by James Kelly
When I was a student, I read a book about the history of the SNP. After all this time I’m not sure what it was called, or who the author was, but it’s stuck in my mind because it contained the rather jarring observation that the SNP is a “curiously British party” (or words to that effect). I was always uncertain about exactly what that was supposed to mean, but the Scottish Government’s initial response to the coronavirus crisis suddenly left me with a better idea. In a scenario where the British government was pursuing an exceptionalist policy that the rest of the world regarded as not merely wrong but catastrophic, you’d have fully expected a Scottish administration committed to the dissolution of the British state to be eagerly distancing itself from London and embracing the best international science. But instead the opposite happened. The role of Scottish officials, such as the Chief Medical Officer Catherine Calderwood, and the National Clinical Director Jason Leitch, seemed to be as little more than PR stooges for the UK-wide strategy of ‘herd immunity’. Indeed Leitch was arguably even more enthusiastic and less apologetic in his advocacy of herd immunity than the Westminster advisers themselves. It was a very British strategy with added Scottish zeal.
Why put all our eggs in the basket of defeatism when the provisional evidence suggested that containment was working well?