Students need more than mere sympathy
THE shambolic student lockdown is an appalling indictment of political incompetence.
Now leading lawyers are lining up to declare the quarantine rules are unlawful on human rights grounds.
When some of the country’s top legal minds issue such grave warnings, ministers can’t bury their heads in the sand.
Yet for now it seems they’re prepared to do exactly that, doubling down on their absurd diktat for students not to go back to their family homes.
While exceptions are outlined, they are limited, and Aberdeen University is even threatening to impose fines of up to £250 for those who flout the rules.
A legal battle is brewing, and doubtless there will be growing calls for principals to refund students’ rent – a move that has already sensibly been introduced at Glasgow University. But how have we arrived at such a sorry position, when these problems were entirely foreseeable?
This is a government that had failed to plan adequately, if at all, for the possibility of a pandemic. So it’s no great surprise that preparation for the return of students varied between half-baked to non-existent.
Mass testing should have been in place prior to students moving in to halls of residence and flats.
Instead, shamefully, it was an afterthought, and now a mental health crisis is taking hold among undergraduates.
Draconian crackdowns which are the product of botched policy-making will not be taken seriously, because these curbs on our lives demand a high degree of compliance.
Locked down in her student flat, prohibited from going to pubs, restaurants or parties, and receiving all her tuition online, one Glasgow University student – Lucy Owens – posed some plaintive and highly pertinent questions about her plight.
In a BBC television interview she asked: ‘What are we paying for? I could do everything I’m doing from my house. So why have they sent us here?’
Yet Miss Owens and thousands of students like her are paying through the nose for a university experience they are simply not receiving. Instead of taking their first steps into independent adult living, they find themselves more constricted than ever, living under virtual house arrest.
They are even being told they may not be allowed home to their families at Christmas: it’s positively Kafka-esque.
It may not have been deliberate, but these young people have been sold a false prospectus. Their generation (and future generations) will already be saddled with a vast bill for this pandemic, servicing our towering Covid debt for years to come and probably finding good jobs harder to come by as recession bites.
So far, Nicola Sturgeon has offered only sympathy and support to those students languishing in locked-down accommodation. But it will take more than words of solidarity to fix the mess.
The First Minister should admit her government got it badly wrong – and make sure highly-paid principals compensate the thousands caught up in this fiasco.