Letters: The Tories and the SNP should be held equally culpable

It's not as if we were not warned. There were at least four reports, three specifically for the Scottish Government, that told of lack or equipment and processes to handle a pandemic, but it appears that the warnings were ignored, and the necessary preparations were never made. It is also obvious that the UK did not lock down quickly enough, but the first significant outbreak was in Edinburgh and it was covered up by the First Minister. Had it been known to the public, pressure for an earlier lockdown would have been likely. Instead concerts and sporting events were allowed to continue, including the Scotland-France rugby on March 8. The Old Firm game of March 15 was cancelled by the SPFL, not the Scottish Government. BBC Scotland's Disclosure programme calculated that a two-week delay could have cost 2,000 Scottish lives over the following month.

The lack of preparedness and delayed lockdown affected the UK and the devolved administrations in equal measure, resulting in lack of PPE, hospital beds, ventilators and other necessary equipment. The urging of the WHO to “test, test, test” was ignored in Scotland as much as England, and current testing levels are lower in Scotland. Infections are at the same rate in Scotland. The death rate from the virus is the same. Excess deaths are the same. Deaths in care homes are slightly worse if anything. Discharging potentially infected people, and therefore the virus, from hospitals into care homes is the same. There is the same callousness in refusing to move the elderly sick from care homes to hospital. The result in all of the UK has been more infections and extra deaths.

A good comparator of success or failure is New Zealand, with the same population as Scotland but with 22 deaths compared to our 2,400. It is difficult to see how such breath-taking levels of incompetence bolster any case for “independence” except with those obsessed with it in the first place. And if the failure of an “elite” is the cause, as Mr McKenna suggests, then the Tory elite in Westminster and the SNP elite in Holyrood would seem to be more or less equally culpable.

Alex Gallagher, Labour Councillor, North Ayrshire Council, Largs.

READING Kevin McKenna's column on Saturday made me wonder: able writer for your paper that he is, does he ever read your paper?

Your front-page lead story in the very same edition (“Almost 1,000 patients got virus after being admitted to hospital", The Herald, June 6) had already demolished his assertions. Tom Gordon’s compelling exposures showed that the Scottish Government’s suppression of information Scottish people are entitled to know, as well as the damaging untruths we had been fed, are a cause for great concern.

The fact that an incompetent elite in charge of the Covid-19 virus in London is leading to lack of trust, hardly confirms that similar “elites” are not mishandling the crisis elsewhere.

Your revelation that the Scottish Government shared the Iris Report in February 2018 with the UK Government ("Labour: Exercise Iris should have ‘sent alarm bells ringing’ over PPE shortage", The Herald, June 6) showed that both Tory and SNP Governments are jointly culpable of a disastrous lack of preparations for a pandemic that was predictable and predicted. You rightly report the view that “alarm bells were ringing for both the Scottish and UK governments”. Surely objective readers have concluded that both administrations failed catastrophically, resulting in a huge number of lives being lost.

Elsewhere in the same edition the impact on Scottish education was exposed in David Bol’s coruscating article headed “Pupils have been left 'severely traumatised'". Again an indication that Nicola Sturgeon’s handling of these matters is no better than Boris Johnson’s.

Moreover, Saturday’s Herald was not a one-off. Switching scores of frail elderly patients from hospitals into care homes, without their or their families’ agreement, is surely beyond defending far less a case for independence.

The consequences of the Nike Conference in Edinburgh and the cover-up which followed will not go away.

Boris Johnson’s appalling handling of the Dominic Cummings affair remains without justification. But anyone who followed Ms Sturgeon’s attempts, for a whole day, to seek to retain her hapless adviser, until her own career was clearly in jeopardy, will hardly be convinced that the First Minister’s motivation was at all laudable.

Mr McKenna’s repeated description of the many who disagree with separatism as “Unionists” is offensive to those who understand its connotations. The clear majority of Scots – amounting to an almost 11 per cent majority – to reject the “once in a lifetime” choice should not have their views distorted. We choose to love our country, Scotland, and to work with others in the United Kingdom to achieve a better society and continue to hold to account an “elite “whether it exists in Holyrood or Westminster.

