Suchergebnisse

This blog is based on an article in the Journal of Social Policy by Emma Congreve, Kevin Connolly, Jordan Harrison, Ashwin Kumar, Peter McGregor and Mark Mitchell. Click here to access the article. There is clear evidence on the link between child poverty and consequences such as lower educational and health outcomes and, with this,… Continue reading Using Income Supplements to Meet Child Poverty Targets: Evidence From Scotland →

Apparently there's something wrong with the water system: Polluted water is causing 60 per cent more hospital admissions than a decade ago, official figures show.The number of people admitted to hospital for water-borne diseases – including dysentery and Weil's disease – has increased from 2,085 people in 2010-11 to 3,286 in 2022-23, according to NHS statistics.OK. Weil's Disease has been rising in incidence for well over a decade, from 2018: A deadly infection spread by rats has reached record levels in the number of hospital appointments taken up by people suffering from the illness.Hospital sessions for people suffering from Weil's disease, which is spread by rats' urine, are three times the level three years ago and are now at unprecedented levels.We'd like to know why of course. Perhaps more rats, perhaps different rats, perhaps councils aren't controlling rats. And we are also told that dysentery cases are up - perhaps it's just more people going to waters where Weil's and dysentery can be caught?We'd clearly like to know why this is happening - so we can decide what, if anything, we're going to do about it.From the Labour Party: Labour pledged it would put failing water companies in special measures to force them to "clean up their toxic mess and protect people's health".Ofwat, the regulator, would get powers to block the payment of any bonuses until water bosses had cleaned up the pollution, while water company bosses who oversaw repeated law-breaking would face criminal charges.Clearly the blame is being placed upon the capitalist nature of the English water companies. For, as The Guardian of all places points out: Waterborne diseases such as dysentery and Weil's disease have risen by 60% since 2010 in England, new figures reveal.OK.We'd still like to find out what is causing this problem in England. And it's true that England has capitalist water companies in a manner that the other Home Nations do not - Wales, Scotland and NI have variants of state owned water companies performing the job. The other home nations also have NHS organisations that are separate and thus their own statistics on this matter. Which does mean that we can test the proposition. It's possible that there is some, or some set of factors, increasing dysentery and Weil's in these isles. Hand washing to more rats to greater water sports patrticipation to the capitalist nature of water provision. We've also the statistics to be able to at least begin to make the distinction. Compare the rise in infections across the Home Nations' versions of the NHS to the ownership of the water companies across the Home Nations.What has actually been done? Noting the rise in incidence in the one country, England, then blaming it upon the one difference in England, that ownership. Without, ever nor at all, actually testing the proposition. Which is, if we are to be very polite about it indeed, not a proof of anything at all other than the ability to project prejudice.So, why do people urinate in the public information pool in this manner? Because it's politically convenient to do so. Which is why politics is such a bad way of running anything - decisions are always based upon biased and piss poor information.

"By returning the galliwasp to its rightful place, we take a small but significant step towards laying the foundation for a regional and international discussion on repatriation."

This week, King Charles had a second coronation in Scotland, following the official one in London. He took part in a parade through Edinburgh and received the Scottish crown jewels in St. Giles Cathedral. While this was not technically necessary, as England and Scotland share the same throne, it indicated his desire to unify Great […]

Leah Trueblood (Worcester College) has posted The Impact of Federalism on Secession Referendums: Comparing Scotland and Québec (in Keith Ewing and Chris McCorkindale (eds) Special Issue of the King's Law Journal, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The secessionist...

Police Scotland says it will no longer investigate minor crimes, but it refuses to say exactly what constitutes a minor crime. In response to a freedom of information request by a local newspaper, the police force said releasing that information would give a "tactical advantage" to criminals. Officials said the move is aimed at freeing…

Police Scotland has agreed to pay £5,500 ($6,967 U.S.) to settle a lawsuit brought by Angus Cameron, a street preacher who was handcuffed and detained for "homophobic language." The agency will also pay £9,400 ($11,907 U.S.) for Cameron's legal costs. The police also agreed to remove a "non-crime" hate incident report from Cameron's record. Last…

Police Scotland received thousands of complaints under the nation's new hate crimes law just in the first few days after it took effect. Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf told The Telegraph that "a tiny percentage" of the numerous complaints are "turning into actual investigations," but control room staff is running up overtime weeding through them.…

