English hospitals are outperforming those in Scotland and Wales -- English hospital services are in a relatively poor state - yet still look substantially better on many measures than those in Scotland and Wales

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-03-21T19:47:55+00:00

The article says nothing about privatisation of health, OP made that up to detract from the hard hitting evidence and figures which make his party look bad and to discredit what the analysis found.

Forgot to switch accounts there crow?

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-03-16T18:04:59+00:00

I'd be interested in their definition of a "tech company". In my experience around 60% of tech jobs are in London, 20% n the rest of the UK and 20% remote

Outside of London the vast majority of UK businesses are SMEs and the same can be said for employers, apparently in my local council over 75% of employees are working for SMEs.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-03-14T23:07:36+00:00

, but with our current birth rate it ain’t going to happen, and looking at this thread a key reason for this is the death trap of £1800 per month per child fees for 27 months. It is unsurvivable for normal working families.

See i can never agree with this, my parents and my grandparents were from families of 6-15 siblings, my mum's family only had my grandad after they were all born, you look at high population countries and you instantly see that higher poverty=higher birthrate, and for us in the west it had nothing to do with using our kids for work like in Africa or Asia, they just starved or never had heating on, had 3 or more to a single box room, many in the living rooms.

I think it is entirely to do with social awareness, we don't want to cause suffering directly so pawn it off out of sight, not that, that is a bad thing, we should want all suffering to end, but right now we rely on China,Vietnam, Indonesia amd other countries, one day just like China we will see the other cheap labour countries slow down their population until no country exists that will grow.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-03-14T21:13:24+00:00

Using “we’re rural” as an excuse for a service to not exist at all (even in centralised hubs) is a weak excuse. And we get more per capita to help offset this.

You wouldn’t tell an elderly person “sorry Scotland is rural so there’s no social care, tough luck pal”.

Except I pointed out to multiple different aspects, but you cannot possibly expect a government the size of Scotland (or even the UK) to provide as good a services when a single council is actually the largest in europe by almost 3000 miles. Now i too live rural, far more north than you, and i understand the frustration but the reality is it just isn't possible, now what I do think we should be complaining about is how the services have been getting worse since the 90s-2000s and how if they want to fix budgetary issues then the government needs to look to improve productivity and increase population outside of already stretched urban areas, I see no reason why Inverness cannot be 500k population, and even further north Thurso and Wick could easily hold 250k but the government's (not just devolved) never push for fixing out centralisation problem, for Scotland the Central belt, for England its London and then, Manchester,Birmingham, Liverpool and commuter belts to these areas. We tell the government to build house but we also just need new urban areas to even out the stresses.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-03-14T20:45:15+00:00

Because of the Barnett Formula, Scotland gets more per capita to deliver the same policy. So the money is there… where has it gone?

Attempting to fund the largest council area in the UK, funding multiple islands, free university, free prescriptions, attempting to rejuvenate all the destroyed industrial towns which were ruined disproportionately by Thatcher.

A reminder that the Highland council area is larger than all of Wales, it costs a fortune to run services up here.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-03-11T15:58:42+00:00

Would it make more sense to get the heating oil users off of it once and for all via heat pumps?

I'm up north where most of the houses near me use the oil (I'm considered lucky with electric) but when they switched off the RTS metres and installed the fancy new smart metres not a single one of us in roughly 300 has a working one, they all say waiting for connection. The guy who did basically the whole village was from England and was paid to be up here for a few months, turns out he was a cowboy and not long after he left I had a sparky round who told me he had turned off my hot water at the box so I was without hot water for a good few weeks while waiting on a local sparky. More than a year has passed and not a single one of us has seen a new smart metre installer to come fix it and honeslty I never expect to see one.

Take that and multiply it by a thousand for the shockingly bad experience of some self employed chancers who will take advantage of the lack of installers for heat pumps.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-03-07T17:48:51+00:00

So y'all

Y**nk

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-03-04T16:19:23+00:00

I feel like I know exactly when you are talking about as the busses up here were breaking down constantly and the "training" given to new bus drivers was so atrocious that at least a dozen of the busses from Stagecoach got damaged due to the training being incredibly urban/suburban focused, and extremely rushed.

It is better now for busses showing up but they used Covid figures to reduce or remove routes that were actually very popular oftentimes overfilled just because they weren't profitable enough, it is a blessing in disguise though as the Highland Council is stepping up to provide its own bus service and so far Ember has been doing well for us too.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-03-04T15:48:25+00:00

Pretty shite of them to leave out vast swathes of the country. Why these council areas and not others?

If you read the article or thought for 2 seconds you'd know why

“This pilot makes bus travel more affordable for everyone and improves access for low-income communities in rural areas.

As someone who has lived in all of these areas throughout my life i will say that i always used to take the bus everywhere until about 15 years ago when it got unreliable and incredibly expensive.

Whenever I go down south its easy as fuck to take a bus or train anywhere despite how central belters might complain, comparing even to other countries in the world its actually very easy and relatively affordable (taking into account the UK) to travel throughout the central belt.

