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I am mildly amused by how the SNP market them selves as opposed to what they do..
Yes, fair enough to most of the above - but they actually reduced spend in the NHS in compared to England in the same period. I also missed the NHS privatisation bill last year...but the SNP seemed to know all about it
Nicola is very careful to be "pro business " .
Peter_Carter-
Every economy needs business. With TTIP they admittedly didn't come straight out and say they wouldn't sign up to it, but there's no way their base would accept the scant detail that's been released for public consumption, but they're also not going to unduly antagonise the USA by embarrassing the UK government over it, because again, in time they'll want to keep those links positive so there's been a gradual hardening of their position in line with the increasingly alarming content of it being leaked. Good luck trying to get comment from Cameron on that.
In the English NHS 30% of contracts are fulfilled by private companies. Of these 70% belong to one company (how many tory mp's are on that board do you think?) In Scotland, it's closer to 5% and they're mostly classed as subcontractors delivering specialised services like mental health orgs. I don't think this represents a significant threat to the general integrity of the NHS as a public service, do you?
The following is cut and paste but basically, given Scotland's budget's been cut quite substantially, and they already spend more per head than England, a 1.2% cut over 6 years isn't really the creeping privatisation that's happening in the rest of the UK, is it? Being able to decide how much you will spend on the NHS doesn't mean that you don't have to balance the books overall-having lived in London I think the services up here work far better.
Healthcare spending per head is higher in Scotland than it is in England, according to Treasury figures. In Scotland spending was £2,115 per person in 2012/13, while in England spending was £1,912 per person. So that’s 10.6% higher in Scotland.
The Scottish government has said this is because lower population density in Scotland makes it more expensive to provide services at the same level, and that people in Scotland have a greater need for healthcare. It’s not a new trend – analysis by the Nuffield Trust and Health Foundation has shown that spending per head has been consistently lower in England than in each of the devolved nations since 2000/01.
Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) suggests that in the current period of austerity health spending has been less of a priority for the Scottish Government than in England. The IFS found Scotland’s planned public spending is to fall by 8.4% in real terms between 2009/10 and 2015/16, less than the 13% cut to the budget for English public services. In the same period the planned spend on health will fall by 1.2% in Scotland, and rise by 4.4% in England.
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I'll send that memo on to Jim Murphy and tell him that it wasn't because he's not Blairite enough even for his own constituents, but even the whole country thought that 'no, fuckit-those people over there advocating a broad based civic nationalism and espousing policy of social justice, environmental protection, land reform, anti nuke, anti ttip, protection of the nhs and the right to free education, the ones that really want proportional representation and have the first ever gender balanced cabinet-those cunts are really the empty, shallow Blairite red tories we're after, so much so we'll abandon the last vestiges of the Labour party still in office who represent those values'
I'm sure Jim will find that entirely in line with his views, and Kezia's having some reconstructive surgery and a sex-change as we speak just so she can look more like Blair and gain some votes back from the SNP...