There will be a future while we might wish we didn't have to start from where we are. Plans are there to try to anticipate and change its shape. We have local Plans in England, Scotland and Wales (parts of the United Kingdom – though the future is not guaranteed). Speaking of England, we can … Continued

Scottish Rural Affairs Secretary Mairi Gougeon said that since 2000, 15.7 million trees have been felled on land managed by Forestry and Land Scotland to make way for wind farms. She said that represents about 7,858 hectares (19,417 acres) of trees. The government is looking to more than double the amount of electricity generated by…

As the perceptive have noted the Puritans were not defeated in 1660:Hard-hitting TV campaigns about the dangers of unhealthy eating and labels on alcohol are needed to curb the huge rise in avoidable cancers, charities and health campaigners have warned.The World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) said mass media campaigns, using tough messages mirroring the graphic photographs and wording on cigarette packets, were now needed to tackle the widespread lack of awareness that alcohol and being overweight are both major causes of cancer.Weekly booze limits these days are what a journalist calls breakfast so we do think that perhaps people are going a little far. But japes and jollity aside, a serious point:Ireland recently became the first country in the world to legislate to do that. In future, labels on alcohol products will warn drinkers that "drinking alcohol causes liver disease" and "there is a direct link between alcohol and fatal cancers".We all know what happens next. Ireland has done it therefore we must too. As when Scotland brought in minimum pricing (which we've never understood, why boost profit margins with minimum prices, why not raise tax instead?) then and therefore England must too. Leave aside the specific policies here. Think about science for a moment. Hypothesis, experiment, evidence, confirmation or rejection of hypothesis. According to the evidence we've seen minimum pricing seems to kill people. So, let's not follow Scotland in doing that. But we only know that because Scotland did the experiment and we all waited to see whether the evidence from it confirmed or rejected the original hypothesis.Scary piccies on the booze bottles. Will it work? No, leave aside assumptions and all that. Ireland is starting the experiment. Excellent, let's await the results shall we? After all, if we're going to pretend to use science in public health matters then let's actually use science in public health matters, shall we? Idea, experiment, results - that's how science works.Of course, we can run with the alternative, which is to refuse to use science when discussing matters public health. But at that point there's not much point in doing any public health, is there?

This blog is based on an article in Social Policy and Society by Colin Clark. Click here to access the article. Setting the scene My recent article in Social Policy & Society considers a very specific example of environmental injustice in Scotland: the 'space and place' of Gypsy/Traveller communities and their accommodation on local authority, private, and… Continue reading Social Abjection and The ‘Space and Place’ of Gypsy/Traveller Communities →

As we've noted before yes, of course markets are a lovely way to organise life. People who want to do things are, with free markets, at liberty to go and try doing those things. Liberty and freedom being the aim of the society of course. But there's another merit here too - which is that markets are very brutal at shutting down those things that do not work. Folk run out of money and stop - huzzah, the waste of resources on something that doesn't work ends.That's not how politics works:Alcohol deaths in Scotland have surged to their highest level in 14 years, according to official figures, despite the SNP claiming that minimum alcohol pricing is working.Statistics from National Records of Scotland showed that 1,276 people died from alcohol-related conditions last year, 31 more than in 2021 and the highest total since 2008.It comes as the SNP faces claims that it "manipulated" research that backed its flagship minimum alcohol pricing policy aimed at reducing problem alcoholics and saving lives.The current call in Scottish politics is, we understand, that the minimum price should be raised. We have to admit that we've never understood why the minimum price policy was undertaken in the first place. The profits from the higher prices go to the booze makers - wouldn't it have been more sensible to raise the tax rate instead? But that aside it's also obvious that the policy doesn't work. The response of politics to failure is to do more of that thing but harder. Which is why markets do work so much better than politics. It's not just the liberty they allow it's also that markets kill off mistakes. Which, as we can see, is something politics does not do.

