GUY STENHOUSE

Large organisations tend to move slowly and are better dealing with problems they identified yesterday rather than the ones which lie ahead. Governments are no exception to this rule – which is a pity because we desperately need the Scottish Government to act swiftly to deal with the disaster staring us all in the face.

The focus of the Scottish Government - and others around the world - over the last few months has been dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. The good news is that they have broadly succeeded. We focus on the lives which have been lost but many more have been saved. The NHS has not been overwhelmed and we have mostly behaved sensibly. Yes, other countries seem to have done better for reasons which are not yet fully clear and yes of course mistakes have been made. The fashion is to rage against our leaders but apart from Dominic Cummings and a few others they have actually done a decent job. In fact they have done such a decent job that they have won the battle – but don’t seem to realise it. It is not yet time to start hugging each other but we need to reprioritise quickly.

In Scotland, figures released on Friday showed there were fewer than 20 people in intensive care with Covid-19. On some days we thankfully report no deaths from the disease at all. We now know that for younger people it is not a significant problem and for children it is almost always irrelevant.

What is not irrelevant is the damage being done to the economy by our continued over-emphasis on protecting everyone from Covid-19. We don’t yet feel the full effect of this because of the anaesthetic of furlough schemes, grants, soft loans and other assistance funded by borrowing on a huge scale – debt is being increased far more quickly than in any war we have fought and this cannot continue.

If we don’t quickly reverse the damage to the economy the result will be misery and harm on a scale which dwarfs the benefit of wrestling Covid-19 down to zero. Right now the impacts on people who need a cancer referral but don’t get one, the child from a difficult home falling further behind because they are not at school, the school leaver who can’t get a job, are clear. What is coming down the track is much worse, an enormous rise in unemployment with all the social and health problems that causes, the ruin of many businesses and the loss of productive capacity which we need to pay for our hospitals, schools and other public services. These are the real enemies - right now – it is the imperative of the economy which the Scottish Government needs to prioritise.

What we don’t need is whining about Westminster being difficult – Westminster has been extraordinarily generous. What we need to do is get back to work and pronto if we want to have a half decent future.

The Scottish Government and its advisers seem determined to stop us doing that. When Scotland’s chief medical officer says to a Scottish parliamentary committee there is incontrovertible evidence the risk of getting the virus is greater the closer you get to someone - somebody on the committee should point out that this is a vacuous statement of the obvious on the basis of which a 4m distancing rule would be even better . The real question is what damage is the 2m rule causing and is that damage worth it (spoiler alert – the answer is "no") ?

When CalMac says it can only take less than 20% of its usual passenger numbers on a ferry and won’t contemplate letting people stay in their cars or making extra allowance for those who can stand outside , somebody should kick their backside and tell them not to be so daft.

If the World Health Organisation says one-metre distancing is enough why is the UK one of the very few countries insisting on two metres? Planes, trains, buses, workplaces, classrooms just cannot work with two-metre distancing but they can with one metre. We need to stop gold-plating – we need to get on with real life right now or there will be needless long-term suffering.

Guy Stenhouse is a Scottish financial sector veteran who wrote formerly as Pinstripe.