Welcome to the Full Scottish from our Cowcaddens Studio in Glasgow.
Full Scottish starts at 12:00 midday on Sunday 19th July 2020
On this week’s Full Scottish, Kenny McBride is joined by Alison Thewliss MP for Glasgow Central and Kirstein Rummery, Professor of Social Policy at Stirling University.
There are some political decisions which have unintended consequences which negatively affect the lives of a group of citizens, and there are other policies where the consequences were predicted and even intended. The two child policy and rape clause is just such a policy. Women’s groups and campaigners like Alison Thewliss, the MP for Glasgow Central, warned that it would lead to an increase in child poverty and force women to disclose that they had been raped in order to receive child tax credit and this week it was reported that over 1 million children had been put into poverty and at least 900 women had been forced to disclose their rape in order to get enough money to feed their children.
The Westminster Government has given us a good display of just how dysfunctional and self-serving it can be this week. To begin with, an opposition day debate sponsored by the SNP calling for an extension to the Brexit transition period was defeated, with the Labour Party abstaining, preferring to sit on the fence than take a stand against the damage that a no-deal Brexit would do. Then the government tried to influence the selection of the Chair of the Security and Intelligence Committee to try and put Chris Grayling in place, but true to form, Failing Grayling failed and Conservative MP, Julian Lewis’ appointment led to him having the Tory party whip withdrawn. It gets worse. At the end of the week, it came out that Boris Johnston planned to reward high profile Brexit supporters by putting them in the unelected House of Lords.
Happy Birthday to Nicola Sturgeon. No doubt she would have preferred to celebrate her 50th birthday in an independent Scotland, but is she now planning for her 51st birthday to be in the middle of the Indyref2 campaign and is the First Minister hoping to celebrate Scottish Independence before she turns 52?
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