‘No border’ row is a gift for SNP

WHEN is a border not a border? When a Tory Prime Minister wants to turn a blind eye. Boris Johnson’s remark last week that there “is no border between Scotland and England” was intentionally provocative as well as geographically illiterate. The PM saw what he thought was an opportunity to present Nicola Sturgeon as divisive and narrow-minded by failing to rule out quarantining of English people travelling north.

The Tory leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg, went full Donald Trump and accused her of wanting to “build a wall” – metaphorically at least – between the two nations of the Union. How dare the separatists exploit a pandemic to further their secessionist ambitions.

The SNP were, of course, over the moon at this scion of privilege disparaging Scotland’s nationhood. There is nothing Scottish nationalists like better than English Conservative politicians suggesting that Scotland is really part of England, or speculating about walls. There already is a wall, of course – indeed a couple. Quite a bit of Hadrian’s Wall, one of the greatest feats of Roman engineering, still exists so perhaps a team of Covid conservationists could be enlisted to build it back up again. A lot of construction workers have little to do right now.

But to be serious, throughout this pandemic many naïve souls have been insisting, as the editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, recently put it, that Covid has demonstrated how “irrelevant borders are in the Covid age” and how globalisation has been “vindicated” by the need for international co-operation. We are all one in the good fight.

I have argued that precisely the reverse is true. Borders are back across the planet as nations rediscover the reason for having them in the first place: security. Nation states used to be all about military and geopolitical security; right now it is more of a public health matter. But the root is the same: people look to their own governments to keep them safe.

The countries that have been successful in combating coronavirus – in this first phase at least – have been those like New Zealand and Vietnam with hard lockdowns and quarantines. Indeed, both countries closed their borders immediately cases of Covid-19 appeared. The UK didn’t introduce border controls until the end of May, which was clearly a big mistake as it allowed many people to arrive virtually unchecked from countries like Italy. Some 18 million entered the UK from around the world before lockdown on March 23.

Keeping the disease out is the cornerstone of the “elimination” strategy pursued by those countries and advocated by Nicola Sturgeon’s key scientific adviser, Professor Devi Sridhar of Edinburgh