NO HUGS, PUBS OR SHOPS

IF politics is the language of priorities, then we know what Nicola Sturgeon’s priorities are now. Scots hoping for good news, for some solid sign we’re heading out of lockdown – and for the last time – were left disappointed by the First Minister’s statement to the Scottish parliament.

Perhaps because we had seen, only a day earlier, Boris Johnson presenting an optimistic path out of lockdown for England, Sturgeon’s audience were hopeful that she too would give us all a much-needed morale boost with promises of better times to come. But she did not.

Instead, all we got was a string of excuses, grievous warnings about the merits of caution and a target of the last week in April – after the clocks go forward at the start of British Summer Time – for the return of shops, bars, restaurants, gyms and hairdressers.

Schools might or might not have returned by then. It all depends.

At that point, Sturgeon hopes that all parts of Scotland in Level 4 – where the toughest restrictions have been imposed – will be able to move down into Level 3.

Which is awfully convenient, because guess what happens just a week later? That’s right – the Holyrood election. Everything, it seems, is tapering towards that first Thursday in May when a new Scottish parliament will be elected.

Until then, the economy will continue to be shut down, schools won’t fully reopen to all pupils and we cannot socialise as normal.

But everything will be just fine and dandy a few days before polling. We might still be unable to go for a pint with more than a couple of friends or head out for a big family meal. But we will be able to head up to the local primary school and vote.

So that’s OK then, what are you complaining about?

It did not escape Sturgeon’s notice that the Prime Minister adopted a far more optimistic tone, in word and action, when he made his own announcement this week, expressing the hope that this year-long nightmare might well end by June 21, raising the hopes of everyone (well, everyone in England) that at least some of this year can be reclaimed in the name of sanity and normality.

In fact, the First Minister couldn’t resist taking a nonetoo-subtle swipe at Johnson yesterday, saying: ‘I want to give as much as possible today, while avoiding giving false assurance or picking arbitrary dates that have no grounding at this stage in any objective assessment.’

Crisis

Sturgeon may well be an able communicator and she may well have had a ‘good’ pandemic politically, but she is terminally incapable of rising above her own party’s standards and behaving like a stateswoman.

Would it have killed her to acknowledge the hard tasks facing all the leaders of our four nations in the face of an unprecedented crisis?

Is it really beyond her to resist the ever-present temptation to have a go at the Prime Minister – and Johnson is her Prime Minister, too – and to focus on the job at hand without drawing unflattering comparisons between her Government and that of Johnson?

Yes, it is. And why not? She has reaped generous amounts of praise by doing exactly that at every opportunity in the past 12 months, so why stop?

She has built her party’s reputation on her own ability to deliver bad news in a stern but reassuring voice.

And there has been no shortage of bad news to deliver.

But I wonder if Scots haven’t had enough of Sturgeon’s ‘We’re doomed’ schtick. The pace of recovery she outlined yesterday seemed to be missing one vital element – the vaccine. The pharmaceutical industry rose to the challenge of developing a number of vaccines in record time, drugs with high levels of efficacy and in quantities that will help to contain, if not erase, Covid-19 in a relatively short space of time.

Remember how relieved and joyous we were at the end of last year when the good news came through from Pfizer and Oxford University?

The light at the end of the tunnel turned out not to be an oncoming train after all.

Thanks to that development, Johnson has felt able to map out a way forward that was earlier than would have been the case if a vaccine had not been developed and if vast quantities of it not been pre-ordered by the Government for distribution across the UK.

But in Scotland, are we expected to believe the vaccine has changed Government plans on lockdown?

If we had never received the vaccine, if it hadn’t existed at all, or if we were still in the EU and therefore had to wait alongside 27 other nations for the bureaucrats of the European Medicines Agency to get their act together, would Sturgeon’s road map out of lockdown look any different to what she announced yesterday?

We have the right to ask what difference the unprecedented vaccination programme has had. We have the right to demand that lockdown will end earlier as a result of the impressive numbers of Scots who have now received at least one dose. But where is the reward for our patience?

In England, even the measurably shorter path out of lockdown set out by Johnson has been criticised by some of his own MPs for not being fast enough. They worry that if lockdown is one single day longer than it has to be then the economy will suffer even greater irreparable damage, more jobs will be lost for ever, children’s educational opportunities will suffer even more and an even longer recession will make it all the harder to raise tax revenue needed to rebuild our country.

Contrast with Scotland, where Nationalist MSPs are sent to Holyrood, not to hold their own administration to account or to question ministers’ decisions, but to vote the right way, to shut up and to do as they’re told by the party whips.

Outrageous

What Scots are asking for isn’t outrageous or even unreasonable. After the worst year in most people’s living memory, they simply want their political leaders to offer them some hope.

They watched the rollout of the vaccine – many of them have received it themselves – they have fretted as their children received below standard online lessons from remote teachers, or they have worried that online lessons haven’t happened at all.

Many of them have either been furloughed from work or let go entirely.

They have behaved responsibly by wearing a mask when they were told, not socialising with friends and family, staying in their homes despite the sheer maddening boredom.

And they expected something in return.

There are times when Sturgeon’s po-faced demeanour is entirely appropriate to the situation; when dark clouds threaten to overwhelm us we don’t need a cheery chappy telling us everything will be fine.

But when there is every reason for optimism, that’s when we do need our leaders to be bold, to lead from the front and to set out, in concrete terms, when things will get better.

Offering us the prospect of being able to vote in May doesn’t really come close to most Scots’ aspirations for this year.