If we must do the lockdown hokey cokey, it can’t be on Sturgeon’s whim
SCOTS, or at least those I encounter at a two-metre distance, are growing scunnered with lockdown. The endless changes to increasingly unintelligible rules. The glum dawning that it’s going to be like this until a vaccine is manufactured.
We are fortunate, of course, those of us who haven’t been struck down by this contagion. Many have lost their lives, friends and loved ones. The restrictions are there to stop more people succumbing to Covid-19. Pandemics must be controlled before they can be eradicated.
even so, lockdown is not an ideal solution, bringing with it deadly tolls on physical and mental health. For some of us, breaking point seems perilously near. No less important is the health of our liberties, which are placed in a coma and revived again as public health authorities deem appropriate.
Indoor and outdoor gatherings have been cut to six, while the rules are even more draconian on the 1.7million people living in Glasgow, North Lanarkshire, South Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, east Renfrewshire, east Dunbartonshire and West Dunbartonshire.
Monarchical
It is imperative that we contain coronavirus, but it is imperative too that our containment strategy works — not only against the virus but in its impact on wider matters. That the easing of contact rules has had to be reversed for the whole nation and one-third of Scots placed under more stringent lockdown suggests the systems in place failed. We need to understand why, and how to avoid another failure when the regulations are loosened a second time.
Given these faults, the knock-on effects on health, the damage visited upon the economy and personal freedoms, it is no longer tenable to keep doing things the way we have been.
The health Protection (Coronavirus) Regulations lack the necessary checks and balances on the First Minister, who has been vested with extraordinary, almost monarchical, powers. (The Regulations don’t grant this authority solely to the First Minister but under the reign of Nicola Sturgeon, the phrase ‘the Scottish Ministers’ is decidedly singular.)
If we are to keep up this hokey cokey lockdown in which we are in, out and our lives shaken all about, then it can’t be on the whim of a solitary politician.
The regulations should be amended to require that the Scottish parliament votes on each new schedule of restrictions (or lifting of restrictions). Practically, the outcome will be the same because, instead of a properly functioning legislature, Scotland has holyrood.
SNP backbenchers will fulfil their constitutional role as the nodding Churchill dog that yelps ‘Oh, yes!’ to instructions from the executive, and if it’s lapdogs you’re after, Patrick harvie, a one-man argument against proportional representation, will dutifully fetch the necessary votes from the Green benches.
The conclusion may be foregone but at least there would be a debate. The First Minister could be interrogated on the rationale for the latest restrictions and advisers called before the Covid-19 committee to lay out the evidence. The case for presenting the evidence in public has been made by the First Minister and her government and their opaque, if not downright cynical, use of statistics.
Nicola Sturgeon’s claims that the prevalence of Covid-19 was ‘five times lower’ in Scotland than in england brought a blunt rebuke from the Office for Statistics Regulation.
Director general ed humpherson wrote to Sturgeon’s chief statistician, reproaching the Scottish Government for making public claims using unverifiable sources, commenting: ‘When unpublished figures are quoted in the public domain, we expect that this information is shared with the media and the public in a way that promotes transparency and clarity.’
he went further, concluding that the five-times-lower assertion was not backed up by the data sets cited. ‘We do not think that the sources above allow for a quantified and uncaveated comparison of the kind that was made,’ he stated. This came after humpherson rapped Scottish Government spin doctors for making a claim about the number of antibody tests carried out. ‘This figure cannot be verified,’ he wrote. ‘This is unacceptable for a figure of such importance used in a government news release.’
Soapbox
The First Minister’s faux-folksy ‘I don’t want to make this about politics, but…’ shtick belies the partisan mode in which she has conducted herself, not least during her daily briefings, which are so important for public health that the BBC must carry them live but not so important that she will forgo turning them into a political soapbox at every opportunity.
No leader so ferociously partisan, no single leader, should hold the fate of 5.5million in their hands, especially not one who surrounds herself with solicitous courtiers and commands a deference from backbench MSPs at odds with good parliamentary government.
Decisions about who we can have in our homes must no longer be made by the house of Sturgeon-Murrell alone. Regular debate in the Scottish parliament is essential to test the First Minister’s claims, decide whether her proposed actions are proportionate and rein in her tendency towards overreach, as we saw early on with her aborted attempt to suspend the right to trial by jury.
For now, the public is behind the First Minister’s approach but their consent should not be taken for granted. We don’t know how much longer the Chancellor will be able to maintain his job retention scheme. We don’t know what winter will bring, but it could involve a fresh spike, a ban on funeral ceremonies and even the effective cancelling of Christmas.
If coronavirus is with us for years rather than months, our endurance will be tested. Giving MSPs a vote on lockdown measures would be one way of heading off public discontent. Instead of just restrictions, the country would be given reasons. Ineffective policies could be remedied faster and those that might provoke a backlash taken off the table.
If the Scottish parliament cannot exert itself over something as pivotal as this, what exactly is the point of it?