The task of leadership is not to get people to do
things they want to do, but rather to get them to do things they don’t want to
do.
It was remarkably easy to get the vast majority of the
British people into lockdown. We were scared and we hardly needed to be told at
all. With very few exceptions nearly everyone has obeyed the rules even when we
thought they were excessive. There has been minimal grumbling, hardly anyone
has been arrested and few fines have been paid. The police may have annoyed
some of us, but they have enforced the rules and regulations with minimal force
and for the most part with consent. A quiet word has usually been enough. This has
been a good effort by everyone. It was far better than form filling authoritarianism
seen in some European countries.
There are a few lockdown sceptics who will need no encouragement
to leave their homes, but I think most of us were quite content to stay at home
so long as we could either work there or
got paid 80% of our wages for not working, but this cannot go on much longer.
Staying like this isn’t going to work economically. It
isn’t going to work mentally, and it isn’t going to work socially. People are
going to have to be able to make new friends, go on dates and get married. Young
children will not develop linguistically or learn to behave with others if they
are stuck at home.
But how do you get a reluctant population to begin
making the steps to normality that are necessary. Boris Johnson and his
Government has tried to get Britain back to work, but his leadership in encouraging
people to do something they don’t want to do has been hampered by the lack of
leadership shown by the devolved administrations with their message to stay at home.
There isn’t going to a completely safe moment when we
try to get back to normal. We might wait a year and still there would be a chance
that people would catch Covid on their way to work or even in a school. But by
then there wouldn’t be any wages and there might not be any food either.
Nicola Sturgeon
may have increased her popularity in Scotland. There is a rally round the flag
effect in any crisis. Whether this continues afterwards is another matter. Her argument
for Scottish independence is worse now that Britain has demonstrated the solidarity
that goes with being a single nation state versus the lack of solidarity that
is so evident in the European Union. She also isn’t doing quite as well as some
Scottish nationalists think.
Scotland has a number of advantages with regard to
Covid. We are sparsely populated compared to most of Europe. We don’t have an
international airport hub and we don’t get that many tourists in the Winter and
Spring because of our weather. Yet in terms of Covid cases per 100,000 people Scotland
is doing rather worse than England. This may be pure chance. One infected
person who happened to fly back to Dundee rather than Derby might have made an
enormous difference to the statistics
It’s worrying that the SNP have not been entirely
transparent about Covid cases such as at the Nike conference in Edinburgh in February.
Can we trust them to tell the truth about what has gone on in Scottish care homes?
Can we indeed trust their figures at all if for instance they were inconvenient
for Sturgeon’s argument for Scottish wondrousness and independence?
While Boris Johnson’s Government faces hostile questioning
from most journalists and relentless negativity from the BBC, Sturgeon reacts
with fury at a reporter suggesting she might be enjoying the crisis. The reporter
repents repeatedly and offers to wear sack cloth and ashes if only Sturgeon
will call off the swarm of gnats buzzing relentlessly like the Scottish form of
water torture.
If Boris Johnson reacted in such a way to a reporter
in London he would be ridiculed and anyway it wouldn’t do any good. Reporters
in London are not scared of the Prime Minister, but they are scared of the
First Minister. Why? Does Donna Nicola Sturgeone play the fairy godmother with horses’
heads?
Sturgeon’s justification for not following Johnson’s
lead on lockdown was that Scotland caught the bug a bit later. While England
has 259 cases per 100,000 Scotland has 269. Wales tragically has 400 while
Northern Ireland is doing a bit better with 235. But the differences within
Scotland are greater than between parts of Scotland and England. On that basis
it would have made more sense for her to have put a border between the Central
Belt and Tayside and the rest of us north and south of those places.
But having gone her own way Sturgeon is going to have
to find her own way out. She has helped those in England who don’t want schools
to go back and who don’t want to take any risks at all. But Sturgeon still faces
the same task as Johnson. She is going to have to somehow get a scared Scottish
population to go back to work and school, this week, next week or next year. She
has rejected Boris Johnson’s method. So, what will her method be?
The British Government is facing great reluctance from
those of us who are too scared to go back to normal. But it at least it has the
ability to offer carrots and ultimately it will have the stick of withdrawing
the wages of those who are furloughed. But what can Sturgeon offer? She is
paying no one’s wages and the money she is offering as subsidy is Treasury
money tied up with a Tartan ribbon.
The fear in Scotland or perhaps the prejudice is such
that there are people telling Northumbrians to stay away by writing swear words
on the border sign. They are apparently unaware that Northumbria is safer than
Scotland. Imagine how Scots would react if we were banned from traveling to
England and if English lorries refused to travel to Scotland for fear of
getting ill. It also makes little sense for the Welsh to try to keep the
English out when the danger of infection is the other way round.
Sturgeon has doubled down on “stay home” rather than go
along with the gradualist approach from London. She couldn’t possibly be enjoying
having an independent policy, could she? No one is suggesting that she is glad
that people are dying, but generals throughout history have taken advantage of
wars, they didn’t want to fight, in order to gain fame and success afterwards. To
take advantage of a crisis is to be human. To deny this is to claim to be a Saint.
But how does Sturgeon change her message. Perhaps she
will be a MacGradualist, only everything will be that much slower than in
England. But gradually Scotland is going to fall ever further behind and ever
more in need of the Rishi Sunak money coming our way even when England no longer
needs it. I’d enjoy hearing from Nicola Sturgeon how making Scotland ever more impoverished
and dependent on British money is preparing us for Scottish independence. Maybe Sarah Smith could ask her.
