ON Thursday the Scottish Parliament voted to further immiserate its populace within a new variant of “social distancing” or social apartheid.

“Covid passport” now joins its stablemates, a legion of Trojan horse phrases, the common currency of the political structure of this Covid theocracy.

In its obscurantist reach for a ground zero in the infection wars, the Scottish Government has corrupted its search for wholesome sanitation to a form of insanity.

This phrase “Covid passport” can now be added to the pernicious lexicon of deviance and dissembling, such as the phrases “social distancing” (divide and rule) and “because of the pandemic” (we are not to blame, we can have no possible agency in this matter, and our hands are clean).

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A passport usually betokens an open door, a conduit to experience, through travel. A “Covid passport” betokens the opposite – it is the slamming shut of a door in the face, the entrenchment of social division.

Like its futile and damaging companion policies of mass internment and mass incarceration, this is just a needless iteration of the same. It will do further damage to social cohesion and resilience: The former passage-of-a-port, now corrupted and rendered anew as a further checkpoint on the road to freedom.

Nothing in the televised parliamentary debate on this issue rendered evidence of a vital need for a further iteration of a policy of social apartheid. The surrender of civil liberties, companion to an inordinate enactment of political power, evidently is its own powerful intoxication.

“What a web we weave...” As ever, Shakespeare was leagues ahead of his time. As our web expands, our net contracts. How did we become entrapped within this net? Will we ever get out?

Keith Steiner
Cornhill, Aberdeenshire

IN Scotland one in every 45 people are suspected of being infected by Delta Covid, the NHS is at the point of being overwhelmed and people are still dying of this virus every day. The Scottish Government is seeking ways to beat this pandemic, like introducing “vaccine record passports” and “booster vaccine jags”, but Douglas Ross wants to know the definition of a night club. How much more trivial can this Tory party get in pursuing their only policy of SNP bad?

Smoking has been outlawed in public places because of the damage it did to the health of non-smokers, so why shouldn’t the possibility of catching the Covid virus be banned for the same reason?

Mike Underwood
Linlithgow

A VACCINE passport as much a push in the direction of getting people vaccinated as it is anything else. A double vaccination does not guarantee you won’t catch Covid, or pass it on, but it reduces the impact – hospitalisation and death.

People will complain the nudge towards getting vaccinated, if you are determined to go clubbing or to the football, is blackmail; infringement of freedom. I say BS. Get real. This is Scotland, not North Korea. You are already free. It’s a jab, or two. That’s it.

READ MORE: Scotland sticking with Covid passport plan as England U-turns

The outrage is driven by faux anger and paranoia on social media. You have the choice still. Manipulating a beatable flow test, or trying to avoid the second jab, is selfish. And potentially lethal to you or another. The whinging from the paranoid and lazy needs ignoring. You don’t have the KGB on your tail. To the nightclub industry and football – do you want a few headaches from checking passports, or no crowds because a lockdown ends up being introduced?

Yep. Thought so.

Toby Hirst
via thenational.scot