Yes movement should be ready to counter claims of UK strength

We have to have our story ready for the time when campaigning restarts. We need to have the facts and figures ready. How did other small countries react, and how effective was their response? New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Iceland. Countries with real devolved power such as Germany. It’s difficult to find an example of any country that’s done a worse job than the UK without reaching for the spectacular pantomime of Trump’s USA.

The UK has failed to learn from pandemic exercises. Failed to reach out to those who had developed testing protocols, as New Zealand did. Failed to recognise the critical importance of the WHO advice of “test, test, test” gained from painful experience of managing virus outbreaks around the world. Failed to screen incoming passengers.

There’s also been a failure to respond to the EU’s offer of inclusion in their procurement programmes. Failure to learn from the experience of places further up the curve. Failure to understand the complexity of emergency supply chains and their impact on the provision of PPE. Failure to apologise for the aforesaid failures. If Macron and Von der Leyen can apologise, why can’t anybody in the UK when they’ve made as big a hash of the job as anyone?

The list goes on and on. There will be much made of Westminster’s largesse, and how we wouldn’t have been able to afford it on our own, when all they’ve done is give us our share of the pot when they incurred an unimaginably large debt that we’re all going to have to repay. It’s absolutely clear we got nothing we couldn’t have found without help from the UK. How much of that debt is going into plugging the holes in our public services that were created by a UK government unwilling to fund services properly over the previous decades? Please, somebody show me some UK resilience.

Maybe it’s all a cunning Cummings plan to get the effects of the virus and the effects of Brexit so entangled nobody can say for sure what caused what. Today may not be the right time for partisan mud-slinging, but let’s make absolutely sure we get on the front foot with this come next year’s elections.

Cameron Crawford

Rothesay

IN the grown up conversation which Nicola Sturgeon has initiated with the population of Scotland, we must take into account that it is the smaller countries and those which have a meaningful federalism which seem to be coping best with the pandemic thus far.

Singapore, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Greenland, The Faroes, Czech Republic, Finland, New Zealand, along with the individual states of Australia, the individual provinces of Canada and the landers of Germany were in control of their own strategy from an early stage.

We cannot change the past, but must cope with the present and plan for the future. Joanna Cherry’s call for quarantine at the airports and shipping ports must be answered, was it not obvious two months ago? I kept expecting to hear Boris Johnston apply the “fight on the beaches” metaphor to airports. Indeed travellers returning from affected countries were being advised to quarantine at that stage then for some political reason this was abandoned as soon as the first “community transfer” was identified. Sometimes a double U-turn is a necessary manoeuvre to avoid further loss of life even if it means going round in circles.

Catriona Walker

Via email

THE immediate priority must be to limit the deaths caused by coronavirus. This means maintaining policies such as social distancing. That’s why calls from businessmen, Tory backers and Tory MPs to open up the economy must be resisted. We can’t allow their greed for private profit to be placed ahead of public safety. We should be looking at how other countries – many of whom have been far more successful than the UK in tackling the virus– gradually remove their lockdown, to see what lessons we can learn and ensure there are no further spikes in deaths.

As we have seen throughout this outbreak it is key workers in the NHS, local government, care and shops and transport who have been holding society together during this crisis. In any post-pandemic society we need to ensure that those workers are truly valued – by decent wages and conditions at work rather than clapping! We also need to ensure there is decent provision for all by a universal basic income rather than the flawed UK benefits system.

Cllr Kenny MacLaren

Paisley

BEING a natural pessimist insofar as expecting the worst while hoping for the best, I can’t help but think that the way we lived before the pandemic is not going to change after Covid has been defeated.

Pie in the sky, follow the rainbow, clouds with silver linings views that somehow we are all going to be better people is frankly absurd. There are many forces at work that will ensure we return to the status quo as soon as possible. What has happened to the world is just a wake up call that will be ignored once we “get back to normal”.

The new normality is a myth. While the beast of big business needs to be fed, while its ideology of consumerism needs to be rebranded and promoted once again, while millionaire politicians milk the system, there is little chance that the people who died will be a monument to a new society.

That is my expectation. My hope is that somehow, against all odds we will overcome billionaire blight that has ravaged the planet, the redistribution of power and wealth to the masses and a once in a precious lifetime chance to avert the next crisis, global warming.

Mike Herd

Highland