You and I we (ain't) gonna live forever

Well, it's not the best kind of Chicken Soup for the Soul to harp on about Scotland languishing in last place among the small developed countries. And I've read a lot of great posts on the subject (see Scots and Independent and Jamie Hepburn, for example) so why am I rehashing the subject?

Well, it was a guy on the news yesterday that crystallised a thought that I believed at first to be overly harsh. But letting the Tory within run free, I thought I'd put into print my thoughts.

The guy on the news was an older gent from Glasgow Shettleston. You could see he was struggling to keep his language clean as he was saying "we just need to get a few of these lazy so-and-so's off their backsides and into work".

I think most people can see from the figures that Scotland's doing pretty good in terms of education and economy aswell as other factors, it's only life expectancy that lets us down. And, to be totally selfish about it, that's all water off a duck's back to me as I don't smoke, drink to excess, do drugs and I eat very healthily.

There's a very clear set of people in Scotland that I think this report is really referring to, many are desperately poor and justifiably in need of help but a large swathe of this group are loud, obnoxious, disrespectful types who have no desire to contribute to the economy and society and are quite happy to leech along as long as they have enough cash to entertain themselves at weekends etc. Scotland is just unlucky enough to have a larger group than other similar sized countries.

So how much hand-wringing and fighting of corners should be done for people who slip down the drug abuse and alcohol addiction path, or those who don't think they have the energy to (as the man says) get up off their bums and go get a job?

The provision of council housing, tax breaks, free rehabilitation, the new deal, knife/gun amnesties, free school uniforms/meals etc are all available to name but a few government assistance programs. All really useful and good policies to have as it is one of the government's roles (in my eyes) to assist those in the greatest need. But when certain people just have no interest in taking a helping hand to get back into society and have no respect for the effort and money that's gone into helping them, you have to wonder if the old Maggie Thatcher approach of letting such people "go to the wall" is really for the best.

I don't want to live in a country with so much poverty and ill health just down the road and I'm happy for now for a significant portion of my taxes to go towards helping people out who are in need, but you've got to ask who the onus is on to turn things around?

If the Scottish dependants aren't careful, the rest of us might just emigrate to Norway.