We think this is a fascinating little piece of digging by the BBC: Welsh Water has admitted illegally spilling untreated sewage at dozens of treatment plants for years.The admission came after the BBC presented the water company with analysis of its own data.One of their worst performing plants is in Cardigan in west Wales.The company has been spilling untreated sewage there into an environmentally protected area near a rare dolphin habitat for at least a decade.Welsh Water says it is working to tackle the problems and does not dispute the analysis, Our word. Gosh. Because of course the English water companies have been subject to a barrage of complaints recently, no? As a result of Feargal Sharkey, Surfers Against Sewage and all water bills in England are to rise substantially to pay for the higher standards they desire. Well, OK, maybe that should happen - as we said. If we all want cleaner water then we've all got to pay for it. But then the other part of the general analysis recently has been that it is private, for profit, water companies to blame for all of this. The dividends taken by the capitalists are the cause. Which does rather run into a slight problem, which is that investment in water rose upon privatisation. As we've also pointed out. Cardigan was particularly bad, spilling for more than 200 days each year from 2019-2022.The data provided to Prof Hammond showed that Cardigan almost never treated the amount of sewage it was supposed to.According to its permit it has to treat 88 litres a second before spilling - but had illegally spilled untreated sewage for a cumulative total of 1,146 days from the start of 2018 to the end of May 2023."This is the worst sewage works I've come across in terms of illegal discharges," he said.Oh. Well, that deals with the Richard Murphy critique, which is that the English water companies are environmentally insolvent and therefore must be nationalised. Not for profit and state run companies are worse so what do we do with them? There is that third example, Scotland. But that's difficult as Scottish Water is so efficient it seems not to monitor sewage overflows at all. A tad hyperbolic perhaps, but certainly very little.Which does - or at least should, to the extent that anyone is willing to be rational here - bring us back to that basic discussion of state ownership and privatisation. Not, not at all, which is the best system in theory. Nor shriekings about capitalism, nor public goods to be publicly provided. But which is the most efficient system at delivering what we actually desire? Clean water from the taps, with the least sensible amount of environmental pollution, at the best price possible for those two? We've also run a natural experiment here. England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland got different ownership and management systems as a result of privatisation. The spectrum was from most capitalist to least. The best results have also been along that same spectrum - England, Wales, Scotland, NI.We have, in fact, gone and tested those theoretical speculations. Done it with the water systems of entire nations. And guess what? Capitalism works best. Sure, well regulated capitalism and all that. But capitalism all the same.Isn't that interesting?

