Scottish hearts are getting better. About time.

   

2013 is supposed to be the year of the positive in Scotland, and for all the negativity that saturates coverage of Scottish affairs there is a lot to be positive about. 

One neglected statistic that caught my eye recently was that, in Scotland, deaths from coronary heart disease have fallen by 43% in ten years. The standardised death rate from stroke is also down 42%. Given Scotland's problems of the heart this is a considerable, if largely unacknowledged achievement. Yes, 8,000 Scots still die from heart disease and we still have the worst coronary rate in Europe, but the fact that fewer people are dying from it is surely a cause for mild celebration. Especially in a year in which the dying Scotsman has become a staple joke on programmes like Have I Got News For You.

Outside the parliamentary constituencies in and around Glasgow, Scotland is almost as healthy as England. Heart disease is a very west coast phenomenon. But the good news here is that it is in Glasgow that the biggest falls in mortality have been recorded – a 10% drop in heart deaths in a year. For my money, that's one of the best pieces of news that's come out of the city in the last twenty years.

The improvement is down to a combination of factors: enlightened public policy – the smoking ban in 2005; improvements in medical care – we have some of the best heart surgeons in Europe; a decade of health promotion; and, most importantly, a conscious decision by many Scots to stay alive. All those people out running and cycling. It shows that people really can change, even in Scotland, and in a surprisingly short time. It's not entirely clear why this change of heart has happened, but the existence of the Scottish parliament certainly helped to alter the climate of passivity and neglect that had allowed Scotland's health problems to go unchecked for four decades.

Another factor is the decline in drinking, especially among men. Bet you didn't realise that Scotland is going on the wagon, but according to the 2011 Scottish government health survey,  The number of Scottish adults drinking more than recommended limits has fallen by a quarter in the last ten years, from 28% to 21%.  Mean weekly consumption among men has declined from 20 units to 15.     That's a very real change, but one which has had almost zero publicity. Nor has the fact that Scots, especially women, in upper income groups are nearly twice as likely to be problem drinkers than people in the lower income groups. So much for the popular image, peddled by soap operas like “Shameless”, that the poor spend all their money on drink. 

I'm not making this up. It's all on the web. But I bet if you asked the average man or woman in the street, or the average MP in Westminster, they would tell you that just living in Scotland is seriously bad for your health, that lack of exercise and bad diet are sending us to an early grave, and that young people here are brought up on a combination of Buckfast and skunk weed. In fact young people especially seem to be turning away from alcohol and drugs. The numbers of under fifteen year olds taking drink or drugs once a week has fallen by a third in ten years, and the numbers taking cannabis has halved.

Only thing that really matters in 2013: is eurozone crisis over?

 On the morning of May 7^th 2012, Greek voters woke up to discover that they had effectively voted to leave the EU. A majority of the new  members of parliament were in parties that rejected the crippling terms of the latest EU £110bn bailout package. It looked like the beginning of the end for the 11 year old European single currency. The cracks in the European Union began to look unbridgeable

Bond investors across the world reached for their phones. Many financiers decided that the euro was finished, and they placed their massive bets accordingly. It was reported that Lord Rothshild of the banking dynasty, had personally taken out a £130m“short” position against the battered single currency. Surely, the EU could not recover from this! If Greece fell, then so would Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy which were all in the same deflationary boat – saddled with over-valued currencies, forced to cut spending in a recession, crippled by unsustainable interest rates on their massive debts. A new word was coined to describe the countries on their way out: “Grexit”

Europe's political leaders seemed caught in the headlights; unable to reconcile the need for fiscal discipline with the imperative of restoring economic growth. In Greece, where the economy had shrunk by 20%, violent social unrest had become an almost weekly occurrence as EU-imposed cuts made the recession even deeper. In Spain, unemployment among under 24 year olds rose to over 50%.. And the contagion began to infect the entire eurozone as France lost its triple A credit rating and Germany, the most powerful economy in the EU, plunged toward recession.

In Britain, the political classes awaited the inevitable. Most of the British media had decided long since that the euro was a dead duck and that it was only a matter of time before it collapsed. You cannot have a single currency without a central government and a central treasury, with the power to intervene in national budgets and the power to issue bonds for every member state. Surely, Greece and Spain would see sense and leave the euro, devalue their currencies, default on their debts like Argentina in 2001, and seek to recover on the basis of low wages and cheaper exports. What alternative did they have? Sticking with austerity was leading to economic depression and social unrest.

But somehow, the inevitable didn't happen. The Greek political parties couldn't agree on a government and decided to hold another election on 17^th June. This left the pro-austerity New Democracy, led by conservative Antonis Samaras,  with a reasonably firm mandate to stick with the euro, bailout and all. Greece would not default. Then, Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, announced that he would do “whatever it takes” to stop the single currency collapsing. Many believed this was just another empty promise from a bankrupt eurocrat, but Draghi proved true to his word. In September the ECB committed itself to unlimited purchasing of european government bonds, and the sovereign debt crisis began almost immediately to subside. The rate of interest on Greek, Spanish and Italian debt returned to pre-crisis levels.