Donor law delight
KYLE Aitken, 12, spearheaded a campaign led by our sister paper the Evening Times to overhaul organ donation in Scotland after owing his life to a kidney transplant from his mother Caryn.
Reacting to news that Scots will now automatically be enrolled on an organ donation register, Ms Aitken said: “I’m absolutely delighted, thrilled to bits and I’m so glad we could help with the campaign. I’ve kept every article that Kyle was in. It will be nice for him when he’s older.” SCOTLAND may have already entered a recession, the country’s leading economic think-tank has warned ahead of official figures being released.
With growth data due out next week, the Fraser of Allander Institute said it was “in the balance” whether Scotland had suffered a second quarter of shrinking GDP.
The Institute’s commentary for June said the economy remained in a “precarious position”.
It said: “Scotland’s recent economic woes can no longer be explained just by the downturn in the North Sea or indeed by Brexit. Instead, Scotland’s economy seems to be stuck in a cycle of weak growth, declining confidence and poor investment and net export figures.”
Rising inflation and stagnant pay meant the outlook for household finances was “grim” and for many it would feel like a “lost decade” since the Crash. But the Institute added, while most businesses expected growth in the first half of 2017 to be “fragile at best”, it still expected the economy to grow modestly this year.
Institute director Professor Graeme Roy said: “The Scottish economy continues to lag behind the UK as a whole, with the scale of the gap growing rather than narrowing.
“On balance, our forecast is that growth will return in 2017, with tentative signs of a more positive outlook for Scotland’s oil and gas sector and improving order books.”
The Institute’s central forecast was growth of 1.2 per cent in 2017, 1.4 per cent next year and 1.6 per cent in 2019, below the recent trend for Scotland and increasingly behind the UK rate.
Scottish output fell in the last three months of 2016 and if this is repeated in the first three months of 2017 it will constitute a technical recession.
A growing concern is that a two-year slowdown in growth has spread across more of the economy, with activity in manufacturing and construction down and services static. Opposition parties said uncertainty over independence was hurting the economy while the SNP highlighted the warning Brexit could cause “a sharp turn for the worse”.