Class and health in Scotland

The link between health and class was reaffirmed today in analysis of an ONS/NHS report about the likelihood of death or emergency hospital treatment due to accidental causes.

By me in today’s report in the Scotsman:

“Adults and children from the most deprived areas of Scotland are twice as likely to die from an accidental injury than those from the most affluent postcodes, new figures show.

Some 1,364 deaths were recorded in 2010 in an Office of National Statistics (ONS) report for NHS Scotland as due to “unintentional injuries” such as road accidents, poisoning, and violent crimes like stabbings and shootings. However, the vast majority were from falls.

Of these deaths, the bottom fifth of the population in terms of deprivation was listed as having a Standard Mortality Ratio (SMR) for children of 119.3, compared with just 54.7 in the top fifth.

Figures for adults were similar with an SMR of 125.2 for the bottom 20 per cent and 65.1 for the top 20 per cent.

The SMR is a measure of deaths and is based on a calculation of actual and expected numbers of fatalities.”

I also put together an interactive visualisation of every emergency hospital admission in Scotland for ‘unintentional injury’ (accidents) in the last seven years. View it here.

Hard left splinter party celebrate North Korea’s triumph under Kim Jong-Il

Over at The Steamie today, I take a look at the reaction of the Glasgow contingent of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) to the death of Kim Jong-Il earlier this week.

Sample quote:

“We believe the media’s response has been, quite predictably, hysterical and with massive undertones of chauvinism and racism; mocking a culture’s grieving process really exposes the limitations of apparent British liberalism.

“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea offers its citizens free housing, free healthcare, the life expectancy is 75 and the WHO recently reported the healthcare, particularly the rate of doctors to citizen ratio, was some of the highest in the developing world, free kindergarten care so women can obtain meaningful equality (unlike in Western nations, where women are made to feel guilty if they pursue careers and then face multiple oppressions as they juggle family and work ‘duties’).

“Employment is a human right and guaranteed, education is free including higher education, it’s a tax-free nation, subsidised food and commodity items are open to all, and is a society free of drug abuse, prostitution, and organised and violent crime.

“Further, the citizens feel a tremendous sense of unity and trust with one another, children are socialised in a safe environment without sexualisation and the population doesn’t suffer from the constant bombardment of advertising and consumerism that really damages self esteem and confidence of young people in Britain.

Scotsman data blog launched

Today was the launch of the Scotsman’s data blog within the newspaper’s political website The Steamie.

The first two posts are both maps:

• Scotland’s top and bottom 10 state schools as judged by exam results at Higher level.
• The Scotsman’s Glasgow knife crime map – a project designed to map every crime with a knife in the city starting in 2011 .

I will be mapping, visualising, and otherwise processing data for the site. Datasets and ideas very much wanted.

Adam Phillips interview

Back in 2009, I did an interview with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, author of Promises, Promises, On Kissing, Tickling, and being Bored, and most recently On Balance.

We discussed what a child psychologist wants for his own children, why he rejects modern technology like email, and why writing feels “automatic” for him.

The audio is here.

The transcript is here.

Capturing the Mob

A short  review of Faces, a new book of photography on the criminal underworld, for the Scotsman.

‘I CERTAINLY don’t envy the boys who are running around the streets today. They have no morals and no respect; they fill their minds and bodies with chemicals and fly around the streets aimlessly until some other guy shoots them down, spilling their brains all over the pavement.” Like many older men, Walter Norval is highly critical of today’s youth. Unlike most of his peers, however, Norval also happens to have been Glasgow’s first criminal Godfather, involved in robberies and protection rackets throughout the 1940s and 50s.

Images of Norval strolling through the Red Road area of his city, pausing at a nearby cemetery, or simply getting a haircut fill the first few pages of Faces, a remarkable new book of photography on gang culture by Brian Anderson and Bernard O’Mahoney.

What if Scotland divorced the UK?

Alex Salmond gives the thumbs up to an independent Scotland

My debut for The Awl, in which I which I ask: could Scotland really go independent?

Read it here.

Scotsman feature on the Occupy movement

I stayed overnight with protesters at the Occupy Edinburgh camp and wrote this for The Scotsman.

IT’S THREE in the morning in St Andrew Square, it’s 9C outside and I am lying in a graffiti-covered tent. Why, I ask myself, would anyone choose this life? Who would stay here night after night knowing that, for the most part, they have a centrally heated home to go to and a comfortable bed to lie in?

For one night only, I have become a resident of the 26-day old Occupy Edinburgh camp, a collective whose single shared principle is that capitalism in its current state is unfair and unjust, and that it needs to change.

Lying in the shadow of capitalist behemoths RBS and Harvey Nichols, Occupy Edinburgh has a variable number of permanent and part-time residents, with around 20 sleeping in tents the night that I was there.

Beyond that, you will find moderate reformers, working mothers, anarchists, communists, anti-cuts activists, students who hate fees, and the odd alcoholic who just enjoys the sense of community and the free meals.

The lack of coherent vision is a striking aspect of the movement, which claims roughly three million members worldwide and whose most visible markers in the West are the Occupy Wall Street camp in Zuccotti Park, New York, and the Occupy London Stock Exchange group outside St Paul’s Cathedral.

Scottish Land Reform Act – Why you should care

Hey, it sounds boring, but the Scottish Land Reform Act allows communities to buy out property from local landowners. I wrote about its lack of success, and asked why, for Scotland on Sunday.

Visualisation of GDPs versus the value of the world’s richest sport teams

Click the image below to visualise data I took from Forbes and the CIA World factbook comparing the relative size of GDPs with the value of the New York Yankees, Real Madrid, and Manchester United.

NPR features my article on the Queen in Ireland

From a while back, but just found it.