Kirsty Strickland: Should Margaret Ferrier be sent to jail for breaching Covid rules?

The prosecutor told the court that Ferrier’s conduct amounted to a “reckless disregard of public safety”.

Given everything that has since emerged about the events of those few days – including the fact that Ferrier failed to inform Test and Protect that she attended parliament – there is no denying that her behaviour was reckless and selfish.

READ MORE: Margaret Ferrier pleads guilty to breaking Covid lockdown rules

After booking a Covid test, during which she stated she had symptoms of the virus, Ferrier was told to self-isolate. Instead, she visited a variety of locations in and around her Rutherglen and Hamilton West constituency and made journeys to and from London by train.

Her political career is now over. When Ferrier had the SNP whip withdrawn, Nicola Sturgeon said her actions were “dangerous and completely indefensible”.

Despite this, Ferrier resisted calls to resign her seat and now sits as an independent MP. In the days following her guilty plea, those calls for her resignation have become even louder and angrier.

If she doesn’t decide to resign of her own accord, there are other ways she may lose her seat.

Sentencing has been deferred until next month to allow time for background reports to be gathered. Were she to be jailed for a period of 12 months or more, she would automatically be barred from being an MP. If a shorter prison sentence was imposed, she could be the subject of a recall petition and her constituents would be able to trigger a by-election if more than 10% of them signed it. If she avoids jail time but the standards watchdog decided to suspend her from Parliament for 10 days or more, then a recall petition is still on the table.

Of course, Ferrier wasn’t the only public figure to disregard the Covid rules that were put in place to protect others, but hers was one of the most flagrant individual breaches in terms of the potential impact it could have had.

READ MORE: Boris Johnson 'checked out' on holiday as Downing Street insiders tell of 'zombie government'

Yet many who deplore her conduct must still feel uneasy about prospect of her facing time behind bars for her actions.

At the time, Covid legislation worked as both incentive and deterrent. Rules were applied with a broad brush as the only way they could be both workable and fair.

The idea was that if we all followed the rules, we would minimise our collective risk.

If we didn’t follow the rules, there would be consequences.

While the vast majority of people stuck to the rules at the time – often at great personal cost – we know some did not.

In the interpretation of those rules, we’ve seen some unjust sanctions placed on ordinary people at an impossibly difficult time.

Some police forces across the UK used compassion and common sense when deciding whether to issue fines, others stuck to the letter of the law – regardless of the personal circumstances of the individuals involved.

Ferrier took a great gamble with the health of others when she ignored the instruction to self-isolate. There’s no excuse for that and in terms of mitigation, it’s hard to see what extenuating circumstances would make her behaviour any less selfish that it appears.

The consequences for Covid breaches has been a hot topic. Not least because we’ve learned that Boris Johnson, the man in charge of setting the rules, in England at least, oversaw and participated in a culture of rampant breaches of them in Downing Street.

He witnessed the law being broken multiple times, failed to intervene, and then lied about it afterwards. Yet the sanction he faced doesn’t even constitute a slap on the wrist. One measly £50 fine for the man who did more than anybody else to undermine his own public health message.

If it wasn’t for the intervention of his advisers, he would have surely broken self-isolation rules, too. One former adviser said she had to work as a “nanny” for Boris Johnson on one of the occasions when he was in isolation, and officials had to erect a “puppy gate” to stop him wandering out of his office and mixing with other people.

I mention that not to excuse what Ferrier did, but to illustrate how the decision to fine or prosecute Covid breaches is an inexact science.

When dealing with an invisible, airborne virus, it is impossible to evaluate the harm caused by one individual.

Ferrier should stand down as an MP. It is the right thing to do.

But do we really want to see a woman with no prior convictions, who is accused of a non-violent offence, sentenced to time in prison?

While it would no doubt delight some sections of Twitter to see the former SNP MP locked up, it’s hard to see what tangible benefit it would bring to wider society.