The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Governments ‘asleep at the wheel’
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has told a grieving woman who lost her fiancé to coronavirus both the Scottish and UK governments were “asleep at the wheel” at the start of the pandemic.
During a Call Keir online question and answer session with people in Lanarkshire, Connie McCready told him: “We should have closed down earlier.”
Speaking on what would have been her wedding day, Ms McCready told the Labour leader her otherwise healthy 51-year-old fiancé died with Covid-19 in May.
Ms McCready said she felt like people who have lost loved ones have been “pushed aside”.
After expressing his condolences and pledging to try to put Ms McCready in touch with MSPs or MPs, Sir Keir said: “This is the same in Scotland and in England, governments have just been too slow to react – asleep at the wheel, if you like.
“I’ve said this strongly in relation to (Boris) Johnson but I think it’s the same in Scotland as well, they were just too slow to respond.”
He added: “We are about to hit an economic crisis, the likes of which we haven’t seen probably for a generation.”
Asked what he would do to support a recovery if he was prime minister, Sir Keir said he would “fast forward infrastructure projects”, ensure there was not a “cliff-edge” with financial support such as the furlough scheme, particularly for the tourism and hospitality sectors, and protect otherwise viable businesses from going bust as a result of the coronavirus crisis.
“The other thing I would do if I was presenting a Budget in July is to put in place something like a future jobs fund,” he said, citing the last Labour government’s jobs guarantee in 2009 after the banking crash to help unemployed people back to work.
He added: “Unemployment is bad, long unemployment is even worse.”