Latest news with #MSPs
Times
a day ago
- Politics
- Times
Ban on buying sex will have ‘limited impact' against exploitation
Banning the purchase of sex would have limited impact on stopping trafficking and sexual exploitation, claims Scottish government research as MSPs prepare to scrutinise Ash Regan's prostitution bill. The Alba Party MSP's proposed law sets out to criminalise those buying sex while decriminalising those selling it, known as the Nordic model. Under the proposals, those convicted of buying sex could be fined up to £10,000 if the case is prosecuted in the sheriff courts, which could also impose jail sentences of up to six months. The legislation also proposes quashing convictions for those involved in prostitution. However, a research paper published by the Scottish government, to inform its trafficking and exploitation strategy, has found the measures set out in Regan's bill would have a limited effect on stopping the activity. The paper acknowledges that there are 'notable evidence gaps' behind claims by supporters of the bill that prosecuting buyers of sex would reduce exploitation in Scotland, in particular in relation to prevention. The research comes after independent reviews carried out for the Irish and Northern Irish governments, which have both criminalised the purchase of sex, reported that the Nordic model had not reduced the demand for sexual services. The Scottish government report authors wrote: 'Much of the literature reviewed focuses on criminal justice interventions. This tends to focus on the effectiveness of preventative measures which aim to reduce demand for prostitution (eg via deterrence). The evidence reviewed suggests that such measures may have limited impact on preventing trafficking and sexual exploitation.' • 'We were like pieces of meat': ex-sex worker backs prostitution law Sex worker groups, led by National Ugly Mugs, the UK's national sex worker safety charity, have warned that criminalising those who purchase sex has no effect on stopping exploitation. They believe the law would simply make life more difficult and dangerous for sex workers, by pushing the industry underground. Lynsey Walton, chief executive of National Ugly Mugs, said: 'Sex worker groups, alongside leading NGOs like Amnesty and the World Health Organisation, have long warned that criminalising the purchase of sex only serves to make life more difficult and dangerous for sex workers, while having no impact on trafficking and exploitation. 'We are pleased that the Scottish government has now accepted that the international evidence backs this up. MSPs now need to pull the plug on Ms Regan's misguided and dangerous legislation, and focus on supporting sex workers' rights to work safely and free from stigma.' • 'I regret approving saunas when I knew they were brothels' Siobhian Brown, the community safety minister, has highlighted 'significant and deep concerns' about the bill. She insisted that quashing convictions — as proposed for those involved in prostitution — was an 'exceptional' measure and 'not a step that can be taken lightly'. While Brown acknowledged Holyrood had passed legislation to quash convictions of those caught up in the Post Office Horizon scandal, she said the cost of this was 'estimated to be £804,000 based on 200 people'. She noted that documents submitted as part of Regan's Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Bill suggested that 10,459 women had been convicted of soliciting since 1982. With these documents also indicating that Police Scotland 'currently holds 2,773 case records involving 791 individuals', Brown said this 'raises some concerns about the accuracy of the associated costs — around £250,000 — detailed in the bill's financial memorandum'. Her comments came in a letter to Holyrood's criminal justice committee, which is due to scrutinise the legislation proposed by the Alba MSP. Brown said there was 'insufficient detail' on how proposals to provide support to those involved in prostitution to help them change their lifestyle would work in practice, including how long such measures would be available and what the costs would be. She stressed that while the Scottish government backed the 'underlying intent of the bill to challenge men's demand and to tackle commercial sexual exploitation', she added there were still 'significant questions and concerns regarding the measures within the bill and how they would work in practice, the extent to which they would deliver on the policy intent, and the associated financial implications'.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
The ugly buildings we secretly love