Three and a half years ago, the ASI published a position paper and draft law proposing a "UK Free Speech Act" which would, if enacted, forever remove the regulation of nonviolent political discussion from the remit of law enforcement in the United Kingdom.The censorship provisions of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 (the "Hate Crime Act"), entering into force this week, are deeply offensive to freedom of expression, and the only way to stop them is to implicitly repeal these new rules with UK-wide protection for freedom of speech.The Hate Crime Act contains three provisions in particular – "aggravation of offences by prejudice," "racially aggravated harassment" and "stirring up hatred" – which are, at least as-described, descriptions of the sort of speech that most members of polite society would rightly oppose as a personal, moral matter. However, if we look at the substance of the language employed by the new laws and its derivation from similar, viewpoint-neutral English rules – in the case of the stirring-up offence and the "racially aggravated harassment" offences,  the "alarm or distress" language from the English Public Order Act 1986, and in the case of the stirring-up offence only, the historic "threatening, abusive, or insulting" language from that same law – we know that these rules have proven capable of extremely overbroad application in England, and these new rules will prove just as terrible, if not more so, if allowed to stand in Scotland.The position, outlined in a 2020 paper for the ASI, and the applicable English legal rules, remains entirely unchanged. It suffices for present purposes to note that existing English laws, which are nowhere near as intrusive as the new Scottish ones, have already been used in England to, variously: ·      threaten a schoolboy with prosecution for nonviolently holding up a sign calling the Church of Scientology a dangerous cult;·      arrest republican protestors in the vicinity of King Charles' coronation for nonviolent picketing;·      convict a protestor for nonviolently saying David Cameron had "blood on his hands" for cutting disability benefit at an event where the then-PM was speaking;·      convict protestors against the war in Iraq for nonviolently expressing their points of view in front of soldiers of the British Army returning home from that war;·      arrest students for nonviolently saying "woof" to a dog;·      arrest a woman for nonviolently praying silently; and·      arrest a preacher for nonviolently reading from the Bible, in public, verbatim.The existing rules should have been repealed years ago, but few UK lawyers, being unaccustomed to an American perspective on free speech jurisprudence and thus unable to see that the frog was starting to boil, seemed to notice very much as the English judiciary lost its way after issuing its landmark, pro-free speech decision of Redmond-Bate [1999] EWHC Admin 733. In a few short years, the English courts went from protecting controversial speech to routinely acquiescing to the criminalization of what, pre-1999 at least, would have been entirely lawful, if somewhat controversial, expression (see: Norwood v DPP [2003] EWHC 1564, and Abdul v. DPP  [2011] EWHC 247). The provisions of Article 10 of the European Convention concerning freedom of expression, enshrined in domestic law by the UK Human Rights Act, are little better than window-dressing. They have been of no assistance whatsoever in protecting English speakers of controversial ideas since that law's enactment; indeed, the Human Rights Act may have harmed the cause of free speech in the country by formalising the broad derogations from that right permitted under Article 10(2) which have been abused, time and again, to stifle discourse. Put another way, our experience with the English rules, in particular the Public Order Act 1986 but also the Malicious Communications Act 1988, and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, is that their application, especially in the last 25 years, has been subjective, unpredictable, inconsistent, politically-motivated, sometimes capricious, and thoroughly chilling to speech.The Scottish law turbocharges all of these problems by abandoning viewpoint-neutrality and expressly targeting "culture war" issues around questions of identity within the four corners of the statute. This is particularly the case when we look at the "aggravation of offences by prejudice" law, which states that age, disability, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, and transgender identity are all to be considered when sentencing people in Scotland for criminal offences. The problem with this, of course, is that merely talking about these issues and causing offence is already capable of constituting a public order offence, both in England and substantially equivalent legislation in Scotland, and these provisions were used in both England and Scotland to suppress speech even before the Hate Crime Act entered into force.Only last month transgender activists sought to have J.K. Rowling arrested there after English prosecutors declined to prosecute her for prior "gender critical" remarks. The Hate Crime Act now requires Scottish judges to take into account Rowling's motivations when judging her speech, which we think would be fairly described as emanating from the identitarian, and therefore definitionally "prejudicial," ideology known as second-wave feminism, and would require, in a public order or malicious communications-based prosecution for those feminist remarks, for a Scottish judge to consider a sentencing enhancement.It makes no sense to criminalise these conversations. Indeed it makes sense to expressly legalise them, given that national politics seems, increasingly, to cluster around identity issues and, in a democratic society, require their open discussion in order for these disputes around the proper ordering of society to be satisfactorily resolved. On the gender theory question, in particular, the debate seems to be between, on one side, critical theory-informed intersectional activists who seek to view all power relationships through the lens of what they call immutable characteristics, and on the other, we see a coalition of classical liberals and religiously-minded traditionalists from the usual suspects like the Catholic Church but also newly aggrieved groups such as traditionalist Muslim parents of schoolchildren. As the fact that the Prime Minister himself felt the need to chime in on these matters this week plainly evidences, identity issues, whether we like it or not, now sit squarely at the centre of contemporary UK political discourse. We take no view on the merits of either "side" here, because taking a viewpoint does not matter and, in any case, is inadvisable, to the extent anyone here at the Institute plans on ever setting foot in Scotland again. This is because it is now quite unsafe, legally speaking, to take a vigorously-defended public position on these questions in Scotland from any perspective, as long as there is a hearer who is offended enough to file a police report against the hearer's perceived political enemies, or calculating enough to pretend to be so offended. To see how the Hate Crime Act potentially cuts in all directions, we need look no further than criminal complaints which have already been made under the new law. See, for example, the fact that Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf, the law's primary advocate and promoter, was immediately reported by the Indian Council of Scotland to the police for thoughtcrime contained in a speech he himself delivered in Scottish Parliament in 2023 as soon as the Hate Crime Act entered into force. Under the new regime, even the First Minister will need to take care not to express those same thoughts in the same manner again.There are not many reasonable people who wish to live in a country where the first response to any political disagreement is to call for a speaker's arrest. Nonviolent speech should never warrant a violent response. Yet, as was proven on day 1 of this new law, we already see that the Scottish law will be used, and is being used, to call down state-sanctioned violence, namely arrests and imprisonment, to suppress broad swathes of viewpoints from all political quarters. To the few back-benchers who are engaged by this pertinent issue: This is the hill to die on. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, has said he opposes the Scottish law. Push the Prime Minister to back up that opposition with decisive action. Permanently abolish political censorship enforced at gunpoint. Enact the UK Free Speech Act.