Naming a hospital

You would think it would be an easy thing to do. Especially since you have 10 years to plan it. You build a new hospital in Govan at what used to be the Southern General Hospital, bringing several hospitals together in one state of the art site. Then you pick a name.

Unfortunately, the combined site puts hospital workers to mega inconvenience travel-wise and some of them end up talking about having to walk through the Clyde Tunnel because there's nowhere for them to park at the new site. Local people who don't drive but have a runway for a car donate the space to nursing staff on Gumtree.

Patients and visitors are confused because it looks like anybody on the southside outside G52 and G53 will end up either taking a taxi to the hospital or taking 3 buses or going into the city centre by train and then getting the subway back out to Govan with a taxi or bus journey to follow. For gawdssake, you can't even get there directly from Pollok. And how long are these journeys going to take? Did anyone try to suss that out on behalf of the NHS beforehand?

There's major upheaval to traffic in the area as roads are dug up and new roundabouts are put in to accommodate a clearway,' despite the fact we already have a clearway from the city centre to Govan. It's called the Squinty Bridge. The local bus station is put out of commission, apparently for 18 months from June 2015 on, despite the fact the NHS could have started the work earlier - and despite the inconvenience to local travellers.

Local residents are outraged to find they're going to have to pay for permits to park their cars. Local businesses will also have to pay to park works vans. This is a very fragile community. Did anybody do any research before this all got going?

And finally, in a carefully handled ceremony, the new site is called the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. Did you know that was on the cards? I didn't - and I know the area well and follow the news pretty carefully. Was there consultation on the name?

Govan is an ancient settlement. You only have to look at the stones preserved in Govan Old Parish Church to see that. The village has thrown up some remarkable people. If we'd been asked for a name for the hospital, we could have suggested:

The Dr John Aitken Hospital: this doctor was a tremendously important figure, a Victorian doctor who championed the good health of Govan people, especially workers in local industry. He died young and was felt to be so important a water fountain was erected in his memory at Govan Cross.

Or we could have had the Mary Barbour Hospital. Mrs Barbour was a councillor, a socialist who led the rent strikes during World War 1 when slum landlords tried to take advantage of the absence of the men at the front to hike the rents up and then tried to evict the families who couldn't pay. Mrs Barbour and her women won that battle and she went on to champion the cause of working class people, till her death at the age of 83 - in the Southern General Hospital. 

This is never going to be the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. If we can't have it named after one of the champions of working people in the Govan area, we'll just keep right on calling it the Southern General. But there was an opportunity here for the NHS to do the right thing. And sadly, management yet again have f*cked it up. 

Oil and all that

How much oil is there still in the North Sea? When will it run out? I don’t know. You probably don’t know. Possibly nobody knows. But UK newspapers were full of articles a couple of weeks back arguing that there is less oil than previously thought and it will not only bring in less cash than we believed but it will run out sooner.

Interestingly, the other thing that happened that week that got loads and loads of media attention was the arrival of 56 SNP members of parliament at Westminster. If you only read the Daily Mail, you’d be forgiven for seeing these 56 as a demented horde of Glasgow street urchins, racing round the sacred halls yelling and brandishing weapons rather than the fairly dull gang of QCs, doctors, councilors, middle managers and TV journalists they actually are. The media have really struggled to find anyone among the 56 worth getting worked up about. There’s been mention of Chris Law. He has a ponytail! And there’s Mhairi Black. She’s young!

So are the oil and the arrival of the new MPs events connected?

Well, they are in the media. And I smell a rat. A media rat. Feed the media rat any kind of claptrap and tosh and, if there’s a decent front page headline to be had, they’ll print it or give it air time on the radio and the telly. Somebody fed the media rat a whole load of nonsense about North Sea oil, most of it inaccurate and very little of it verifiable. And none of it dealing with the real issues around energy.

And those issues are – in my opinion:

Oil exploration is going on all the time. The oil companies are currently exploring the area north and west of Shetland. As the technology continues to improve, the oil companies will go into ever deeper water. The oil we already know is in the Atlantic will be at our disposal.

But I’m a member of the Green Party and we say we’re at a point when we should stop exploring for new oil and start moving over to alternative energy sources. There’s evidence now that fracking is costly and not just in money terms: there’s a risk of polluting the water table, even of causing earthquakes. And like the oil, shale gas will eventually run out.

But that’s not what we’re being told in this story. The media go banging on about North Sea oil bringing in less money, not for financial reasons but for political reasons. According to the media, the SNP depend on oil money to create the picture of a wealthy independent Scotland. The SNP says it has never said this. But since 34 out of 35 newspapers are anti-independence and – I would venture to say – both BBC and ITV follows the unionist line, it’s unlikely you’re going to get much publicity for any alternative view.

So here’s my prediction for the next few months: this story is just one example of media anti-independence bias. The next time the SNP or the Scottish Government announces good news, expect a very negative story to hit the media. And all we can do up here is keep plugging away on the outlets available to us: keep reading Bella Caledonia, Wings Over Scotland, the remaining Yes sites on Facebook – and, of course, The National and The Sunday Herald. And if you’re a member of the SNP and the Greens, keep reading the party websites.