AN EXODUS FROM THE CAMPUSES
Students quit halls for home despite warnings
STUDENTS have ignored government warnings and fled the lockdown at universities.
Parents were seen at colleges and halls of residences picking up their children and taking them home rather than have them suffer self-isolation.
University officials have warned youngsters, who only arrived earlier this month, they face being thrown off their courses if they repeatedly break lockdown rules.
The surge in Covid cases in universities has led to them being ordered to stay in their flats, not travel home and avoid visiting pubs and restaurants.
As well as penalties for breaching legal guidance, they also face a ‘yellow/red card’ system which could see them expelled.
On Saturday, Glasgow University announced an increase in the support it would offer students in accommodation, including a refund of one month’s rent and a £50 food payment.
But despite the penalties, many chose to leave and the exodus saw students, fearing being in lockdown for months, dodging police and university security guards to be picked up by waiting parents just hours after the First Minister said they should self-isolate in their student flats.
Some of those who stayed have threatened to stage a rent strike.
At Edinburgh University’s Pollock Halls, which houses about 1,900 students, taxis pulled up to collect students throughout Saturday.
Others were picked up by relatives and a steady stream left under their own steam.
Yesterday, angry parents and students at Glasgow University voiced their fury as the confusion and chaos continued.
Some questioned why politicians and universities ‘encouraged’ students to go into halls.
Aeronautical engineering student Jamie Marshall, 18, was selfisolating as two flatmates had tested positive.
His parents, Shona and Fraser, 54, had driven from Dumfries to bring him home-cooked meals and supplies to his halls in Glasgow.
Mrs Marshall said: ‘It definitely shouldn’t have happened, without a doubt, both politicians and the university had a role to play in it.
‘The universities have been struggling financially.
‘It is a worry for the rest of the family as well as the students, all parents are going through the same turmoil.’ Glasgow University student Theo Lockett, 19, originally from York, tested positive for coronavirus on Thursday.
On top of his tuition fees of £9,250 a year he is also paying rent for Murano Street student village in Glasgow at £126.77 a week on top of a non-refundable £600 deposit.
He told the Observer: ‘Physically I feel tired and drained, I’ve got a sore throat and I can’t taste
‘It’s miserable; you can’t meet new people, you can’t go to campus, you can’t go home. It feels like you’ve come all this way to start a new life and you’ve ended up locked in a house. If I hadn’t paid the deposit and things had got to this stage, I wouldn’t be here.’
Current gripes include the fact that residents are unable to individually control the heating in their bedrooms or to open their windows beyond a safety latch.
Twins David and Duncan McConchie, 17, both tested positive for coronavirus after losing their sense of smell, and three flatmates also tested positive. All the students were self-isolating together in the Glasgow halls.
David is studying sport science and physiology, while Duncan is taking biology. Parents Martina, 43, and Duncan, 58, from Tillicoultry, Clackmannanshire, asked why people were ‘encouraged’ to go
‘It shouldn’t have happened’ ‘Worry for family and students’
into halls despite the risks, when they could have studied at home.
David said: ‘It’s been tough, it’s not what we expected from our first few weeks at university.’
His mother said: ‘They could have studied at home, we are paying more than £1,200 in rent which is supposed to be refunded.
‘If there was better testing, like testing on arrival, maybe this could have been prevented. They were encouraged to come. Then there is the threat of being excluded from university if they break the rules.’
THESE are not glad times for individual liberty. Covid-19 has occasioned some of the most sudden and far-reaching extensions of state power seen in peacetime. Government ministers dictate our holiday plans, the number of worshippers who may congregate in church and even who we allow into our homes.
Worst of all, at the very moment liberty is most vulnerable, the business of defending it has been left up to cranks and conspiracy theorists.
Let us dispense, then, with some housekeeping: coronavirus is real; comprehensive measures are required to suppress it; restrictions on basic liberties are not part of a nefarious plot; ministers and scientists have and will get some of this wrong; where they do, it is a function of human fallibility and institutional dysfunction, not cunning conspiracy.
The mainstream has failed to articulate both the need for a robust response to the virus and alertness to the impact of restrictions on fragile freedoms. Yet only by recognising the gravity of the health crisis we face can we begin a serious discussion about what remedies are necessary, which ones work and don’t and the balance between eradicating the virus and upholding rights and liberties.
