Kenneth J Murray
I’m a writer, consultant and campaigner with experience of the care system.
I’m a writer, consultant and campaigner with experience of the care system.
I am a freelance journalist with a passion for writing about Care Experienced people, social inequality and poverty. I’ve also written on digital technology and online behaviour.
I most recently wrote a column for Holyrood Magazine, an award winning fortnightly political and current affairs magazine. I have appeared on BBC Breakfast, Scotland Tonight and a number of other broadcast channels.
I've worked with others including Times Radio, Scottish Violence Reduction Unit, STV Online, The Metro and The Spectator.
If you’d like to commission something, get in touch with me via my contact form.
You can read examples of my work below.
Locals resented its presence. As far as they were concerned, the children who called this facility home were young thugs hellbent on intimidating local people. We were criminals who were fire-raising and house-breaking in between committing all manner of sexual offences.
This was the world portrayed to the people of Glasgow by a popular newspaper of the time. It bore no relation to the truth about us or our lives, but the scare stories put people on edge. I would walk around my community under a battery of suspicious eyes.
At the same time as we’re accepting inevitable delays and being encouraged to adopt a ‘blitz spirit’, social media is awash with so called lifestyle gurus, an entirely unlicensed profession, giving out tips on wellbeing whilst our statutory services are failing to meet targets all around us.
These ‘gurus’ and influencers need no qualifications, aren’t registered and aren’t held to any standards. Meanwhile, these people profit from a desperate population by selling candles, diaries and soaps under the banner of wellbeing, earning commission or royalties.
When we live in a world where 65 per cent of Boris Johnson’s cabinet was privately educated and MSPs are five times more likely to be privately educated than the average Scot, I find it hard to fathom that ‘lived experience’ is truly the power we’re told it is.
It’s clear to me that, until people with so-called lived experience are able to cross the divide from the subject of policy discussion to the architects of it, we’re destined to lack the real power to remove the barriers and systems which have left us out to dry.
Estate agents and solicitors across the country have been speaking to the media in recent days about the boost in property prices and the number of enquiries about each property they have been marketing. With the growth of home working, a recent report by the BBC highlighted a growing interest in Scottish properties from around the world.
All this while there’s a shortage of homes. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, in its state of the nation report, has called for the Scottish Government to build 53,000 new homes by 2026 of which 70 per cent should be for social rent.
The government needs to take action now to ensure that those who were and are their children are provided with a solution to their poor dental health. The longer that this policy takes to enact and adapt, more Care Experienced people will miss out. All the while, those who can afford to will skip the queue.
Children in care today deserve to have smiles, not a rotting and painful reminder of how nobody cared enough to make sure their dental needs were taken care of. After all, isn’t the ambition for Scotland to be the best place in the world to grow up?
Cycling as a lifestyle choice does not have the infrastructure to make it a working-class pursuit. Yet, those using bikes are safer from the virus than those using public transport. They will experience health benefits and they can feel good about their contribution to cleaning up the environment.
For some reason, these cycle schemes have chosen to omit the areas which would benefit most from access to affordable cycle hire. I don’t know why but if the nation is to get on their bike, I’d ask the leaders in each city one thing; how?
How would you feel if the people your children were sent to live with, if you could no longer look after them, had one eye on your child’s happiness and the other eye on the clock? That they were a shift, a job in which they count down the days until a holiday?
I think this poses a very real question to the people of Scotland. What kind of person would look after your children if you were no longer able to? Appealing to people’s finances doesn’t work. If it did, there wouldn’t be a shortage.
A global community of people raised in care took to the streets of Scotland last week, on the 26th of October in a historic rally for “the right to be loved”. Hundreds of people with experience of the Scottish care system organised the gathering, the first celebration of its kind in the world.
I was among them, and I could not have been prouder.
An interview with Scotland Tonight on the impact of debt, poverty and doorstep lending for people struggling to stay afloat. One of a series of interviews where I discussed the difficulty in keeping your head above water during periods of debt and lack of choice.
I decided to look at non-English languages used online in Scotland. The breakdown shows that in the last 12 months there has been an addition of over 30,000 Polish speakers to Scotland, with Spanish and Chinese speakers making up the next top two. There has also been an additional 800 Arabic speakers.
What this data shows is that not only is Scotland a melting pot but that Scotland is welcoming on a yearly basis a culturally diverse group of people. And not only from Europe, farther afield too.
Respected and rigorous institution popular with Scots and those from the farthest-flung reaches of the globe too. Their graduates tend to follow clear career paths.
Many seem to make a dash for the NHS, not surprising given Glasgow's renowned school of medicine. Others head into finance or government but there are a lot of future engineers to be found there too.
Social media lends itself to quick bursts of activity across a short time frame, meaning that news tends to go very big for a short period before disappearing, rarely to be mentioned again.
In short, it does the job of making you feel better. You feel like you've supported a worthy cause and then you can forget all about it when it's no longer popular. I like to call this phenomenon populist empathy.
While it is not necessarily a criminal offence to photograph a completed ballot paper either at home or within a polling place, it is strongly discouraged as it could violate the secrecy of the ballot, which is fundamental to the integrity of the process.”
So, is it illegal or is it not?