Scottish Nation in poor health

You're alive, Happy New Year!

I'm fine thanks, no worse for wear after last nights pints and a glass of Bunnahabhain.

Few more days of it to go. Hogmannay is ace!

But what an excuse!

Not defending but in Scotland there is a legacy of the Tenement dwellers in several of the major cities whereby young children grew up exposed to many childhood diseases and in order to survive then some genes, normally dormant, switched on and stayed switched on in any progeny. This protected individuals as children but the cost was poorer health in middle age, exacerbated by lifestyles. It is only the last two generations that have been largely free from this but the poor condition tenements in Glasgow were mainly still standing in my living memory and still lived in as my brother was renting as a student and his place was pretty abysmal.

It is all grist to the mill of poor health. The shorter daylight in winter with grey skies and rain clouds is another, The diet of Scots has been pretty heavy on the salt for many years which is another factor. Over here on the West the sun does not rise until 0846 and sets at 1558,  and we are pretty far south, and for a week the sun was not visible through the rain clouds and the drizzle. Further north the days are even shorter. So Scotland has many factors why it has a poor health outcome and the Scottish and UK governments may be two of them but there are many more.

It has the worse dug porblem in the world also.

Scotlands life expectancy has been falling in comparison with much of Europe since the 1950s. This article here blames the neoliberal choices of Westminster governments for a large part of  that fact....
 

Neoliberal policies have been associated with poor health outcomes and health inequalities in a number of studies in Eastern Europe (with very little time lag between the implementation of policy and health outcomes)20–23 and the USA,24 but the UK also underwent radical change from 1979 as the Conservative government elected in that year implemented a range of such policies. While the resulting change was less profound than that flowing from the stark imposition of neoliberalism in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union after 1990, and perhaps also somewhat less profound than ‘Reaganomics’ in the USA after 1980, it has been further argued that Scotland, and in particular the west of Scotland, was, amongst the nations of the UK, disproportionately vulnerable to, and worse affected by, its damaging effects

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3505444/



 

What I find interesting is the republic of irelands example. A century ago , when the republic was a part of this despicable union , it had a life expectancy similar to Scotland. After independence , and the ability to control its own destiny , and set its own policies to the benefit of its own people , it now has the one of the best life expectancies in Europe , far higher than their British counterparts in the north , and higher than England itself.

So the answer appears to be ending devolution , and becoming an independent nation like Ireland.



Meanwhile , current polls are showing 57 % of people uk wide oppose a labour government , 58 % of the welsh oppose labour , and in Scotland this rises to 70 % oppose a labour government   .

It was the blairites ruin of the economy that led to the SNP landslide of 2011 in Holyrood , and the massive increase in the yes to indy vote to 45 % . Fingers crossed starmer makes it into number ten , despite the fact we are all realistic enough to realise labour can't be trusted with the levers of power and the economy.