Leaders: Green lights road to survival for Rangers

It appears to offer the best and most immediate prospect of a sustainable future for one of Scotland’s most historic and internationally known football clubs. The agreement between former Sheffield United chief executive Charles Green and the administrators offers a pathway out of a maze where every exit seemed blocked and each new proposal led into yet another tunnel of complexity.

It has three powerful elements. First, it is backed by 20 individuals from the UK, Middle East and Asia, with no one individual holding more than 15 per cent. This should provide the club with a welcome diversity of financial support rather than dependence on the caprice of one individual.

Second, it outlines a creditors voluntary arrangement, with £8.5 million in the pot for creditors.

And third, it is backed by the administrators. They are firm in their belief that Mr Green offers the best of all other options on offer.

Not only for this club but also for Scottish football as a whole, this is to be welcomed. While the agreement will be a disappointment to fans who favoured the Blue Knights consortium led by former director Paul Murray, it contains the key features necessary for this stricken club to move forward, rather than the nuclear option of liquidation and the formation of a new company.

This both avoids the spectre of a Scottish Premier League bereft of a major competitor for the foreseeable future while providing a continuity of sorts for fans concerned at the loss of the club’s history and identity.

However, this is far from being the end of the story. Even assuming the creditors agree to the proposals, the new management will have to move quickly to put the affairs of the club on a sustainable footing. That geographic diversity of ownership offers the prospect of building fan and brand product support worldwide. But a new budget will have to be drawn up and players allowed to go on to the transfer market. It cannot be – and no resolution could ever be – a return to status quo ante, but a fresh start that will enable a proud club to build a new future with a financial discipline long lacking across football club finances as a whole, not just this one institution.

And there will be deeper issues to be addressed. The most immediate of these is the reaction of the Scottish Football Association and the sanctions it will impose upon Rangers by way of future points deduction for having effectively traded so long while insolvent.

Related to this will be the ability of the club to attract and retain quality players to ensure that it retains and builds on fan support to boost gate receipts. And it is in reaching out to a wider universe of support that will be critical, not only for the future of this club but for the health of Scottish football as a whole. Scottish football needs Rangers.

Risk remains for frontline NHS jobs

What, exactly, is “protected” in health spending, and what isn’t? After many assurances that spending on the National Health Service was shielded from government spending cuts have come troubling accounts of patients being moved out of hospital beds and sent home in the early hours. At best, this is an industrial parsimony that cuts across the caring ethos of the NHS. More worryingly, it points to a reality of NHS funds being stretched ever more tightly across wider areas of responsibility.

Such incidents lend credence to the findings of a new report from the Royal College of Nursing that more than 60,000 frontline jobs in the NHS, including those of nurses, are at risk of being axed because of spending cuts. And of this total, almost half, it says, have already gone. The RCN says that despite the Scottish government’s claim to the contrary, community nurses are among those facing cuts, and claims that government plans to move care from acute hospitals to community sites are a “facade”.

Such warnings are of real concern to the public and there would be widespread anger if the government’s austerity programme was taking its toll on frontline nursing staff. That said, continuing improvements in medical treatment should mean patients needing to spend less time in hospital. And the NHS, as the nation’s biggest employer, cannot be absolved from the need for efficiency improvements.

While many will share the concerns of nursing staff, these are tough times right across all services, and every pound spent on healthcare has to work hard to help the NHS meet the ever-rising demands of an ageing population.