Best Of

Holyrood’s new health committee convener has been criticised after a recently surfaced video shows her drawing a comparison between pregnant women seeking abortions and “feral cats”.

Ms McDade, Reform UK MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, who was elected convener of the Scottish Parliament’s Health, Care and Sport Committee this week, also described the move to decriminalise abortion in England and Wales as "appalling".

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/26188787.holyrood-health-convener-compares-pregnant-women-feral-cats/

That is an extremely misleading headline. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you did not read the full remarks.

For those of us who don’t have a Herald sub, can you say why it’s misleading?

It is misleading for two reasons.

1. There was never a comparison drawn between women seeking abortion and feral cats. There were two interesting points made to illustrate McDade's feelings on abortion, one of which was a formative experience during which as a vet she had to abort pregnancies in cats, which was evidently an extremely visceral and a horrid task. The headline implies an incredibly crass and insensitive insult.

2. Beneath the headline, the sentence appears to indicate that McDade opposes all abortion and regrets the 1967 act. This is untrue - she has condemned the recent 2026 act that legalised full term abortions arranged without medical oversight. She is concerned that labour could be forced almost at full term, with the result that a living/viable baby is born 'gasping for air'. I think that's a horrific scenario that would concern anyone with a shred of human feeling, but maybe that's just me.

No 10 was braced for Reeves or Miliband to quit. Then Healey jumped ship
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/keir-starmer-defence-strategy-john-healey-bsncps22n (£££)

Healy and Carns resigning, with blistering letters to the PM, was about the worst case scenario for No.10.

No-one would have mourned Reeves or Miliband walking away.

On what possible planet would Reeves have resigned? Her only hope of remaining as chancellor is for Starmer to stay on.

Does Reeves want to remain Chancellor for an extra few weeks or would she fancy three years of first class flights and state banquets as Foreign Secretary to a grateful Wes Streeting Andy Burnham? Or even, since this is Labour, a chance to build something running a spending department – whether you like what Miliband, Phillipson and Streeting have done or not, at least they've done something.

Too late - she’s too politically damaged and too closely associated with Starmer for Burnham to offer her a job.

We'll see. I'm not convinced Burnham will want to exacerbate party splits on day one.

Good morning

I suspect the bond market's patience is going to be stretched to breaking point in the next few weeks, especially if Burnham carries out his threat to nationalise water and energy

Utilities were publicly owned

Stolen and Thatcher ruined by greed and corruption.

Labour should take back in to public ownership paying shareholders a minimal peppercorn sum

Power to the People

Bringing accountability back

Some of us are old enough to remember 1980s British Telecom, where you’d wait three months for line to be installed, it would end up being a shared party line, and you’d better be damn grateful they were kind enough to give you service in the first place.

Privatisation and competition were the best things to ever happen to utilities.

Maybe, but that doesn't apply to water. Unless I've missed it, I can't choose my supplier and there's no meaningful competition.

The issue was that there was a huge amount of capital spending needed to improve sewage treatment and the Treasury didn’t want to pay for it. But it was politically impossible for public companies to put up bills & the accountants wouldn’t let them borrow any more to do it.

So you privatised it, the treasury got some cash and the customers paid the bills. It would have worked fine until Macquarie outsmarted some naive regulators

No 10 was braced for Reeves or Miliband to quit. Then Healey jumped ship
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/keir-starmer-defence-strategy-john-healey-bsncps22n (£££)

Healy and Carns resigning, with blistering letters to the PM, was about the worst case scenario for No.10.

No-one would have mourned Reeves or Miliband walking away.

On what possible planet would Reeves have resigned? Her only hope of remaining as chancellor is for Starmer to stay on.

Does Reeves want to remain Chancellor for an extra few weeks or would she fancy three years of first class flights and state banquets as Foreign Secretary to a grateful Wes Streeting Andy Burnham? Or even, since this is Labour, a chance to build something running a spending department – whether you like what Miliband, Phillipson and Streeting have done or not, at least they've done something.

Too late - she’s too politically damaged and too closely associated with Starmer for Burnham to offer her a job.

We'll see. I'm not convinced Burnham will want to exacerbate party splits on day one.

Good morning

I suspect the bond market's patience is going to be stretched to breaking point in the next few weeks, especially if Burnham carries out his threat to nationalise water and energy

Utilities were publicly owned

Stolen and Thatcher ruined by greed and corruption.

Labour should take back in to public ownership paying shareholders a minimal peppercorn sum

Power to the People

Bringing accountability back

Some of us are old enough to remember 1980s British Telecom, where you’d wait three months for line to be installed, it would end up being a shared party line, and you’d better be damn grateful they were kind enough to give you service in the first place.

Privatisation and competition were the best things to ever happen to utilities.

Your older than I thought if you were ordering new phione lines in the 80s , unless you were doing it in a piping treble voice.

I’m old enough to remember my parents having to use a neighbour’s phone to get news about my dying grandfather, because it took BT three months to install the line after they moved house.

My parents didn't have a phone and neither did I until after I left university.
We wrote letters to one another about once a week.