SpecData

When it rains for Scotland’s Nats, it pours. It now transpires – according to the Scottish government’s very own survey – that between 2022 and 2023, the proportion of people who trust the SNP government has plummeted by a staggering 10 points. And that’s not all. Trust in all six public sector institutions has declined markedly in the last 12 months, with the results presenting a rather concerning picture for the SNP ahead of the 2026 Holyrood elections. Not that Mr S can say he’s particularly shocked… The Scottish government saw public trust fall from 55 per cent in 2022 to a mere 45 per cent the following year, while

One of the perennial scapegoats of the NHS is the patient who doesn’t turn up for their GP appointment. The headlines write themselves: millions of pounds wasted and other patients can’t get seen. But while missed GP visits have become a symbol of inefficiency, a far bigger – and often overlooked – problem lies within our hospitals. Every day, there are more than 300,000 outpatient appointments at hospitals, from MRI and breast scans to plaster casts and blood tests. And every day, 20,000 patients don’t turn up. On the surface the data looks like a success story for the NHS, with the percentage of appointments that patients miss gently falling over the last

Does wisdom come with age? MPs have just voted by a margin of 55 to back a bill to legalise assisted suicide. In what was the first Commons vote on assisted death for a decade, MPs voted 330 to 275 in favour of the bill.  The new intake of parliamentarians – those first elected in 2024 or returning after an enforced absence – were nearly twice as likely to back assisted suicide than any other intake. You might think this is just because most of the new MPs sit on Labour’s benches. Well, perhaps. But this was a free vote on an issue of conscience so we wouldn’t necessarily expect

How can you miss over 300,000 migrants? This morning the Office for National Statistics revised up its previous record high net migration figure to 906,000 meaning that since 2021, 307,000 more migrants are in the country than the ONS previously knew about. So, has Britain turned the corner on migration? There has been a 20 per cent fall in net migration in the year to June compared to the 12 months before, according to figures published this morning by the ONS. Some 1.2 million people migrated to the UK compared with 1.3 million the year before. Meanwhile, 479,000 left the UK, up from 414,000 the previous year.  Net migration is

Since Steerpike first reported on the petition for another general election, another two million signatures have been added. (Not that Mr S is taking the credit.) While the petition is most popular in Tory and Reform-held seats – especially in Essex, where almost one in ten of the electorate have signed in some constituencies – MPs in Labour marginals should be taking note too. In Tamworth, Ribble Valley, Sittingbourne and Sheppey, Derbyshire Dales and North West Leicestershire, Labour MPs with majorities of fewer than 1,500 votes have at least 5,500 constituents who have signed the petition. Derbyshire Dales’s new boy John Whitby perhaps has the most to fear as his

The BBC reported that AstraZeneca and Pfizer are credited with together saving more than 12 million lives in the first year of Covid vaccination. To substantiate this claim, the BBC refers to Airfinity, a ‘disease forecasting company’. Models do not fit anywhere in the pathway for establishing effectiveness Airfinity used an Imperial College London study, which calculated that Covid vaccines saved 20 million lives between December 2020 and December 2021. Using a mathematical model, the Imperial team assumed that vaccination conferred protection against Covid infection (mRNA vaccines were estimated to have given 88 per cent protection against infection after the second dose) and the development of severe disease requiring hospital admission. The team also assumed

For more than a decade, viral petitions demanding an immediate election were the preserve of Remainiacs and much of the Twitter left. So with Labour now in government, it is to no surprise then that it is now much of the right which is demanding another vote. A parliamentary petition to ‘call a general election’ has gone viral overnight, thanks to supportive posts by Elon Musk (who else?) among others. Numbers currently stand at more than 650,000 signatories: six times higher than the threshold of 100,000 required for a parliamentary debate. Wonder what the government response will be eh? Such petitions rarely, if ever, succeed in their goal and those

Is ‘workshy Britain’ a mirage caused by dodgy statistics? That is what the left-leaning think tank the Resolution Foundation is claiming in a report published this morning. The Office for National Statistics (ONS), it says, has missed 930,000 people who are actually in work. The missing numbers, it asserts, are enough to raise Britain’s employment rate from 75 percent to 76 percent, with a corresponding fall in the combined total of people classified as unemployed or economically inactive. Until the 1990s, the concept on unemployment in Britain was pretty straightforward: it was the total number of people who were claiming unemployment benefit. Since then, however, the unemployment total has instead

It is a fate which has been creeping up on Britain for years, but that doesn’t make it any the harder to bear when it becomes official. According to the OECD, we now have the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe. At 80.9, the average Brit now keels over more than three years earlier than the average Swiss (84.2), Spaniard (84.0) or Italian (83.8) – which are the top three countries in Europe. We have lower life expectancy than many significantly poorer countries such as Greece and Slovenia. We also live shorter lives than countries where assisted suicide is commonplace, like Belgium and the Netherlands. We also come out pretty

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said Britain ‘would be one of the countries most affected’ by Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs, with growth cut by 0.7 percentage points in year one, 0.5 percentage points in year two, and inflation 3-4 points higher. But research from Oxford Economics today suggests the impact would be ‘limited’, even in the worst-case scenario.  During the election campaign, Trump suggested putting tariffs of 10 or 20 per cent on all imported goods – except those from China and Mexico, which would be stung with 60 or even 100 per cent rates. At the moment, average UK tariffs on goods from the US