This site has focussed over the last two weeks on radical ideas for next week’s Programme for Government. I’d like to focus less on specific policy proposals than on a wider issue – the absence of what might be deemed a guiding strategy for reform in Scotland
Eddie Barnes | Twitter Facebook-f Twitter After a week where she has led the news agenda on Scotland’s drugs deaths
This video by the charity Change Grow Live gives Carl, a former heroin and crack addict, a chance to tell his own story of recovery. It’s worth watching as Scotland reflects again on the enormous human cost drug addiction.
Small is beautiful, wrote the German philosopher EF Schumacher more than forty years ago. True, but small can also be dangerous. Exhibit A: Public Sector Scotland.
We all hope something good will come from this strange, prolonged hiatus in our way of life. It’s not often a country gets the chance to start again. Most of us intuitively want to make sure, as the saying goes, that the Covid crisis doesn’t go to waste – but is devolution in Scotland ready?
Interviewing Sir Michael Marmot for ScotlandCan last week, I was struck by a comment he made about the priorities governments make. Looking back over the last decade, Sir Michael noted that he “almost didn’t care” about growth in the economy. People were getting sicker and health inequalities were widening. If GDP was going up, “so what?”
If you want to study the devastating impact the Covid pandemic has had on society, Sir Michael Marmot suggests we go back to 2017 and a storm in the Caribbean. Hurricane Maria smashed through Puerto Rico in one of the deadliest storms ever to hit the island. The Hurricane thrust the underlying inequalities in Puerto Rican society into sharp relief.
Like many others involved in Scottish politics over the last decade or so, I’ve spent most of my time lobbing rocks at the other side on the question of the constitution. The battle continues to be vital and intense, but it has left us divided as a result. This platform is designed, in a small way, to reset that balance.
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