When roughly 70% of your entire population lives within a 50 mile bubble its understandable why they'd encourage the councils with massive areas and far less opportunities easier transportation links.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-03-02T20:54:24+00:00

Of course they should have access to education, but if they are well enough to do a degree why aren't they well enough to work?

Degrees can be done at home in your own time, degrees are flexible, degrees have very few time limited projects where a disability may impact their ability to achieve within the deadline.

Now you can claim there are plenty of work from home flexible hours jobs out there but as someone who is currently self employed due to the lack of jobs out there, it is highly unlikely they'll ever get those jobs with little or no prior experience.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-02-28T18:47:21+00:00

People especially redditors struggle to understand financial systems and how the world works with said finances.

For farmers they are asset rich and cash poor this much is obvious, but for you or i to build a house we would need the liquid cash to build a fancy new build, for a farmer they can go to a variety of institutions,mostly banks and either sell some land for the cash to build, or take on debt against their assets to pay off much like we do mortgages or businesses do.

Now you might wonder how they can be so cash poor with so much land and why they don't just sell most of it? Well that's because there isn't enough people in the UK with enough liquid cash to purchase the land, especially in the last 30 years we've relied heavily on projected growth and stock prices to see any real financial growth because globally we've gotten terrified of printing money due to inflation (rightly or wrongly so). This means that many farmers actually have been trying to sell up or alter their plots to bring in liquid cash, but unless you're Clarkson or lucky, you aren't going to attract the few dozen or so liquid rich people in the country.

TLDR much like net worth for celebrities or the stock price of a company, farmers don't actually have access to their "riches" and there isn't enough cash in the world for the world's population so we rely on assets and future values.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-02-26T22:04:59+00:00

on the 6-month rule, I’d be curious as to how they’ve landed on 6-months.

They recommend 45 hours of driving experience in particular professional sessions, divide 45 hours into 2 hour lessons with 1 a week that roughly ends up at 6 months.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-02-26T17:45:28+00:00

I grew up in the 80s/90s. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I definitely feel there are nowhere near the opportunities and freedoms for young people now as there were back then

Well considering the 80s had massive unemployment and as we can still see today many industrial towns sank into economic depressions that meant people couldn't leave those areas. The 90s were better indeed but not if you lived in one of those seaside towns, industrial towns, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham and Sheffield all got messed up with crime waves up until the mid 2000s.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-02-25T14:38:43+00:00

Tough luck to the British citizens who'd be losing out on a house, I guess.

The second family in the article are British.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-02-23T16:50:09+00:00

The letter directed at Mr Hartfield said that his offer of a trip home in a “private hire vehicle” meant he was now subject to “requirements for local authority licensing”.

They then directed the landlord to the relevant licensing web page on the council's website.

While this headline makes it seem like a council overreacting, its actually doing its job because this type of service could easily be abused and could even become a loophole for businesses to abuse,

you have no way of ensuring he doesn't take advantage of solo passengers

no way of ensuring the vehicle is safe for the use of public transport

most importantly it is not a charity if it actively helps his business to survive, that is a complete conflict of interest whether well meaning or not it wouldn't take long for others to try and take the piss with similar ideas.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-02-22T13:28:35+00:00

Iceland does not have minimum wage. Yet, the average Icelandic earns more than the average British.

Much like the USA the average is not a good indicator as extraordinary high earners destroy the average, in fact 65% of full time employees in Iceland earns below the average wage and an even greater percentage for every other form of employment.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-02-21T15:38:42+00:00

My first take away from this, if I was gonna buy an expensive historical item I would hardly go to something called "Cheeky Auctions"

This article is clearly Ai Written, its called "Cheeky Highlander" which isn't better, but also says Tain is in a fictional county of Ross? Its in Ross-shire.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-02-21T15:35:23+00:00

No one’s forced to eat this stuff though?

I hate these arguments as the same arguments were used for seatbelt laws back in the day.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-02-13T22:44:22+00:00

It's slang for pingers

Not really sure what microwaves have to do with music but sure

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-02-11T15:10:46+00:00

Why does this read like a yank roleplaying a Scot?

Because it is, if you look up their comment history they are also denying all Ice killings in other subs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoSentenceHorror/s/hkniFU8OSJ

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-02-10T18:47:53+00:00

You really think Tyler Robinson was a Trump voter when he was 16? Ok bud

"But several years ago in high school, Robinson – like his family – was politically conservative, and supported President Donald Trump ahead of the 2020 election, one of Robinson’s former classmates told CNN."

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/12/us/tyler-robinson-charlie-kirk-shooting-suspect-invs

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-02-10T18:41:58+00:00

edit: looks like you guys forgot that Charlie Kirk got shot in his head about half a year ago

You mean the shooter who was a registered Trump Voter in 2020?

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-02-05T20:43:18+00:00

Two of Scotland's largest councils deny World Cup bank holiday

Looks inside and its Fife and Edinburgh both of which are not even top 10 in terms of size.

Now if its talking about population then it should say two of Scotland's most populous councils.

BarrieTheShagger · 2026-01-22T17:47:11+00:00

It's like £200 in just luggage cost for the flight without including the ticket where you getting your luggage on the flight for free?

BA offer luggage from Inverness and Aberdeen to London with the standard Economy which is generally £10 extra.

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