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By stewartb:

‘ROLL UP, ROLL UP …. GET YOUR ‘PERSPECTIVE’ HERE!

Covid-19 testing, care homes and New Zealand

For anyone following media reports and the comments of some opposition politicians in Scotland, you could be persuaded that Scottish Government ministers aided by Scotland’s public health institutions, Scottish Government officials and independent advisors must have all got this ‘Covid-19 testing in care homes’ issue so wrong – exceptionally and uniquely, even wilfully, wrong – by implementing an approach that is completely at odds with international practice.

Is this justified? This is where ‘perspective’ is needed. Unfortunately, ‘perspective’, like that other thing contributors to the TuSC harp on about, ‘context’, is in short supply in Scotland.

Where to look?

‘New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has said her country has “done what few countries have been able to do” and contained the community spread…

Sean Connery at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999

I was certain we would lose the first independence referendum, so certain that I placed a £100 bet in William Hill at 7 to 1, to win the vote. I did the patriotic thing, the futile sacrifice. And why not, as Arnold Brown is want to say. Colonised over 300 years, the chances of the ill and the sick getting up off their mattresses to vote the invaders home was no more than fantasy. After all, we hardly had more than a year of a national debate to turn Britishness into nationness. No amount of frantic idealism was going to reverse 300 years of imposed English values overnight.

Be prepared – next year, maybe

And so it came to pass a fool and his money are soon parted, in my case, to a bank in Gibraltar where William…

I wrote this last July. As Pete Wishart MP feuds with the wider Yes movement again, it might be of interest to any who didn’t see it then.

Yesterday, in the Constitutional Affairs committee, Wishart flirted with Rees-Mogg:

‘Could I obviously warmly welcome him to this place. He’s the fifth leader I’ve had, in my fourth year, but I would have to say that he is by far the most exotic.’

Note the sense of belonging comfortably in ‘this place’, in Wishart’s words. Rees-Mogg may seem exotic but we know he is really a cold reactionary politician who despises the left-of-centre democratic values of the SNP. He was rewarded by laughter and reciprocal warmth from the Tory front bench:

A delighted Rees-Mogg was then enabled to witter on about the parliament’s long history going back to 1265 and to refer to Wishart as ‘the honourable gentleman is a very good…

Angus Brendan MacNeil has called on Nicola Sturgeon to restart the independence campaign. It will come as a surprise to precisely no-one that I am in total agreement with him on this. The independence campaign should never have been stopped. In fact, it hasn’t been stopped. Nicola Sturgeon’s cease and desist order was never going to deter anyone who was truly committed to the cause of restoring Scotland’s independence. Faced with an unprecedented public health crisis, their first wasn’t that all campaigning must stop. Their first thought was about how the campaign could be kept going in spite of the lockdown restrictions. They never imagined that campaigning necessarily involved the kind of interpersonal contact that was rendered impossible by an infectious virus in the population. They had never considered campaigning to be entirely and exclusively about leafleting and canvassing and street stalls and public meetings and social events. They…