When news came last week that Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King – colloquially known as 'Paddy's Wigwam' – had been granted Grade I-listed status, it marked a long-awaited vindication for a building that has weathered its fair share of criticism. The design by Sir Frederick Gibberd, selected from 300 entries worldwide, took shape over five years (1962–67) and sits atop Mount Pleasant, overlooking the city with views stretching to the Mersey estuary beyond. Built quickly and cheaply – as many post-war buildings were – it has been described as 'a gargantuan concrete aberration from the Apollo space programme'. Even as recently as 2013, CNN named it one of the world's ugliest buildings. Inside, of course, the story is very different. Bathed in coloured light from the kaleidoscopic stained glass, the cathedral is an extraordinary space – one that has come to be cherished by Liverpudlians, Catholic or not. It is the latest in a long line of buildings that, though they didn't receive universal acclaim at first, have endured nonetheless. Scottish Parliament Building, Edinburgh The 1997 vote for Scottish Devolution meant a new parliament was needed, but its birth was, to put it mildly, a car crash. Ten times over budget and years behind schedule, Holyrood's construction became a dream story for the press but a nightmare for MSPs and civil servants, whose mistakes were broadcast daily. The image of the dour, thrifty Scot clashed with the flamboyance of the building's cost and design, hardly endearing it to the public when it opened in 2004. Questions were also raised about the practicality of the joint design by RMJM – one of the world's largest architecture and design firms – and Barcelona-based architect Enric Miralles, who avoided much of the controversy by passing away midway through the project in 2000. Yet opinions shifted after it won the 2005 Stirling Prize, the highest honour in British architecture. Scots, embracing a new era free from Westminster's control, came to see the building as a symbol of a renaissance north of the border. Today, visitors flock to marvel at its outré design. Hillingdon Civic Offices, Uxbridge Hillingdon Council's Ford Granada-driving apparatchiks wanted a new HQ, and what they got ended up defining over a decade of suburban style in Britain. If the Hillingdon Civic Centre reminds you of a supermarket, you wouldn't be far off – this became the signature look of Tescos and Safeways across the south. The bulky Civic Centre was designed by Andrew Derbyshire of RMJM and opened in 1979. 'Like any suburban orgy, it was more comical than sexy,' said the architecture journalist Jonathan Meades. 'It was the architectural equivalent of Benny Hill or Sid James: coarse, matey, blokeish, undemanding, unthreatening, accessible.' This building felt like the starting point of a backlash against the progressive and exciting modernism that had flourished during Britain's ' Les Trente Glorieuses'. Over the following 30 years, there was little but disdain for modernist achievements and a widespread retreat from ambition, with brick vernacular becoming especially fashionable in this new, cautious era. Nowadays, modernism and postmodernism have found a warmer welcome. While Hillingdon Civic Centre might not immediately evoke the wild, pastel-coloured tropical postmodernism of John Outram and others, it's certainly an uncle to those buildings. Now listed, it enjoys a bit more affection from the people of Uxbridge. University of East Anglia, Norwich The serpentine teaching block, dubbed the Lasdun Wall, snakes along a ridge where University of East Anglia (UEA) students study, while the eye-popping ziggurats tumbling down towards the River Yare are where they sleep. Space-age chic seems entirely at odds with sleepy Norfolk; architectural historian Elain Harwood called it 'the boldest architecture of any new university', and it became the backdrop to Malcolm Bradbury's novel The History Man. It's heartening that, despite the UEA's stark 1960s campus, it has gained more fans as it has reached middle age. It's not without problems – issues with the fireproof reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC), widely used as a cheap material especially in roofs, have led to the closure of the ziggurats during remediation work. Meanwhile, new extensions to the university have sparked thorough debate. Architecture fans visiting can also explore the Sainsbury Centre next door. Designed by Lord Foster, it opened in 1978 and was hailed as revolutionary for its lightweight, high-tech design, influencing many airports and office buildings throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Southbank Centre, London London's Southbank Centre has long been at the heart of various culture wars. When Churchill's Tories won the autumn 1951 snap election, they sought to dismantle the remains of the Festival of Britain, viewing it as a thoroughly socialist project by Labour's Herbert Morrison – which, of course, it was. The futuristic Skylon was removed, but the Royal Festival Hall survived. The Southbank Centre was expanded in a brutalist style during the 1960s. Its maze of passageways and high walkways confused visitors, while its gruff exteriors offended many sensibilities. In 1988, the then Prince Charles famously likened Denys Lasdun's National Theatre (NT) to a nuclear power station. Today, attitudes have shifted. We now recognise the stark beauty in its complexity and surreal sculptural forms, and the restrained harmony of the theatre complex in particular. John Grindrod wrote in his 2013 book Concretopia that 