Very few people in this country can have been surprised that another rightwing UK government has led the country into yet another war of uncertain outcome on hastily collated numbers.
What was surprising was just how much the UK parliamentary Labour party has now been formed in the image and likeness of the Conservative party.
It appears that Jeremy Corbyn’s fate is always to be painted as an extremist even by those who are advocating a policy that will cause many civilian deaths and that has no exit plan.
I fear then that his leadership of the Westminster party is doomed: he is now being stabbed in the front by people he promoted just a few months ago. It seems that only in Scotland does a reliably authentic leftwing quantum of support reside across SNP, Labour and Greens.
But for their views to prevail, independence must first be gained. Being dragged into another war in the Middle East when 57 out of 59 of your country’s MPs voted against it would seem to me to satisfy several of the tests Nicola Sturgeon has set before another independence referendum can be considered.
Yet a snapshot of the main political developments in Scotland last week shows that the leftwing Nirvana of enlightenment and wisdom that many of us crave is still a long way off.
It also showed that, if the Labour party in Scotland can ever get its act together in the near future, independence would offer it the best chance of wielding proper political power somewhere on these islands at some point in the next 10 years.
There is a rich seam of political opportunity to be mined here for Labour as the gap between SNP rhetoric and daily reality gets wider all the time.
This party, which would like us all to believe that it is the most radical party ever to have existed since the word radical was invented, has been in power for eight years. It is set fair for another eight at least.
Yet research conducted by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission last week concluded unequivocally that Scotland possesses a class ceiling every bit as insidious and unyielding as that which dominates English society.
Around 45% of senior judges, 32% of our most influential media professionals and 28% cent of business leaders are privately educated. Yet, only around 4% of the Scottish population attend these facilities. For such influence to be wielded by so few is the result of generations of social gerrymandering on a grand scale.
Meanwhile, two-thirds of senior judges, around half of our media executives and 46% of Westminster’s Scottish MPs attended one of the Russell group of Scottish universities: Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews and Aberdeen.
These numbers simply destroy the myth that Scotland is a place where the lions lie down with the lambs and all our swords are being beaten into ploughshares.
What is happening is that the lions are still using swords, ploughshares and anything else that comes to hand to batter the lambs and anyone else that comes within touching distance of them and their domain.
When, earlier this year, I asked Nicola Sturgeon for her thoughts on hospital consultants spending up to a third of their working week on private work, she quite properly stated that she would ask for those figures to be checked and verified before coming back to me. It was a whole lot better than mouthing some casual sophistry about a review into remuneration of consultants and their terms and conditions. Whenever a crisis in the health service in Scotland occurs the response is always the same: someone will set up a review of procedures/numbers/ratios.
I knew, however, I was in for a long wait as consultants ask other consultants to sign off their job plans for the week – perhaps before another round at Glasgow Gailes links – and so the accumulation of hours that the NHS donates to the private sector through the services of its state-trained operatives is unknown.
It’s bad enough that we subsidise the private health sector in this way at all, but when it happens at a time when 550 hospital operations were cancelled in October, according to NHS figures, owing to a lack of staff or beds, this is a national scandal.
Some authorities are even importing locums from Australia, for heaven’s sake, while our state-trained consultants are paying for the kids’ school fees with another few shifts at Ross Hall or the Bon Secours private hospitals.
I’ll forgive them if they still require more time to get those numbers, especially as it would seem that an entire division of experts is required to sort out the ongoing shambles at Glasgow’s new £832m Queen Elizabeth University Hospital.
Last week, healthcare inspectors found one patient close to malnutrition and another unfed for eight days. Why go on a 5:2 New Year diet when you can arrange to have a wee accident and spend a week as a guest of the state in the Sweaty Betty?
This was just the latest in a series of weekly bulletins from the Queen Elizabeth that suggest you might be better off taking your chances in the Haiti healthcare system.
More people now work in the NHS in Scotland than when the SNP came to power in 2007, most of them in the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde area, which runs the Queen Elizabeth. It also runs the Vale of Leven hospital where 34 elderly people (and perhaps more) died in an outbreak of Clostridium difficile in 2013.
The chief executive of Greater Glasgow and Clyde is one Robert Calderwood, who has given notice that he will be retiring soon, yet keeps moving back the date (a situation that is bound to please his pension adviser).
Welcome to fair and equal Scotland, where only if you are one of the hundreds of health, education and police bosses are you allowed to depart on your own terms, at your own time and free from any scrutiny of your performance in the job.
Make that two paracetamol and a large Bacardi, nurse…
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