Coronavirus: Nicola Sturgeon 'right to go her own way'

Alex Brummer was worried about the “calamitous” impact of pandemic restrictions on the economy after figures were published showing just 4,321 new cars left Britain’s showrooms in April – 156,743 fewer than the same period last year.

“The scale of the damage being done to the nation’s economic fabric ... is out of all proportion to anything we have seen before as the Government seeks to combat Covid-19 and protect lives,” he wrote.

“As a financial writer, I have reported on Britain’s humiliating search for a bail-out from the International Monetary Fund in 1976, on the stock market crash of 1987, the UK’s ejection from the European Monetary System (precursor of the euro) in 1992 and the financial crisis of 2008-09.

“I can honestly say we’ve never had it so bad.”

Arguing that “every possible solution” must be examined to breathe life into the economy, he said one possibility would be to get those facing less risk from Covid-19 – the young, for example – back to work.

“There is no escaping the fact that the vast majority of citizens who have perished from this wretched plague are the over-70s and people with underlying health problems,” he wrote.

“As a reasonably fit 70-year old I am not happy about being incarcerated in lockdown, but I am at least gratified that the Government wants me to continue to be shielded from the disease in my own home.

“What I don’t understand, though, is why we can’t spring, say, the under-45s from such repressive measures and send them into the workplace to ‘fire up’ the UK’s engines, in Boris Johnson’s words.”

While acknowledging that “brilliant and devoted” young people had lost their lives to the coronavirus, Brummer said the economy would have to be revived, “and fast”, to generate much-needed resources for the NHS, social care and schools.

“There could be no better vanguard to bring us back from the economic precipice than a workforce of the under-45s,” he added.

Daily Record

The gap between policy decisions in Edinburgh and London was highlighted by Annie Brown, who also took aim at Scottish Secretary Alister Jack for his demand that Nicola Sturgeon stay in “lockstep” with the rest of Britain as Covid-19 restrictions are eased.

“Bear in mind that marching to the Tory Government’s tune has made the UK’s coronavirus death toll the world’s second-highest and top in the grim league table of Europe,” she wrote.

“While the death toll was rising in Europe, BoJo was still defiantly shaking hands and planning a feasibility study about a bridge or a tunnel between Portpatrick and Larne.

“No wonder we don’t have confidence in Jack and BoJo to show us the light at the end of the tunnel we are in.”

Scotland’s First Minister, she indicated, should follow to her own path.

“Sturgeon is right to suggest now is not the time for partisan politics and she will navigate the safest path for Scotland, approved by Westminster or not,” Brown wrote, adding: “Jacob Rees-Mogg concurred with his old chum Jack, which only emphasises the need for these Tory buffoons to be sent on a bridge to nowhere, asap.”

The Scotsman

Martyn McLaughlin, meanwhile, turned his attention to suggestions that Scotland’s islands could be places where contact-tracing pilots might be trialled, with lockdown measures relaxed “at a progressively greater rate”.

That approach, he warned, would not be without risk. “One in four people (25 per cent) living in the NHS Western Isles area is aged 65 or over, with Orkney close behind on 24 per cent,” he wrote.

“By contrast, the figures for Lothian and the Greater Glasgow and Clyde region stand at just 16 per cent.”

He added: “If lockdown measures are to be eased in communities with the highest proportion of those most at risk of Covid-19, it is fundamental that any trials are conducted with drastically scaled up medical provision.”