot her out of Bute House at that point. It can't come soon enough for Calton.

Scottish Tories - bad for your health?

It's obvious that Ruth Davidson has no idea what it is like to be a poor worker with a chronic health condition. She can afford prescription charges on an MSP's salary. Many low-paid workers can't. It is also a false economy to charge for prescriptions as studies in England are proving - some people there are not going for all the drugs they need due to lack of money and are ending up in A&E as a result, which costs the NHS more in the long run. Prescription season tickets are no help because, if you are short of money, you are hardly likely to be able to find the dosh up front to buy one.

The Scottish Tories are trying hard but until they realise what life is really like for the poor and low-paid, they are not going to make much headway. Promising more nurses is fine but doing it at the expense of free prescriptions is not a vote winner in Calton's opinion. It is the one SNP policy which Calton totally agrees with. At a time when many are feeling the pinch they should not have to choose between food, heating or much-needed drugs. We don't charge anyone for X-rays, MRI scans or CT scans if they need them. We don't charge them for putting a plaster on a broken leg. We don't ask for proof that they are on benefits or otherwise entitled to free treatment before we admit them to A&E so why should we charge for drugs? It's an outdated policy from an out-of-touch Tory. Fortunately the Scottish Conservatives are unlikely to get enough MSPs elected to implement it.

Devolution is good for your health

Calton is very glad he lives in a devolved Scotland, with the announcement today that prescription charges in England are going to rise to £8.05 in April this year. Yes, he knows that some people can well afford to pay for their medicine but there is increasing evidence that the high cost of prescriptions, particularly for people with chronic conditions such as asthma, coupled with a drive to limit the amount GPs prescribe in one go, is having a real negative impact on the health of the working poor - those who earn just enough to make them ineligible for free prescriptions but not enough to cope with extra expenditure, especially when they are ill. Thank goodness we have a more enlightened attitude here in Scotland and we didn't need to be independent to implement it.

Alex Neil - right on symptoms, wrong on cause and treatment

Calton has some sympathy with beleaguered SNP Health Secretary Alex Neil, who is being lambasted on twitter for blaming Scotland's drink problems on Maggie Thatcher. There is some truth in him saying that the loss of jobs for men in traditional heavy industry left them turning to the bottle. Where Neil goes wrong, and loses Calton's sympathy, is in blaming Thatcher for a) the demise of the coal and steel industries and b) not providing decent replacement jobs. Thatcher may have hammered the last nail in the coffin of coal and steel but the corpse was already dead and embalmed - the industries were uncompetitive, uneconomical and hampered by unions like Unite who, unlike Unite, could not see the writing on the wall and adapt to save jobs. There is a limit to how far any government can go in propping up ailing industries with taxpayers' money just to keep a few people employed. Similarly, there is a limit to how much government can do to provide new jobs. How many times have sweeteners been offered to firms to locate in Scotland, only for them to pull out the minute the money runs dry or penalties no longer apply? How much public money was spent on the infrastructure for a semiconductor plant at Halbeath, Dunfermline which never opened and has now been demolished? We need to create an attractive tax and infrastructure environment for businesses to operate in Scotland, yes, but sweeteners are bad for Scotland's economic health.

Alex Neil is also in trouble for saying that checkout jobs in shops or working for McDonald's are not "good jobs". Well it depends on how you define a "good job". Working at a supermarket checkout is better than being unemployed but it will never make you rich. It might not even pay the bills, given that some retailers do not offer staff full-time contracts. McDonald's does have training schemes which could lead to a better job however many of the chain's UK workers are on zero-hours contracts. Perhaps Neil could have phrased his comment somewhat better but, the truth is, if you want to have any hope of achieving at least the national average wage of £25k and have some prospect of advancement, you do generally need to have "training, education and a qualification" as Neil said, otherwise a McJob may be all that is open to you.

On a more positive note

It says on the right of this page that Calton is not affiliated to any political party and, just to prove it, here are a few of his current 'likes':
Ed Miliband setting his sights on employers who exploit loopholes to pay workers less and firms who only advertise job vacancies abroad.
Nigel Farage on the Syrian refugee issue.
David Cameron on pensions - given that pensioners' savings are not earning any interest, it's the least he could do.
Danny Alexander on raising the personal tax allowance, which has been a boon to low earners.
The SNP's policy of free prescriptions.
Since we are still in the season of goodwill, and the year is not that old, Calton will leave his list of 'dislikes' for another day. He is trying to strike a positive note. Happy New Year!

Hobson's Choice - the army or unemployment?

While Calton can understand calls for the army recruiting age to be raised to 18, he does not agree with them. No-one is forcing 16 year olds to enlist and they cannot do so without the consent of their parents. They also do not see active service until they are 18. Yes, joining the army may result in significant mental, emotional and physical injury or death. So does becoming one of the many unemployed youth with no hope of finding a job. A recent review by the World Health Organisation has highlighted joblessness as a major health risk to young people, with suicide an immediate risk and chronic diseases such as cancer and stroke a risk in the long term. In an ideal world there would be no wars and there would be plenty of jobs for school-leavers. This is not an ideal world and closing the door to one viable career option for 16 year olds will not make it any better. Staying on at school until 18 is not appropriate for all young people - for some, the alternative of going into the forces provides them with the discipline they need and training which will stand them in good stead. On this day, as we remember the fallen, we also demonstrate our support for our armed forces. We need to take better care of them when they come out of the army, whether by choice, by redundancy or through injury and we need to take care of the youngsters who stay at home and struggle to find a job. Our young people deserve better than Hobson's choice.

