What was the weirdest year of your life? I already
know what mine was even if I lived to be one hundred. It was this year.
Covid is a through the looking glass sort of illness.
One person catches it, but has no symptoms, his neighbour catches it and dies.
Japan has fewer deaths than Ireland. Sweden with no lockdown does better than
some places that lockdown strictly. We still don’t know exactly what the Case
Fatality Rate is (how many people have caught Covid versus how many have died),
because we can only estimate how many have been infected and it's impossible to know
the real cause of death in all cases. We don’t know for sure if full lockdown was
necessary or if a different approach such as locking down only the vulnerable might
have worked just as well, nor do we know if the decline in Covid cases in
Britain will continue until it is eliminated or rise again in the Autumn and
Winter.
What we don’t know may be greater than what we do know
about Covid, but there are some things that we do know about this looney tunes
year.
The British people are no longer willing to do what
they are told. I remember back in March watching a discussion about whether to
introduce lockdown now or later and the experts suggested people would only be
willing to stay locked down for so long. So, it has proved. We have had mass
demonstrations about Black Lives Matter and also counter demonstrations. We
have had huge crowds of people going to Bournemouth beach. These people were
not scared of catching Covid.
At this point I realised that the mood of British
people was hugely different from the politicians telling them what to do. As we
went through various easings of lockdown (now you can go within one metre of
someone else so long as you wear a mask etc), it became clear that ordinary
people were deciding for themselves what was safe and what wasn’t.
If hundreds of thousands of people were willing to
publicly break the rules by crowding together on a beach or in London’s
streets, how many more would privately be meeting friends and lovers?
There is a disconnect between what people are willing
to do and the timidity of those in charge of opening restaurants, pubs and schools.
If we are willing to kiss our lovers and be in close proximity with our
friends, why is there such unwillingness to open schools and send children to
them?
In Scotland there are now between 0-5 cases of Covid
per hundred thousand people. That means that there might be ten people in
Aberdeen who are sick with Covid. There might be two hundred and fifty cases in
the whole of Scotland. I would have to try mighty hard to meet one and it would
take me a long time even if I was desperate to catch the disease. Yet it is at
this point that Nicola Sturgeon compels me to wear a mask in a shop I have been
going to since March without a mask. I already stand always two metres away
from everyone. I sanitise my hands and have trained myself not to touch my
face. How many lives will this mask compulsion save? It won’t save any. It is
not intended to do so. The point is the compulsion. Not the lives.
But as Covid declines in Scotland a new illness
arises. Scotland has had about as many cases of Covid per hundred thousand
people as England and Northern Ireland, Wales has done rather worse. The rate
of death in Scotland is similar to that of England, but the preventable deaths
in care homes is much worse. Nicola Sturgeon’s performance is no better than
that of Boris Johnson and she had the advantage of a sparsely populated country,
with few ethnic minorities and she didn’t almost die.
But shamefully Scottish nationalists have used the
Covid crisis that ought to have brought us unity and a feeling of shared
humanity to further their grievance, hatred of England and political goals.
Scottish journalism has conspired in this by failing
to ask the difficult questions that journalists in England routinely asked
Tories. Sturgeon on the phone may be scary but believe me she is not the KGB.
In some of the most shameful scenes I have ever
witnessed bigots have dressed up as if they were at Chernobyl to defend the
Scottish border against English people bringing with them plague. They have
been cheered on by an SNP MP.
These are the people who used to put “Settler Watch”
signs on telegraph poles. This is still the motivation for too many SNP
supporters. They pretend that theirs is a civic nationalism that is welcoming
and inclusive, but the mask slips and we see it for what it is and always was.
I have witnessed hatred of English people since I was
a child. Sometimes I took part, sometimes I stayed silent, but rarely did I defend
my English friends when they were made to feel that they were something on the
bottom of my shoe because of where they were born or the accent with which they
spoke.
The hatred of English people that motivates Scottish
nationalists to make a spectacle of themselves on the border is taught from the
cradle and nurtured and carefully kept alight in case it goes out. It is
Scotland’s greatest shame. It lowers us perhaps even more than sectarianism.
Without these two great evils there would be no Scottish nationalism.
I am tired of the pretence. Nicola Sturgeon stands on
her platform each day and pretends that this has nothing to do with politics,
but every second of her life has been devoted to independence and these seconds
too.
Scottish nationalism in this strangest of all years
has become ever more feverish, ever more disconnected from truth. If we are
very lucky indeed, we may in the course of the next ten years be able to
recover from this crisis. If we all work hard and focus on growing the economy
and getting people back to work, we may just about be able to pay back the
debts accrued to keep us going during the past few months. But it will take us
the rest of our lives to do it.
The idea that anyone is going to have either the time
or the interest to deal with Scottish independence shows a self-centred
selfishness, ignorance and immorality that transcends everything we have
witnessed since 2014.
As the Scottish economy declines still further in
relation to Britain as a whole, because we dare not face the highly unlikely chance
that we might meet someone with Covid in Scotland, we will continue to demand
that the British Treasury props up the Scottish tourist industry, even as we
tell the people who pay our wages that they are not welcome here. This turns us
into scoundrels.
We live on the work of others while plotting to walk
away without paying them back. It makes us something baser than parasites that
at least remain loyal to their host.
In this strangest of years, I have simply become
ashamed of Scotland. I see as through a glass darkly and no longer recognise
the most beautiful place in Europe because too many of its people have made it ugly.
The plague is not coming from England and it is not called Covid. It is
Scottish nationalism. The flees are guarding the border and the buboes swell,
burst and spread their pestilence. This is not Scotland. It is SNPland using
Sturgeon’s dog whistles about quarantine to justify its desire to keep Scotland
for the Scots and pure from all settlers from anywhere.