Lest I am thought to be over-critical of Kevin McKenna, I welcomed his recollection that a Labour leader, Clement Attlee saved Britain, including Scotland, from the horrors of fascism by rejecting Lord Halifax. I imagine Sir Starmer would agree wholly with that, if not the rest of the article.

Tom Clarke, Coatbridge.

TOM Gordon’s exposé lays bare the damage being done to the relationship between the people of Scotland and those who govern us.

His revelation that almost 1,000 patients have acquired Covid-19 and more than 200 have died after being admitted to hospital for other conditions is deplorable. But the attempt by Jeane Freeman, the Health Secretary, to appear to camouflage this and to speak instead of 125 “incidents” of Covid-19 on other wards is despicable.

AC Grayling has previously written that “in the related arts of politics and government, judicious economies with truth are a stock in trade”, and the learned philosopher may well be right, but only if we let them get away with it.

When dealing with the impact of this pandemic, we need our leaders to tell us in plain language exactly how it is, no matter how bad. If they do not, and others have to speak truth to power, then our government has failed us.

Bob Scott, Drymen.

AN active No campaigner in 2014 I now find myself unable to bear the thought of being subjected to a future of relentless mis-governance by such second-rate politicians as make up the current Westminster Cabinet.

On the other hand, my principal concern about independence has always been the impact of the inevitable financial turmoil on those in poverty and otherwise deprived and powerless after a decade of Conservative austerity. The Yes/SNP/Green coalition has been unwilling to acknowledge, far less address, that issue.

There is one light on the horizon in the person of Sir Keir Starmer (Richard Leonard I have misgivings about), but I fear the devastating consequences for our society of a minimum of over three years of post-hard-Brexit-rule by Dominic Cummings and his mouthpiece, Boris Johnson.

And so I believe that the Government and people of Scotland must find a way of addressing the issue of how we can deal with the consequences of being part of the Dystopian DysUnited Kingdom (DDUK) with its architects’ rejection of the UK values its citizens once believed were at least implied in its unwritten constitution.

I find myself thinking that a resounding vote for an SNP/Green alliance next year with a correspondingly overwhelming rejection of Jackson Carlaw’s Conservatives would be the only way to put the necessary shot over the bows of the DDUK. A risky strategy for a non-nationalist? Probably, but presently I see no alternative when faced with a Government determined to create an “independent England” founded on closer ties with a Trumpian United States.

John Milne, Uddingston.

THE political consequences of Brexit have so far been more rapid and lethal than its economic damage, leaving Britain with a Gilbert-and-Sullivan style leadership of spectacular incompetence during one of the worst public health crises in recent history.

Out of 60,000 excess deaths, 40,000 could have been avoided had we acted like any other European and East Asian nation. On a single day last week, 360 people died from coronavirus in the UK – more than in all 27 EU countries over the same 24 hours.

North and south of the Border, as government failures multiply, the default position is evasion and denial. In the past it didn't really matter who was nominally running the country as we had one of the world’s most effective administrative machine.

Today a weak, politicised civil service outsources to incompetent companies while co-ordinating existing organisations, such as NHS laboratories or local public health departments, is far beyond an organisation which is afraid to speak truth to power.

Rev Dr John Cameron, St Andrews.

AM I the only one noticing the disparities between how the UK Government deals with the EU trade deal talks compared to those with the US?

There seems to be no real will to engage with the EU: accusations of truculence and blocking deals are branded on both sides. Time is running out, yet there seems no political will on the side of the UK to extend the talks despite the Covid19 crisis.

On the other hand, trade talks with the US are going swimmingly: the firm promise of Boris Johnson not to open the UK market to chlorinated chicken has already been broken; hormone-fed beef will no doubt follow. All the rules, regulations and in particular: protections that our membership of the EU brought with it will be broken, one by one. I have no doubt that the opening-up of the NHS will come about as well. Did the UK vote for those sunny uplands? Scotland didn’t.

Trudy Duffy-Wigman, Crook of Devon.

Read more: Letters: Scottish Government must take responsibility for what has gone wrong