Not so different

So, after weeks spent implicitly criticising Boris Johnson’s lockdown easing measures as over hasty, Nicola Sturgeon, in response to sustained criticism from businesses, employers, workers, schools and parents, eventually provides lockdown lifting plans for north of the Border. Bizarrely after her rhetoric around the need for caution, in some cases sooner than England.

We still await news from the SNP administration about revisions to social (pointlessly rebranded here as ‘physical’) distancing, without which shops and the hospitality industry can’t function. Doubtless this will also more or less replicate what Downing Street has decided, though using cosmetically different language and a slightly alternative timeline.

And Ms Sturgeon claims she’s above politics these days.

MARTIN REDFERN Melrose, Roxburghshire

South of the Border, summer is back on as Prime Minister Johnson unlocks the nation, axes the 2m rule – thereby saving the hospitality and tourist trade – and urges the English to “Go and enjoy yourselves.”

North of the Border all is still doom and gloom as the First Minister dithers and equivocates, teasing desperate parents that our schools may open fully and on time but still refusing the necessary

1m rule. The PM wants to see “bustle and activity” return after three months of restrictions that have pushed the economy to the brink; the FM cannot see the problem: she will tax and borrow her way to ‘prosperity’.

Johnson believes the English can be “trusted to use their common sense” while Sturgeon infantilises the Scots, keeping them tethered to 5 miles like naughty children and refusing them summer holidays.

(REV DR) JOHN CAMERON

Howard Place, St Andrews

Rarely do I choke on my porridge in the morning while reading the newspaper, but I came close this morning. The report on FMQ was normal enough, until I came to the part where Scottish Tory leader Jackson Carlaw urged a relaxing of the two-metre distancing edict. The First Minister answered: “If I were to put pressure on an interdependent advisory group... Jackson Carlaw would be the first on his feet to criticise me’’.

That was my choking point. Oh, yes, right, when has this SNP government ever put pressure on experts?

Ms Sturgeon’s neck must have been in need of Brasso. A better question would have been when have they ever not done so?

ALEXANDER MCKAY New Cut Rigg, Edinburgh

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