Nothing dramatises the need for this quite like the sight of university campuses transformed into impromptu detention centres. For young people on the cusp of adulthood, living away from home for the first time, this is not what they envisioned their fresher experience to be. University is constant movement, from lecture hall to library to tutorial room to student union, stopping to take in a protest or two along the way. Confining undergraduates to halls of residence not only restricts their movements, it guts university life of its very spirit.
For parents watching helplessly from home, there is a mounting anger about the double injustice dealt their offspring. The school pupils put through a week of anguish by the exams scandal are now the university students barricaded into cramped accommodation, far from their families, cut off from friends and social events and stuck with distance-learning software that is sleek and shiny but which cannot replicate the interactive learning that university is all about.
Some retort that, while these circumstances are not ideal, earlier generations of 18-year-olds were sent to war or suffered other privations to which a few partyless weeks cannot compare.
In a sense, this is true and a muchneeded reminder that, despite the extreme scenario that grips the globe today, we live in a world of choice and convenience our grandparents could not have dreamed of and their grandparents could not have imagined. But our world is not theirs. It is a society structured around the individual and an architecture of self-government, a rights-based order that maximises autonomy and limits what burdens the state can place upon our freedoms.
Coronavirus has slammed into the foundations of our way of doing things like a wrecking ball from out of the blue.
Two weeks ago, I argued for the Scottish parliament to have a vote on the imposition of fresh restrictions. On Thursday, Central Scotland MSP Graham Simpson made much the same case to Nicola Sturgeon at First Minister’s Questions. She responded with a voice that visited me a few times while writing that column: this is a fast-moving, global pandemic; parliament can’t be convened every time the rules require to be updated for this council area or that.
Emergency
That is a reasonable voice, but so is the one that says: we have no idea how long the current emergency will last. It may be years before this pandemic becomes endemic and ministers cannot believe that retaining emergency powers until then is either politically sustainable or democratically healthy.
Regulations of the kind currently in situ are not inconsistent with democracy but, kept in place for a number of years, they will begin to become inconsistent with the particular genre of democracy that we favour in this country. A parliamentary democracy rooted in individual liberty and which has evolved to encompass defined legal rights requires a political and statutory environment that is both stable and transparent.
What matters is that long-term emergency powers, imposing regulations that change sharply and wholesale, exercised with no parliamentary approval beyond post facto review, makes for an unpredictable and opaque form of government. MPs at Westminster are growing concerned about the operation of these powers in England. Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tories, has tabled an amendment requiring that MPs get a vote on any further lockdown measures. Labour grandee Harriet Harman has emerged as one of the motion’s most prominent backers. This is not about party politics. It is about ensuring restrictions to suppress coronavirus are accountable to Parliament.
Boris Johnson must worry about what Tory backbenchers think because they are not programmed to follow him into whichever division lobby he toddles. While the Commons does not exist to serve the executive, the same is not the case at Holyrood. The automaton blocvoting of SNP backbenchers, hardwired into them by the monopolitics of nationalism, renders Holyrood subservient to the First Minister. Perilously, this muffles the early warning system backbenchers provide to a government becoming too insulated from the country it rules over.
It should not require a parliamentary revolt for the First Minister to reassess the present arrangements. She has nothing to fear from the electoral power of students, a chronically apathetic group who, when they do vote, are typically attracted to the idealistic and impractical. (They’re already on board with independence.) Their parents are a different matter and so, too, are the wider public.
The country is with the Government for now, but the longer these impositions continue, the more aggressively they will wear away at popular consent. Most of us have written off 2020 and made peace with a lost year of our lives, but how many are prepared to take the same view of 2021, 2022 and beyond?
The case for a rethink is ethical, not electoral. The more months that go by with ministers enacting the advice of public health officials into law with scant legislative scrutiny, the further we inch away from parliamentary democracy and the closer to rule by technocrats.
We can already glimpse how discontent might bubble up in reports of students decamping from university halls and the pleas of Deputy First Minister John Swinney to remain there. Vague promises to get them home for Christmas smack of desperation. Ministers know goodwill is what keeps their regulations in force.
Epidemiologists will always err on the side of caution and there will always be something to be cautious about. Where parliament has a say, a workable balance can be struck between public health and the public’s desire for a normal life.
Restoring parliament to its rightful place as maker of laws and scrutiniser of executive power is important, but it is not enough. If Covid-19 is to be with us for years to come, we will need to rethink the use of national curfews and blanket restrictions in favour of more tailored measures. Coronavirus must be eradicated – but our liberties cannot remain in lockdown until it is.