Scottish independence

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

The NI estimates of costs of leaving the union show this. Scotland could save a fortune on the cost of subsidising Nuclear Weapons and HS2 and Nuclear power plants and 2% GDP for NATO could offset the Barnett Formula ( Scottish GDP is £200Bn , HS2 is already £50bn over the initial estimate, Sellafield clean up was £70Bn and increasing by £5bn a year and nuclear power is write a blank cheque stuff )

Do you suggest independent Scotland leaves NATO and won't build a high speed rail towards its only neighbour?

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

It wouldn't need one.

Look at how many ex-soviet republics border a state with nuclear weapons. Especially when you add Iran and the weapons based in Turkey.

Besides unlike the other Security Council members the UK only has submarines and the bare minimum of them. So it's not physically possible. Oh and Scotland doesn't have a GPS system or an empire to protect.

A few % of GDP would be handy for Health and stuff.

They should come up with a slogan about that and put it on a bus.

A lot of disgruntled folk in the independence movement who are disappointed with the performance of the SNP leadership with regards to the UK govt just saying no. A lot of grassroots SNP members are asking the leadership to challenge this in the courts and bring some legal clarity over the matter. The SNP seem wholly adverse to doing that so the grassroots are crowdfunding to challenge the narrative that seems to be accepted everywhere (that only the UK govt can grant a legal referendum)

https://twitter.com/LesleyRiddoch/status/1291461415048445952

dere34 wrote: »

SNP in hot water over exams.

Was always likely to happen...Didn't the same happen in England too?

Not sure why Sturgeon has apologised as nothing has changed since last week - other than all the media and politiical opponents are pushing a narrative that is not correct to normalise teacher estimates

SIMD = Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation

The SQA moderated the grades based on the previous 4 year average (plus a little bit)


Grades A-C at Higher

Teacher estimates



SQA moderated results

Aegir wrote: »

The Systems were different though. It is appropriate that all of the governments look into fixing the system before scrapping it.

Once the Scottish government U turn though, it meant that there was pressure on the other three regions as it would have given Scottish students disproportionately better grades and therefore an advantage when applying to universities.

I don’t think any of the parliaments/assemblies can get credit or criticism really. This is an unprecedented event and to an extent a poisoned chalice. Whatever they did was going to get them excessive criticism.

Not necessarily excessive; the criticism may be entirely justified.

My reading, for what it is worth, is that the Tories assigned top priority to avoiding grade inflation, partly for ideological reasons and partly because they wanted not to be under pressure to fund the extra university places that would result if more than the expected proportion of students acheived their conditional offers. The algorithm was therefore designed to ensure that the total number of A grades, B grades, etc, would match the total number granted in previous years. These grades would then be divided up between the students based on (a) the school they were in, and (b) their ranking within their class, as assigned by their teachers. (For most students, the predicted grades assigned by their teachers played no role at all in the algorithm.)

The process has been compared by one commentator to attempting to identify the size of each egg that went into an omelette, by looking at a different omelette.

If you start off from the principle that this year's grades cannot be better than last years, regardless of the ability, aptitude or attainment of this year's students, and that not providing extra university places is a greater priority than ensuring that no student is denied an opportunity to flourish despite the impact of the pandemic, you don't have to wait for the Scottish results to realise what the adverse impacts of the policy are going to be.

And thinking about this is pretty basic policy work. Always think about who is going to be adversely affected by your policy, and always think about whether and how you can justify that adverse impact. If you can't justify it, it's a bad policy. If this work was done at all, it certainly wasn't done properly, because the government simply didn't have a credible answer when the questions became real-world questions for real individuals. Hence the U-turn.

Aegir wrote: »

The Systems were different though. It is appropriate that all of the governments look into fixing the system before scrapping it.

Once the Scottish government U turn though, it meant that there was pressure on the other three regions as it would have given Scottish students disproportionately better grades and therefore an advantage when applying to universities.

I don’t think any of the parliaments/assemblies can get credit or criticism really. This is an unprecedented event and to an extent a poisoned chalice. Whatever they did was going to get them excessive criticism.

So you're saying that things were so different in Scotland Vs rUK that there was nothing to learn from what happened there?

That's a bit of a leap.