“The IFS is unconvinced by the SNP’s spending plans. Independence would not be positive for Scotland. It would mean at least a decade of new deep cuts at a time when we need to invest in education and boost mental health services to turn them around. We’ve got to learn the lessons of Brexit, not pile more chaos on top. Just like their Growth Commission, the SNP’s own maths is painting a picture of a poorer Scotland with less money for our public services.
The operator has come under fire from Dumbarton and Lomond Labour MSP Jackie Baillie for overcrowding and cancellations. But ScotRail said the changes, which include 1,500 more seats on the Borders Railway and extra seats between Edinburgh and Glasgow, will have a positive impact.
By her own admission, Jenny Odell’s book isn’t saying anything new, but the terms of reference are bang up to date for a new generation inured to personal branding, social monoculture, and the reification of the self: “It is within a blasted landscape of neoliberal determinism that this book seeks hidden springs of ambiguity and inefficiency.” What she goes on to prescribe as the solution to the multiple distractions competing for our mental energy approximates the concept, familiar in many Eastern religious practices, of being “in the zone”, or its more recent iteration of “flow”.
It’s not just Christmas bells you have to listen out for at this time of year – it’s alarm bells. For the smiling man – or woman – at your front door may not be Santa Claus. The Scottish Government has been asked by Dr Alastair Allan, a rural MSP, what measures it can take to better enhance the consumer protection for vulnerable people facing aggressive sales at the doorstep.
Should political parties be permitted to produce election material that resembles a local newspaper? That question has been thrown to the fore in this current general election after it has emerged that all three of the main parties attempting to win the December 12 poll have been producing partisan free-sheets that appear to ape or at least resemble existing local publications. Has the time now come, the newspaper industry is asking, for such practices to be banned completely, especially when an election is underway?
Ten days after her 16th birthday Amy-Beth Miah decided she’d had enough of a care system that seemed designed to do anything but care. She signed the lease on a flat, filled her then-boyfriend’s car with all her belongings and left it for good.She first went into foster care when she was seven years old. When a subsequent foster arrangement broke down, she says it felt like she was passed round every children’s unit in her local authority area.