'Lasdun's interiors have a rather cosy aesthetic,' echoing theatre critic Michael Billington's 1976 view that the NT is 'a superb piece of sculpture.' The entire Southbank complex was designed the way it was because planners insisted on roads and car parks, and even proposed building a heliport next door – hence the Queen Elizabeth Hall's thick, austere walls. Today, the terraces are bustling with diners, while the undercrofts have become a beloved haunt for skateboarders. Moseley Road Baths, Birmingham The residents of Balsall Heath in south Birmingham were certainly grateful when the baths on Moseley Road opened in 1907. Back in 1890, Birmingham was hailed as the 'best-governed city in the world' by Harper's Magazine – a claim that might raise a wry smile from today's locals still waiting for their bins to be collected. Its trams, housing, utilities and public baths were all part of a civic effort to lift the city from industrial slum to modern metropolis. But the baths were not universally loved, and have only narrowly escaped demolition, more due to luck than design. As the 20th century wore on and more homes welcomed bathrooms and washing machines, fewer people needed the bathhouse. And Birmingham (city motto: 'Forward'), spent much of the 1960s demolishing its Victorian and Edwardian architecture, including the grand Central Library and the original New Street Station, as tastes turned against the ornate. In recent years, however, a dedicated campaign has saved the arts-and-crafts building. Now Grade II-listed and undergoing careful restoration, the Moseley Road Baths are protected at last. Scarborough Grand Hotel, North Yorkshire Scarborough's grande dame was originally conceived as the Cliff Hotel, built at a time when the town was establishing itself as a premier seaside resort following the arrival of the railway on the Yorkshire coast. Visitors came to take the waters, and a grand hotel was needed to accommodate them. But throughout its life, the building has been a victim of its own scale – beset by fires, outbreaks of illness, and now, by its current management. Run as a tired, cut-price hotel, it was dubbed 'the shame of Scarborough' by Tory mayoral candidate Keane Duncan last year. When it opened in the 1860s, it was one of the largest hotels ever built – so large, in fact, that some wondered whether it was all a bit much for the once-sleepy fishing town. The Grand's story is closely tied to that of its architect, the exquisitely named Cuthbert Brodrick. A Hull native, Brodrick also designed Leeds' monumental Town Hall and Corn Exchange – buildings with a distinctive size and swagger that often clashed with the era's more restrained architectural tastes. Brodrick's overblown Oriental Turkish Baths on Cookridge Street in Leeds were unceremoniously demolished in the 1960s – by then, he had well and truly fallen from favour. That changed in 2007, when Jonathan Meades made a film about him for BBC Two, sparking a reappraisal of his work. Today, the Grand is a much-loved landmark on the Yorkshire coast. Blackpool Tower, Blackpool The Eiffel Tower is perhaps the most famous example of a building once heavily derided that has only grown in popularity with age. Blackpool's imitation, by contrast, was long dismissed as a poor copy aimed at entertaining the lower classes. Like Brighton's more recent i360 seafront tower, it was seen by some as overly tall and something of a white elephant. Today, it's a listed building, and its kitsch swagger has come to define the Blackpool seafront. We'd never dream of demolishing it now – nor its ballroom, the spiritual home of ballroom dancing. Yet in the 1920s, there was serious talk of tearing it all down. It may seem far-fetched, but that's exactly what happened to the similar-looking New Brighton Tower on the Wirral. Despite being even taller than Blackpool's, it had few defenders when it was demolished in 1919 after just 20 years. Its ballroom – where the Beatles played no fewer than 27 concerts – met the same fate in 1969, following a major fire. Strawberry Hill House, London A gothic wedding cake by the Thames, Strawberry Hill House is a singular and delightfully eccentric creation – perfectly in keeping with its owner, Horace Walpole. An unmarried enigma and gothic novelist who puzzled polite society, Walpole built his fantastical home in Twickenham as a whimsical homage to medieval cathedrals and castles. It was a world away from the architectural fashions of the mid-1700s and, at first, had few admirers. Slowly but surely, people began to visit, drawn in by the fairytale interiors and jaunty gardens, and Strawberry Hill House grew into an attraction. A century later, gothic revival (an architectural style) had become a full-blown Victorian obsession – just look at the Houses of Parliament – so Walpole's creation no longer seemed quite so outlandish. Architecture critic Ian Nairn once remarked that 'Walpole's stucco fancy' was 'prettier and less finicking than you'd expect'. A high-profile restoration in the 2000s, featured on TV, brought a new wave of admirers. Today, the house welcomes around 25,000 visitors