Nothing like a dark Scottish wet day to focus the mind on hiding under the duvet. Makes you wonder how big the Starmer bedcover is. With his popularity ratings falling, the mask has slipped and I’m reminded of the Thatcher rhetoric about how good England is to Scotland. Aye right.
Here is a greyness over the UK just now, it hung over us all from the 1970s, but this feels different. The gloom is on us and the nights are drawing in but it all seems familiar, or are we moving into a transition stage where we take control and move onto our own path? The truth is the whole country has a financial void which even the new Government cannot explain, when they had provided us, the voters, with so many explanations of how the previous incumbents got it so wrong, and how they were going to put it all right. Let’s see what the Autumn budget exposes.
Running a country is a bit like running a hospital, the first priority should be people, staff and making sure the place is running within budget. The problem with hospitals, like Westminster, there are a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. Lobbyists have an incredible power, in the case of hospitals, pharmaceutical companies especially, as the thousands of complex procurement purchases which have been highlighted from the COVID scandals prove, but who are we to Mone!
But frightening the patients is a major problem when you start starving them, freezing them and subsequently killing them. Who needs an Act to assist dying when all you need to do is just cut the pensioners allowances, devalue pensions and make sure they are left in corridors to die. Harsh but true. Not the hospital’s fault, the system is broken because it needs good management from the top.
I suspect Scotland is regarded as just one of these broken hospitals. Just an institution trying to heal its people on yet another handout being cut. Until our masters in the South start regarding us as consultants not surgical waste, we will have to endure more years of neglect.
However on a wet bank holiday, a day of reflection and bad TV, we can hope that this new regime can use some kind of defibulator to resuscitate the heart of the country and replace the faulty valves that have been so badly blocked to Scotland. We are not the wounded mass of the UK, we are the front line of that team to take our country forward. We are not in intensive care, we are the life blood of our own nation, when are we ever to stand up and say our country cares, our country nurtures and our country heals, Westminster stop inflicting wounds and start the process of healing, not stealing.