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In your briefing today:

• A damning report from the Scottish Human Rights Commission will say many Scots are being denied basic rights around housing, healthcare and food

• Scotland’s health secretary has urged people to get a flu jab, if they can

• A highly-emotional Lando Norris celebrated his first Formula 1 championship

• But Wilfried Nancy, Celtic’s new boss, had a difficult first day.

📣 Basic human rights are being denied in Scotland, a damning report from the Scottish Human Rights Commission (SHRC) will tell the Scottish Government today.

The commission’s State of the Nation report says people are not having their rights to adequate housing, healthcare, social security, education, food and fair work met.

The report will make a series of demands, including putting human rights “at the heart of public decisions”.

“There are very significant human rights denials in people’s everyday lives,” Professor Angela O’Hagan tells Neil Mackay.

“A series of public policy and public spending decisions have resulted in an erosion of people’s economic status and wellbeing, and introduced a daily precarity for people - a fragility and vulnerability about being able to feed and heat their families.” (Herald) (Interview with Prof O’Hagan)

• The Scottish Human Rights Commission

📣 The Scottish Health Secretary, Neil Gray, has urged “anyone able to” to buy access to the flu vaccine as an outbreak continues to spread across the country, in what has been an early start to the flu season.

The Early Line’s research suggests finding an appointment for a jab before Christmas may be hard work, however. (Scotsman)

• Flu cases expected to “spike” in the weeks ahead (BBC)

📣 Big booze news: pubs in Scotland could be allowed to open super-late to accommodate members of the Tartan army who want to see their nation’s 2am kick-off games in next summer’s World Cup. (Daily Record)

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AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 A young Rangers fan was injured by a flare on Saturday night as supporters staged a pyrotechnic display before their side’s game against Kilmarnock. The injury could trigger a suspended sanction from the SFA after previous problems. (The Herald has the exclusive)

📣 Broadcaster Nicky Campbell has accused a teacher facing extradition back to Scotland of abusing at least 1,000 victims at Fettes College and Edinburgh Academy in the 1960s and 1970s. (Times £)

📣 Geologists have extracted 5,000 feet of rock from Scotland’s Great Glen Fault, which they say could answer “fundamental questions about the history of the earth”. (Mail)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 A three-year-old girl was among 21 people treated for injuries after men allegedly used pepper spray during a suitcase robbery at Heathrow Airport. (Mail)

📣 Keir Starmer says the “hugely talented” Angela Rayner - rumoured to be thinking about challenging the Prime Minister for his job - will make a return to the cabinet. (Observer)

📣 Horrific reports are emerging from Mali as a new Russian military unit, the Africa Corps, employs grim tactics as it works with the country’s military to hunt down extremists. (AP)

📣 The Louvre’s year goes from bad to worse: a water leak has damaged several hundred works in the museum’s Egyptian department, only weeks after a jewel heist raised concerns about its security. (Guardian)

📣 Angry Ginge wasn’t so much angry as tearful last night, as he was crowned King of the Jungle on I’m a Celebrity. (Mirror)

SPORT

⚽️ There was much to take from Hearts’ 2-1 win over Celtic in Glasgow, but two big points: first, what a welcome to Scottish football for Wilfried Nancy, the new Celtic manager who endured his first game in charge. Second, we have a genuine title battle on our hands: Hearts looked the real deal.

• Talking points: Nancy made big calls. They didn’t pay off (Daily Record)

• Derek MacInnes gave Nancy a harsh lesson (The Sun)

• As first days at the office go, this was a shocker (Daily Mail)

⚽️ Edinburgh managed an impressive bonus point-earning 33-20 win over Toulon at Hive Stadium, in their opening match of the Investec Champions Cup. (Scotsman)

📣 British driver Lando Norris was crowned Formula 1 Champion in a climax to the Formula 1 season that was just as thrilling as fans could have hoped. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the call between a sobbing Lando Norris and his team as he came home third, securing enough points to win the crown.

• See highlights and reporting from Abu Dhabi (Sky Sports)

• “In tears and almost rendered speechless by the sheer weight of emotion, what winning his debut Formula One world championship meant to Lando Norris was writ large across every inch of his face.” (Guardian)

• The rise of Lando Norris (BBC)

⚽️ Liverpool legend Mo Salah gave an incendiary interview after being left on the bench again on Saturday: he overplayed his hand, says Andy Hunter. (Guardian)

IDEAS
Three things we learned at the weekend: Who is Lord Offord - and what does his defection mean? | Maybe the NHS is beyond repair | Tech bros have utopian dreams

🗣️ Another Tory - (Lord) Malcolm Offord - defected to Reform - in an undoubted blow to the Conservatives on both sides of the border. It’s not just his money - he was a big donor - but the fact that he served under three consecutive Tory PMs as a minister gives him greater weight than some of the others who’ve joined Farage’s band.

His parting words towards Russell Findlay’s Scottish Conservatives were particularly pointed, especially as he was Treasurer until his departure. “Offord,” notes The Spectator’s James Heale, “cited his Unionism as the main motive for his defection.

“His criticisms of his former party were strikingly pointed, accusing the Conservatives of ‘giving up’ on Scotland. He called the Tories ‘parochial, not political’ and described them as a ‘party without a vision.’ A subsequent Reform UK press release quoted Offord as saying that ‘Scotland is crying out for a centre-right narrative.’”

That line makes clear Reform’s immediate goal in Scotland: replace the Tories on the right. You might argue they stand a decent chance, given how toxic the Conservative brand remains here.

“With Farage’s party now polling at 20 per cent in Scotland, the Conservatives risk losing their status in May as the primary vehicle for centre-right Unionism north of the border,” writes Heale. That prospect may make it an uncomfortable New Year for Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay.

• From the archives of Holyrood magazine: Lord Offord profile (2022)

🗣️Is Sunday Times columnist Alex Massie saying something no politician can when he asks if the NHS’s problems might “be intrinsic to the health service’s structure and design”?

He thinks so. “If there’s one thing John Swinney and Anas Sarwar agree on it is that voters’ views of the NHS will play a disproportionate part in influencing the result of next May’s Holyrood election,” he writes.

“This is because voters dearly love the NHS they imagine should exist while despairing, increasingly, of the one they actually have.

“But they are deluding themselves if they think the election’s result will have any great effect on the health service. Much of the political sparring over the NHS is really a fake kind of fight.”

Massie doesn’t offer a solution. But he invites us to imagine that, no matter who is in charge, things might not get better without a fundamental rethink of our expectations of the service, and what it tries to do. And that, we all know, remains a political third rail no politician is going to want to tread. (Sunday Times £)

🗣️Tech elites are starting their own for-profit cities, reports the Financial Times in a fascinating - and free - long read.

“What was a fringe concept a matter of years ago is now attracting more interest as scrappy start-up chief executives and aggrieved billionaires contemplate the allure of tech-friendly havens unbound by legacy rules and regulation,” writes Hannah Murphy.

“While some are aspirational, reliant on their founders securing hard-to-come-by special economic zone status, there are now about 120 ‘start-up societies’ in the works, according to an open-source database shared by [Balaji] Srinivasan [former chief technology officer of Coinbase].”

The most evolved, reports Murphy, is “Próspera, a gated private community on a Honduran island run by a Delaware-based company.” It denies it’s any kind of separate nation state, saying it’s run under Honduran law.

“Critics argue that the special economic zones legislation that allowed for Próspera to be established was championed by a corrupt former government whose leader, Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado, has just been released from prison where he was serving a sentence for narco-trafficking and weapons crimes, following a pardon from Trump.” (Financial Times - free to read)

👍 That’s your Early Line for the day

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