The Backlash

The backlash has started. I mean the backlash against the Scottish Government’s handling of Covid-19.

It’s unionist-inspired. How do I know that? Let me give you a few ideas:

Criticism is focused entirely on Nicola Sturgeon. She’s been far too successful in managing the pandemic, driving down the figures for new infections and deaths and she’s been far too good at keeping the Scottish public onside. So it’s time to knock her down. And having spent years telling Nicola Sturgeon to get on with the day job, the unionists didn’t like it when she did.

Mostly the criticism of her is petty, and sometimes incredibly personal: for example, apparently Nicola Sturgeon never talks about ‘we’. She always says ‘I’ in her daily briefings. Have you noticed that? I haven’t and I watch the briefings quite a lot. The suggestion seems to be the pandemic is some kind of ego trip for her.

They’ve also reverted to calling her by the old nicknames: Wee Nic, Wee Jimmy Crankie and on one FB page the Poison Dwarf. They hate her and, in their usual misogynistic way, they even attack her appearance – her hair, for heavenssake. She’s been getting professional help with that, they tell us, while stopping the rest of us going to the hairdresser. See what I mean about petty?

She can’t be faulted for what she’s doing now, so her detractors have to go back to what was happening in the early panic-stricken days of Covid-19.  And they blame Nicola Sturgeon personally for anything and everything, conveniently forgetting Scotland was playing nice in those days, trying to cooperate with the UK government – before they found out the UK government was cutting the devolved governments out of the picture. Things only picked up for Scotland pandemic-wise when the Scottish Government decided to go its own way.

I also know this is unionist-inspired because every FB and newspaper accusation features the same issues:

She set up the Louisa Jordan hospital and it’s never been used. Firstly, that’s not true: it’s been used for weeks now for clinics dealing with cancer referrals and cancer tests, heart and stroke consultations and also seeing anyone whose medical treatment was delayed during the early weeks of the pandemic.

Secondly, opening the Louisa Jordan was part of the UK’s panic reaction: remember the early predictions that half a million people would be in need of hospital treatment? That never happened, but it was a COBRA decision to have field hospitals set up right across the UK, and Scotland cooperated. Does anyone know how well the Nightingale hospitals have been used in other UK nations and what they’re being used for right now?

Then there’s the Nike conference in Edinburgh. If you want the lowdown on the lies that have been dreamed up about that, including the laughable idea that the pandemic started in Edinburgh and spread from there across the UK, I suggest you read back in Prof John Robertson’s ‘Talking Up Scotland’ blog. The Prof has followed the events before, during and after that conference very closely in his usual accurate academic style and concluded the Scottish Government had no case to answer.

The most astonishing accusation is that she has failed with Trace & Track. Can we again look at the bigger picture? Did the Scottish Government get funding from COBRA to set up such a system? Or was there a UK-wide system in place that the Scottish Government could have joined? I think we know the answer to that, since Westminster still doesn’t have a system in place 4 months later, despite spending a huge amount of tax payers’ money trying to set one up.

And finally, there’s the care home ‘scandal’. Nicola Sturgeon is being held personally responsible for thousands of deaths by removing elderly people (who were no longer sick) from hospitals and sending them home or to care homes. Again, at the time this was the approach taken by all of the UK nations at the behest of COBRA. How have the infection and death rates been in the other nations’ care homes?

As for testing elderly people who left hospital then, where private care homes are concerned, it was up to the management to isolate people coming from hospitals. Did they do that? How many private care homes provided extra nursing staff to care for those in isolation or carry out testing or even - now here’s a daring idea - buy in tests which were readily available on the open market? Or do private care homes really just care about cashflow, with no real care involved.

After all this is over – and that may take years and see several mutations of the virus – there will be enquiries into what happened and how the outbreak was handled in every country in the world. Till then, the very least we can do (even if we’re not SNP – and I’m not) is make sure that the First Minister is allowed to do her job. And remember, the biggest enemy of Covid-19 is us, the people who live in Scotland. This isn’t the Nicola Sturgeon show. We’ve done this and we’ll go on doing beating the virus.  

If you want to, you can also try thinking back to the run-up to the 2014 referendum and the tactics the opponents of independence used then. And remind yourself, they will stop at nothing and they will say anything. It’s up to us not to fall for their propaganda.