a year. Buckingham Palace, London Like the face of an ageing celebrity, Buckingham Palace has had more alterations over the years than you can shake a Botox syringe at. Throughout its life, it has endured feelings ranging from antipathy to outright hostility from its residents. The original house, built in 1703 by William Winde, was – using the polite parlance of stately home design – 'improved' countless times. It was so often disliked that entire sections were torn down and rebuilt. John Nash's lavish 1820s redesign nearly bankrupted the Royal household, and he was promptly sacked. When Queen Victoria made it her primary residence in 1837, the palace still failed to charm – particularly Prince Albert. Albert tried to modernise it with plumbing, lighting and even toilets for servants. But, like many of his descendants, he preferred to be elsewhere. His own pet project, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, was met with a lukewarm response thanks to its oddly Italianate style. The late Queen favoured Windsor and Balmoral; the current King prefers Highgrove and Clarence House. Yet today, tourists flock to the Palace's current form, fronted by Aston Webb's century-old Portland stone façade. More state venue than family home, it may have finally found its purpose.
Techday NZ
3 days ago
- Business
- Techday NZ
A managed protection service suite empowers MSPs to scale their businesses effectively
In the world of continually expanding cyber threats, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are increasingly a target. Many SMBs depend on managed service providers (MSPs) not just for their security needs, but for all their IT needs across their business. As a result, MSPs are crucial. The catch? Most MSPs are small businesses themselves. As an MSP, it's always important to balance scaling your business with providing the customer service that defines your reputation and keeps your customers loyal to you. But how do you do that in an economical way? A Managed Protection Service Suite, or MPSS, can help you scale your business and provide better security, all while keeping you free to focus on building relationships with your customers. MPSS is a security service that provides for firewall monitoring, management and reporting, performed by a dedicated team. These team send notifications when a firewall in your environment is changed locally or goes offline, and then handle firmware upgrades and patches along with other configuration changes. Furthermore, the team will always notify when updates need to be applied and will apply the updates at a time that's convenient. MPSS also provides for enhanced reporting and analytics as well as monthly health checks. Helping MSPs scale smarter and serve stronger Here are just a few ways MPSS empowers MSPs to drive customer value and grow their businesses, MPSS: Backstops your existing operations If you're actively deploying firewalls for your customers, you may already have staff members who monitor and manage them. But it can be challenging for your team to stay on top of all the alerts and updates from the many firewalls across your customer base. MPSS gives you peace of mind that licensing, offline and update alerts are never missed, and that your customers always have the best firewall configuration with the latest firmware available. Allows your team to focus on customer service The vast majority of MSPs do so much more than security. They deploy new laptops, help issue software licenses, provide troubleshooting and more. Your team has enough to do without analyzing firewall reports and other administrative tasks. MPSS can help you free your team to focus on delivering the personal, dedicated service your customers expect, increasing your customer loyalty. Every proactive touch a customer receives from an MSP helps build the relationship and demonstrates value. As an MSP, you don't want to wait for problems to crop up before talking to your customers. With MPSS, monthly firewall health checks are provided, allowing you to stay a step ahead of potential issues. Even better, you can drive business value for your customers with the productivity reports in MPSS. These reports show the top apps and websites being used across a customer's network, allowing you to flag sites that may be harming network speeds or overall productivity. By blocking these sites at the network level, you can help your customers optimize their productivity. Scale your business more effectively Growing your business means adding more customers and thus more endpoints and firewalls, and that means you need more staff to support them in the normal course. But MPSS lets you take advantage of the MPSS deployed team for the monitoring and management of your firewalls, allowing you to take on more clients and firewalls with fewer in-house engineers. Provides your customers with a warranty Firewalls with MPSS have an embedded $200,000 cyber warranty, backed by Cysurance. In the event of a qualifying cyber incident, this warranty can help your customers cover their cyber insurance deductibles and other necessary business expenses.
