ANOTHER big football match in Glasgow, another day of misery for countless residents.
The weekend before last, the Merchant City was under siege, householders and business owners alike hiding in case an invasion by thousands upon thousands of Celtic fans “celebrating” their team’s league title win tipped over into a full-scale riot.
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Just a few days ago, it was the South Side, where the normal, civilised weekend culture of chatting in cafés, walking the dog in a park or enjoying a quiet pint had to be abandoned because the Scottish Cup Final was on at Hampden.
And, as with seven days before, it was as if it took the council and the cops completely by surprise – you know, rather than having been ringed on the calendar since LAST year’s final.
Driving through Battlefield a couple of hours before the game, Aberdeen’s travelling army had pretty much parked everywhere except actually on top of bus shelters, mainly because there was nowhere official for them to go.
It was every man for himself. You know, dump the motor, buy a carry out, neck it in the street, pee in a hedge.
Which isn’t me trying to paint some dreadful picture of one support in particular – just recognising how too many fans of EVERY club seem to think it’s OK to behave these days. And why do they behave this way?
Because they’re ALLOWED to.
Because – either through lack of numbers or of motivation or of who knows what else – Police Scotland’s methods seem to change as soon as a ball’s being kicked nearby.
As in, if they can be reassured the city isn’t actually on fire, it’s hailed as a success.
We’re all pain the price for bungling SNP’s Great Paracetamol Scandal
A PACK of 16 paracetamol pills at your local Morrisons costs 37p.
For our NHS to give the same tablets away for nothing costs you and I more than £8 a pop.
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In what world does that make any kind of sense?
What kind of brain computes that something worth the same as a tin of own-brand baked beans should actually dip the taxpayer’s pocket for more than a gallon of diesel?
Simple. The world and the brain of an SNP who bought off a generation of votes by handing out freebies like sweeties and left future generations to pick up the tab.
It’s 14 years since they took their “let’s make England look bad” mindset to new heights by scrapping prescription charges. In that time, the bill for painkillers alone — the basic kind we find on supermarket shelves for pennies — has topped £185million.
Imagine the good that kind of money could have done for our crumbling health service, how many nurses it could have helped hire, extra GP appointments it could have created or buildings it could have maintained.
Imagine the difference to budgets across the board if even a fraction of the — wait for it — £1.5BILLION in drugs and medical supplies handed out overall had gone back into the system.
Sadly, all we can do is imagine it, because throughout this period, we’ve been ruled by a shower of Holyrood chancers who care far less about infrastructure than they do about surface appearances.
Free paracetamol makes them look good, so to hell with the cluster headache it leaves for future governments.
The figures published in this paper on Sunday truly are jaw-dropping. Seeing this level of scattercash idiocy laid out in its starkest form is a damning indictment on the “get elected quick” mentality piloted by Alex Salmond and gleefully carried on by Nicola Sturgeon, Humza Yousaf and now John Swinney.
But you know the really scary thing?
That while the £8-plus cost of supposedly free painkillers — funding the consultation, processing the prescription, paying the pharmacist — might be headline-grabbing, the £185million hole it’s created is only ONE example of waste in ONE department of the NHS.
So how many other examples do we never get to find out about?
How much more money is disappearing down a giant black hole 24/7 — money that can’t be as easily quantified for public consumption as the Great Paracetamol Scandal?
Take mental health as an example. Last week, I hosted a conference on the issue in Glasgow, at which one former NHS psychologist, now in private practice, said bluntly that so much cash is thrown blindly at policies which simply don’t work for doctors, counsellors or patients that — and I quote — “they might as well pack the whole thing up and go home”.
That was plainly hard to say for someone whose life has been devoted to helping others build stronger minds.
But they meant it, right from the heart. The point wasn’t that the doctors and counsellors aren’t good enough at their jobs, or that there isn’t the demand for their services, as neither could be further from the truth.
It’s that the politicians and civil servants making the decisions on funding only care about the amount they throw at the wall rather than how much of it sticks. Result? Waiting lists are so long that (and I write this from personal experience) many of those stuck on them give up because the anxiety of hanging around only makes the existing anxiety worse.
So what do they do next? They see their GP for more free tablets, even though that doesn’t fix the problem.
That’s what waste looks like. It looks like a total lack of joined-up thinking, like constantly reacting to situations rather than being proactive, like making decisions based on what the public will THINK rather than what they NEED.
Then we see figures like the £185million in free painkillers we could all afford, we hear experts speaking with despair about the state of things and we look for people to blame. Hence stories like the one that has just revealed over 300 NHS managers are on £200,000-a-year, with another 500-odd earning more than the Prime Minister’s £172,000.
Now, I’m not going to start pointing fingers and claiming that any of them aren’t worth it because, for all I know, they might all be absolute geniuses.
But when, here in Scotland, we’re making political decisions to give away stuff that doesn’t need given away, what else is there to do but ask why bosses are on so much dough when the service is on its knees?
We hear of the golden hellos and goodbyes, the first class travel and the bumper pensions, we put two and two together and come up with a five that says the whole thing’s corrupt as hell.
All this while a recorded message says we’re 29th in the queue for an appointment with a doctor who isn’t free until a week on Thursday — and even then, only by phone.
And the gits wonder why we need so many headache pills…