Do we want to see ourselves as we really are?

Given that Scotland is now the second-fattest nation in the world, do we really want our High Street mannequins to more accurately reflect society? It might be quite effective shock therapy mind you. Shops could always put a burger in one hand, a coke bottle in the other and a fag hanging out the mouth to add to the effect. Calton is struggling to think of any other way of getting Scots to realise how fat and unhealthy they are. It was interesting to hear Jo Swinson wriggling out of directly answering John Beattie's point today that the average woman's dress size has increased from a 12 to a 16 in the last few years but does that mean that we should now be promoting size 16, which is overweight for a lot of women, as normal? Calton thinks not. Being even moderately overweight increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, cancer and other health problems and if a woman is overweight in her 20s, she will probably be obese by the time she is 40. The same applies to men. Yes, there is a problem with anorexia, body image and self-esteem among young people and the use of size 8 or 10 mannequins does not help, however there is an even greater problem now with obesity and there is a danger that using size 16 plus mannequins will simply normalise being overweight. It would be better if models and shop dummies were a healthy size, neither too thin nor too fat. Otherwise Swinson's latest campaign risks undermining all the Scottish Government's efforts to tackle obesity.

OK four-eyes

Calton has reached the age where he has to perch a pair of glasses on his beak to read or use the computer however there is nothing wrong with his distance vision, unlike many of those who regularly get behind the wheel of a car. DVLA has issued updated guidance stressing the responsibility of motorists to ensure that their eyesight is up to the job but, as long as there is no requirement for regular eye tests after a driver passes their driving test, we will continue to see accidents caused by poor eyesight. Given that it costs nothing in Scotland to have your eyes tested every second year, there really is no excuse and Calton fully supports Brake's campaign to 'sharpen up'. It's not always easy to realise (or admit) to needing specs but the alternative - living with the knowledge that your poor sight has caused a crash - is far worse. So go and get your eyesight tested, as Calton did last month. Don't wait for the Government to make it compulsory (which hopefully they will do).

Quality, not quantity

If you pay peanuts you get monkeys and if you pay pennies you get horsemeat. A bit obvious really. In the old days, if people couldn't afford meat they ate vegetables or pulses and were a lot healthier as a result. Now, people expect to get a quality ready-cooked meat meal for a quid and want to eat meat every day. It's no use blaming the supermarkets - if people didn't buy it, they wouldn't stock it. They are only catering to our demand for cheap food and our expectation that meat should be a staple rather than a luxury. Similary, councils and NHS Trusts are going for the lowest price when it comes to catering and so, lo and behold, we now have horsemeat in school dinners. Calton is only surprised that they have found so little of it. If this current scandal causes us, as a nation, to re-examine our addiction to cheap, junk food, so much the better. Quality, not quantity, is what's needed.

Fish is good for you

Calton does not have any objection to eating horsemeat per se, however he does like to know the provenance of what he is eating. He doesn't want to be eating some old nag from Provence which expired of goodness knows what disease before it even got to the knacker's yard. That's the real problem with all this - not the type of animal but the condition it was in before it became lasagne. That and a small issue with the Trades Descriptions Act. Our farmers can trace an animal from birth to table - they are being badly let down by the actions of unscrupulous meat providers from other countries. If ever there was a time to buy British, from your local butcher, it's now. Or turn vegetarian. Calton is having a nice wee bit of salmon for his tea tomorrow night. Freshly caught. From a fish farm.

It's payback time

Calton is not convinced that more college places is the answer to our youth unemployment problem. Let's face it - we've tried it, with a huge increase in the number of young people going on to higher education in the last 20 years, and we still have a problem. What we really need is a return to good, old-fashioned apprenticeships, where school leavers learn a trade, and the discipline of working, while earning at the same time. Ploughing money into supporting businesses to provide such places would be worthwhile and Gavin Brown's idea of raising it by introducing a graduate tax is worth considering. If you have received free higher education and are now earning a good salary as a result, why shouldn't you pay a little back? Calton also thinks that free bus passes should only be handed out to those who have reached state pension age - it's a nonsense giving them to 60 year-olds who are still working. However, Calton parts company with Tory MSP Brown on limiting free prescriptions, as regular readers of this blog will know well.

There is such a thing as bad publicity

Calton would like to applaud the staff member who took a baby reindeer into Yorkhill Children's Hospital before Christmas so that children who were too ill to go outside could share in the fun. OK, so maybe they should have asked permission but it's heartwarming to think that something like that can still happen in this age of red tape and Elf Ann Safetee. It must have made the kids' day. Let's just hope they didn't then watch Snow Babies on BBC1, where one of Calton's relatives over in Scandinavia was seen snaffling a young reindeer for lunch. Not good PR for Sea Eagles even if they didn't show all the gory details! Calton would like to reassure any young readers he may have that he only eats politicians, and, if the ones at Westminster keep on shooting themselves in the foot, they will be easy prey!

Truly chilling

Calton has no idea what sort of Christian ethic council candidate Geoffrey Clark is going to promote given that Clark's views on compulsory abortion of disabled babies and euthanasia of over-80s run completely contrary to the teachings of Christ as Calton understands them. UKIP are quite right to suspend him from the party. If he wants to stimulate discussion of where NHS money is spent he would be better starting with the fact that much of it goes on treating the effects of alcohol, tobacco and obesity, not on Down's Syndrome people. His views remind Calton of the Nazi Party's extermination of mentally disabled people in the 1930s, carried out for the same reason - saving money. It is truly chilling to see them reappear in 21st century British politics.