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
STEPHEN DAISLEY: As MSPs head for the beaches, a question... Would we REALLY be any worse off if they just didn't come back?
Imagine it is May 2021, a few weeks on from the Scottish parliament election, the sixth such poll held since devolution began. Only this time it's different. This time, Holyrood doesn't reconvene. No presiding officer is elected, no oaths taken, no committee conveners appointed. The parliament lies empty. It goes on like this for weeks, then months, until it becomes apparent that MSPs will never show up. The reason for their absence is unimportant. Maybe they've secured more gainful employment as a travelling circus, a major career change insofar as it would involve travelling. In every other way, however, there is continuity. Schools stay open, the NHS groans on, police still investigate your tweets, and councils empty your 15 wheelie bins sporadically while charging rates that would force the Emir of Qatar into a payment plan. All remains as before, budgets are allocated to services, but the 2021-26 parliament never sits and never passes legislation. Question: can you think of a single way in which you would have been worse off under this scenario? I ask because MSPs have just packed up their offices for summer recess, the last before the forthcoming Scottish parliament election, which must be held by the first week of May 2026. But as the politicians root around for their buckets and spades, I've been digging through the record of this parliamentary year and indeed the entire session, which is what prompted my little thought experiment. Because this parliament is surely the most insubstantial and inconsequential since the dawn of devolution. A do-nothing assembly that, on the occasions when it rouses itself to action, confirms the wisdom of its original instinct. It is this parliament which brought forward the final draft of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, rammed through Holyrood in a marathon run of late-night sittings shortly before Christmas 2022. Women's rights campaigners and legal scholars cautioned that its plans for self-identified gender changes would fall foul of Britain-wide equalities legislation, not least when it came to single-sex spaces. Parliament would not listen and then received the ultimate slap-down when Scottish Secretary Alister Jack made history and became the first holder of his office to block a Holyrood bill. The Scottish parliament fumed but the Court of Session sided with Mr Jack. MSPs had no cause for pique. Most showed themselves to be singularly incurious when it came to gender legislation, satisfied to regurgitate the dubious talking points of taxpayer-funded lobby groups rather than doing their jobs as legislators. Pursuing self-ID was a Nicola Sturgeon pet project, but it was also necessitated by her reckless decision to bring the Greens into government, handing ministerial power to an anti-capitalist doomsday cult that hitches its yurt to every policy fad on the go. This included the deposit return scheme, a thoroughly reasonable notion in theory, until Lorna Slater got her hands on it and drove it into the ground, alienating small businesses along the way. And in return for the votes of these ego-warriors, sensible, long-standing Scottish Government positions had to be jettisoned. An undertaking to fully dual the A96, a notorious accident blackspot, was diluted down to the weakest water. Despite the inclusion of an environmentalist party in Scotland's government, St Andrew's House missed target after target in its loudly proclaimed quest to cut emissions. Eventually, Holyrood scrapped annual and interim targets altogether. Failure has been a hallmark of this parliament. Take the PISA report confirming that performance in maths, science and reading continues to slump and Scottish schoolchildren lag behind their English counterparts in all three. Take the attainment gap, the closure of which Sturgeon asked to be judged on. It has widened, but that cannot be pinned on the former First Minister alone. It was the duty of parliament to hold her to account, but this parliament could not rise to its obligations. In this session, Holyrood has seen three First Ministers (so far) and neither Sturgeon, nor Humza Yousaf, nor John Swinney could be said to have feared parliament very often. All three warrant a share of the blame for the post-Covid NHS recovery that never materialised. For the habitually missed emergency care and cancer treatment waiting times. For the shame of elderly people forced to part with their life savings to pay for hip and cataract operations. Holyrood, the guardian of the people's interests, has attached no meaningful political price to this dire record. The same can be said of the Ferguson Marine fiasco, a slow-motion catastrophe that a more diligent and effective parliament could have stopped in its tracks. Yet as with so many of the topics at issue, MSPs, and