I WAS evidently mistaken to think that Johnson’s urging of the public to go forth to the parks and spread Covid-19 was his last throw of the dice to generate “herd immunity” for the UK.
We now have his proposal to gather together some 250,000 untested and unprotected individuals and place them in proximity with a similar number of untested and unprotected individuals, once they have travelled to their required destination, with still more untested unprotected individuals.
Thank goodness Scotland’s Government does not consider itself too poor to seek additional expert opinion, does not consider itself too small to encourage the best experts to assist, and does not consider itself sufficiently stupid to follow the Donkey-in-Chief in his herd immunity fad.
READ MORE: Coronavirus: Nicola Sturgeon confirms more deaths in Scotland
Upping the stupidity stakes is the general call for further untested and unprotected individuals to swarm, travel, and pick fruit and veg from the agricultural fields across of the Kingdom of Britain. Where these swarms of seasonal unprotected and untested workers alight upon areas of ripe produce, they will go forth seeking food from the local shops etc, before leaving nothing behind except picked produce and infection.
Johnson’s wasted months of inaction, added to the previous decade of austerity, and running down costly resilience across all public services, has therefore condemned a significant part of this year’s home harvest to waste, even though we already need to import around 50% of our food from the EU.
Scotland might seek an alternate way to harvest as much as possible, but it will probably be down to using relatively local labour, the provision of testing, the provision of protective clothing, and 24-hour lit working, and crucially it will all need to be properly paid for.
The resultant full cost will have to be directly borne by the customer unless the picking, health and safety costs are supplemented by the Scottish Government providing some form of tailored UBI resilience payment to the producers (pickers and farmers).
The availability of all-seasonal fresh food produce that Scotland has become used to having, whether local, the rUK, the EU or South America, after Covid-19, is therefore no longer certain. What is absolutely certain is that the governance of such food chain, is best not left to donkeys.
Stephen Tingle
Greater Glasgow
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