The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Virus fight shows difference in Scots vs English cousins
Every now and then we are reminded that Scotland and England are different countries, connected by geography and centuries of history, inhabited by people with a broadly similar language and appearance, but nations in their own right with unique characters and priorities and a tendency to veer off on tangents which the other will never totally understand.
For a while it was the little things – they had their boat race, pints of bitter and World Cup campaigns; we got ginger hair, Hogmanay and the Wimbledon men’s singles winner’s trophy. More recently, the independence referendum and contrasts in the Brexit votes north and south of the border have revealed wider political and societal gulfs. And now here we are again, two nations figuring out how to emerge from the coronavirus lockdown and seemingly coming at it from very different places.
The divide goes right to the top. Nicola Sturgeon’s chief mammy persona – firm, straight-talking, empathetic – has won praise throughout this crisis, her messaging clear and consistent even when the subject matter has been less than palatable. Support for her handling of the outbreak is evidenced in a recent Yougov poll which put her approval rating above 70% among Scots of all political stripes, a rebuke to Boris Johnson’s 40%.
Even allowing for the exhaustions of new fatherhood, a stint in intensive care and the strains of recovering from an infection that has now claimed the lives of more than 33,000 of his fellow Britons, the prime minister’s appearances at Westminster have been more… well, more like the weird posh uncle your mammy rolls her eyes at when he goes off on one of his reveries at the Christmas table.
By the time he delivered Sunday’s haphazard repositioning of the Westminster government’s public health message, it was a relief to realise we only had to keep half an eye on the television. So confusing were the practicalities of the new
“stay alert” slogan that he and his ministers spent much of Monday clarifying the revised rules. Yes you can go back to work, but best not to if you have to take public transport. Yes you can see your elderly parents again – but only outdoors, one at a time and two metres apart. No it’s not safe to have the family around to your home yet, but the nanny or the cleaner? God yes, we’re not savages. Oh and feel free to drive your car anywhere you like, but if you cross over into Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, don’t even think of getting out for an ice cream and a walk around.
Because here, nothing has changed and on this Nicola Sturgeon has been reassuringly unequivocal. To lift the lockdown now risks undoing all the good we have done by putting our lives on hold since the end of March and the message remains the same. Stay home, protect the NHS and save lives.
It would be naive to think this can go on indefinitely. On Wednesday, we learned the UK economy shrunk by 2% in the first quarter of the year, prompting Chancellor Rishi Sunak to warn we are heading for a “significant recession”. Closer to home, laundry firm Fisher’s blamed the coronavirus for the closure of its Perth base with the loss of 80 jobs, and Dundee City Council leader John Alexander, pictured, warned recovery could take five years.
Against this backdrop, some are beginning to test their boundaries. There have been queues around the block at B&Q depots, anglers are calling for the River Tay to be reopened and golfers are itching to get back out
on to the greens, but there has been very little clamour to lift the restrictions among ordinary Scots and while Sturgeon felt it necessary to denounce the “peaceful protests” being planned across the country this weekend by a group with far-right links, it will be a surprise if they assemble enough people to fill a phone box, never mind the parks they’ve targeted on Tayside.
Reporting on the coronavirus response has become a bit of a numbers game and as the zeroes have accumulated into hundreds of deaths, thousands of cases, hundreds of thousands of tests, they’ve lost something of their impact. This week we boiled it down to ones and twos in stories that left much more of a mark.
On Monday we reported on the first Covid-19 survivor in Fife to be released from hospital after being on a ventilator. Brian Herd walked out to the applause of the NHS “superheroes” who had cared for him in the preceding 51 days. On Wednesday, it was the turn of Dundee’s Maureen Deuchars,65, whose six-week battle with coronavirus involved 19 days on a ventilator, and Anne Wicker, 62, and her 84-yearold mother Sheila, reunited after five weeks in which they both fought the virus in hospital.
It’s worth remembering it’s to save lives like theirs that we are still staying home and every one of these personal triumphs should be a source of national pride in the difficult years to come.