we're talking specifically about Nationalist MSPs, chose to put party before country and keep their mouths shut. They saw their remit as that of parliamentary clapometers, there to make noise but not trouble. Taxpayers, especially those who rely on islands transport, bore the brunt of their cowardly partisanship. That word right there – 'partisan' – might just be a one-word summation of Holyrood's problem. Too many of its members regard themselves as components of a political bloc instead of elected representatives tasked with challenging, scrutinising and checking executive power. Recall how Nationalist MSPs rallied round Michael Matheson after he tried to bill the taxpayer for his holiday iPad use. A more basic test of fidelity, whether it is owed to parliament or exclusively to party, there could not be. And dozens of MSPs failed it. Holyrood is a parliament in which parliamentarians are in the minority. There is very little reason to expect things will improve in the eight months that remain when MSPs return from summer recess. This session will end with as much distinction as it has conducted itself thus far, and of what comes next we can only guess. Donald Dewar promised so much of Holyrood but even if he had been more circumspect, what we've got could only be a source of acrid disappointment. Who can say if things would be better had devolution never happened, but it's hard to imagine they could be any worse. This column began with a thought experiment, and it ends with another. Imagine you were given the opportunity to return to September 11, 1997, the day of the Scottish parliament referendum, retaining full knowledge of what has happened in the quarter century since Scots voted for legislative devolution. You head to your polling station, go into the booth, and poise your pencil over the paper. This time around, you know what's coming. The paucity of ambition, the dearth of delivery, the inevitability of failure. Much will not get better, some things will get worse, and the poor and vulnerable will pay the price. There will be mediocrity, ineptitude and cliquishness. The thinly veiled resentment towards its own people of a provincial elite that yearns only for the approval of international elites. A culture of secrecy, an aversion to scrutiny, and a closed-ranks hostility to anyone who speaks out of turn. This will be a parliament in which truth and conscience are in constant submission to party and power. The ballot before you asks you to choose between two options: 'I agree that there should be a Scottish parliament' or 'I do not agree that there should be a Scottish parliament'.
STV News
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- STV News
Lorraine Kelly 'shocked' by 'disgraceful' scandal at Dundee University
TV presenter Lorraine Kelly has said she's 'absolutely shocked' by the 'disgraceful' financial scandal at Dundee University. Speaking to STV News on Friday, the 65-year-old Glasgow-born TV star said she's 'heartbroken' and 'really angry' about it as well. 'It's shameful what's happened and what's been allowed to happen,' Kelly said. 'I have been absolutely shocked by the incompetence.' Kelly served as the rector of the University of Dundee about 20 years ago, from 2004 to 2007. It's a role she said she remains very proud of. She added: 'Where was the accountability? It's an absolute disgrace, it really is. And there are a lot of questions still to be asked.' Kelly celebrated her 40th year in television in 2024. She is the host of an STV daytime talk show, Lorraine, which she has presented since 2010. She said issues in Dundee are close to her heart. Kelly said: 'I feel very invested in what's going on, and I'm actually really angry about it as well. Hopefully it's going to get sorted and it won't happen again.' In December, the university announced that hundreds of jobs could be lost due to a £35m blackhole. An investigation published last week found serious concerns over governance and transparency at the highest levels. Led by Professor Pamela Gillies, the review found that the ex-principal and other senior leaders at Dundee University breached ethics rules, ignored financial red flags, and operated in 'isolation of facts'. 'I'm actually really heartbroken about what's happening at Dundee University, especially as it's graduation right now and there are all these bright, hopeful, young people who are going to do wonderful things in the world,' Kelly said. 'To think that might not happen in the future is devastating. 'We have to do everything we can to save the university, to make sure it keeps going, to make sure jobs are retained, and that people can still have the university in the city because the two are so linked.' On Thursday, the university's former principal Professor Iain Gillespie told MSPs he would consider returning a £150,000 payment he received when he stepped down after admitting he had been 'incompetent'. Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
