I HAVE a recurring nightmare where I’m tied to a hospital bed, unable to speak or move, while Jacinda Ardern – a smiley version of Nurse Ratched in the film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – subjects me to a forced medical procedure. For my own good, of course.
I wonder how many New Zealanders are suffering similar nocturnal disturbances? Their Prime Minister, the Queen of Zero Covid, this week locked down the whole country again because of one case, which has now become a “cluster”.
As Ardern, and like-minded politicians in Australia are discovering, Zero Covid is for the birds.
As is the case with flu, SARS-CoV-2 has become endemic. We will never be rid of it and must learn to live with it, just as we have with every other virus that has afflicted humanity since the year dot.
But rather than swallowing her pride, and adopting a more sustainable, realistic approach, Ardern has backed herself even harder against the wall.
Yet again, she has condemned New Zealand to be a prison island shut off from the world. She has left herself without an exit strategy from Zero Covid folly.
READ MORE: Dangers of Covid vaccine over-reach
On announcing her latest over-the-top lockdowns, the New Zealand dollar tumbled to its lowest in three weeks.
Rigidly locked into her futile strategy, Ardern’s attitude appears to be that she must wreck the Kiwi economy, just to be on the safe side.
Meanwhile Nicola Sturgeon, so often cited along with Ardern as living testament to wise feminine leadership in a world of mad male leaders, has dropped her flirtation with the Zero Covid fantasy, despite a never-ending chorus of Cassandra-like wails from the high priests of doom.
Sturgeon’s pursuit of electoral brownie points, by implying that her handling of Covid would put the English response to shame, reached its nadir in her silly Keep Them Out stand-off with Manchester mayor Andy Burnham. Whatever measure you use, Scotland has performed no better than England, arguably worse.
Our national deficit has more than doubled in the last year. Scotland tops the European league for drug and alcohol deaths, a chronic problem made acute by lockdowns and restrictions.
What else do you expect when you intern the population for months at a time, including those who already feel trapped, hopeless, and who live in difficult circumstances?
Who wouldn’t be tempted to reach for a pill or a bottle to escape this dystopia?
Ms Sturgeon may have quietly ditched her policy of virus elimination, but she clings to the powers that the pandemic afforded her.
Her Deputy First Minister, John Swinney, has unveiled a public consultation on removing the March 2022 expiry date for a host of extraordinary emergency powers, including the ability to impose lockdowns, close schools and make people wear face coverings.
They have named it the “Covid Recovery Consultation: public health, services and justice system reforms”.
The “Scottish Government’s totalitarian power grab” would do it more justice.
Over 30 measures are mooted, including paving the way for controversial blended learning in schools, and limiting the number of people at gatherings – in perpetuity.
“The Government considers that building public health resilience in the future requires action to ensure a permanent suite of powers that will allow Scottish ministers to tackle any type of infectious disease or contamination that may pose a significant health threat.”
I’ll paraphrase that: “We enjoyed the power the pandemic gave us and we want to keep it permanently so that we can impose our whims on you, whenever we feel like it.”
Remain silent on this opportunistic power bid and you give your consent to a permanent erosion of civil liberties in Scotland: the right to an education, the right to association and freedom of movement, and more.
We have until the 9th of November to respond, so if you can see where this New Abnormal is heading, please make your views known.
Otherwise, get used to the walls of your life closing in permanently. You will have signed up for politicians telling the people what to do, not the other way round.
For the last 18 months, as schools and businesses closed, as our children’s education and the economy suffered, we have sought comfort in the thought that such measures would eventually be undone.
But having awarded itself temporary powers to micro-manage its citizens lives and suspend hard-fought for civil liberties overnight, the Scottish Government has developed an appetite for more.
When a major suspension of civil rights and personal liberty is at stake, truly democratic politicians should expect to come back to their parliaments at regular intervals to make a case as to why they should be trusted with such sweeping powers.
The fact that the Scottish Government wants to dispense with parliamentary scrutiny should be a red light for every democrat in the country.
I return to Nurse Ratched, who is often held up as the embodiment of sociopathy, a form of antisocial personality disorder.
She is convinced, like certain national leaders, that she is right in all her decisions and sees any questioning of her rules as opposition rather than a reasonable request to reconsider.
With sociopathic indifference, she puts herself in a position where she exercises near-absolute power over her patients' access to medications, privileges, and basic necessities such as food and toiletries.
She capriciously revokes these privileges whenever a patient displeases her. Her patients must do as she says or risk the consequences.
Haven’t we all experienced that power dynamic in the last year and a half?
According to the diagnostic manual on mental illnesses, antisocial personality disorder is defined as a “pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others.
With its misnamed Covid Recovery power grab – a technocratic formula for a shut-down, frightened future – the Scottish Government shows that governments can suffer from this disorder just as surely as individuals.
Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.
Joanna Blythman
Guild of Food Writers Food Writer of the Year 2018
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