Sarah Smith is the Scotland editor of BBC News. On Monday night’s Ten O’Clock News, she was in the middle of a ‘live’ from Glasgow on Scotland’s divergent lockdown arrangements when she said this:
Nicola Sturgeon has enjoyed the opportunity to set her own lockdown rules and not have to follow what’s happening in England or other parts of the UK.
If you don’t see it, that’s probably because you’re in the pay of MI5 too. Smith’s choice of words made her meaning unclear. Did she mean Sturgeon was taking the chance to make her own decisions? Or that she was fortunate or glad to be doing so? Was she suggesting Sturgeon was seizing an opportunity to differentiate Scotland from England? Each of those meanings may be right or wrong in its analysis of the situation but none is an illegitimate observation for a BBC correspondent to make. Smith’s ‘live’ provided viewers with a political context for a story with major political implications.
The story that observers outside Scotland are missing is just how flawed the Scottish government’s handling of coronavirus has been
That should have been the end of it. But Sturgeon tweeted: ‘Never in my entire political career have I ‘enjoyed’ anything less than this. My heart breaks every day for all those who have lost loved ones to this virus.’ Of course, she knew Smith wasn’t suggesting she was enjoying coronavirus or the deaths it has caused but she couldn’t pass up the chance to take a swipe at the BBC for the pleasure of her paranoid, obsessive grassroots. You might say she ‘enjoyed the opportunity’.
Since Sturgeon announced how wounded she was, there has been a muckleload of splenetic tweets directed at Smith by Scottish nationalists. When Donald Trump rebukes journalists, it’s the ever-breaking dawn of fascism in America. When Nicola Sturgeon does it, it’s a case of yaaas, kween, slay! It’s no surprise that Smith subsequently clarified her wording, claiming that she had meant to say ‘embracing’ rather than ‘enjoying’. Whether that explanation sounds on the up-and-up is of secondary importance to the fact Smith felt the need to issue the same clarification four times. Owning up to her mistake, if that is what it was, was honourable and the First Minister might want to try it sometime.
Incidentally, the grumbling about Sturgeon’s decision to keep Scotland in lockdown longer than England is a red herring. Scotland has a higher ‘R’ number, distinct challenges of health and geography, and a more rapid spread of Covid-19 through care homes. Whatever you think of lockdown as a policy, Nicola Sturgeon can plausibly defend her decision as a virus-containment strategy rather than a political one.
The story that observers outside Scotland are missing is just how flawed the Scottish government’s handling of coronavirus has been. Scotland lags far behind England in using up testing capacity and despite 45 per cent of deaths being in care homes, even staff at homes with multiple Covid-19 deaths have not been tested. Official guidance from Public Health Scotland says staff who do test positive may be ‘permitted’ to finish their shift instead of going home to self-isolate. A report from a pro-independence think tank says the scale of care home deaths is ‘an unmitigated disaster’ and ‘possibly represents the single greatest failure of devolved government’.
NHS staff have faced PPE shortages, with almost half of Scottish nurses working in high-risk environments asked to re-use single-use equipment. A 2015 pandemic contingencies exercise, only revealed last month by a newspaper, identified a need to ‘review plans for the distribution of PPE’ and ‘ensure fit testing procedures are in place’.
In March, Professor Allyson Pollock, head of the Centre for Excellence in Regulatory Science at Newcastle University, says she wrote to the Scottish government urging ministers to begin contact-tracing and testing. She received no reply. Two weeks ago, SNP ministers unveiled plans to recruit 2,000 contact-tracers but, as the Sunday Mail reported over the weekend, despite 8,500 applicants not a single vacancy had been filled.
Most egregious of all, the Scottish government learned of a major outbreak in Edinburgh in late February but withheld the information from the public. A BBC investigation found that 25 Covid-19 cases were linked to the international Nike conference at the Hilton Carlton hotel on 26 and 27 February but Nicola Sturgeon waited until 16 March to stop large gatherings and 23 March to take the country into lockdown.
Sarah Smith isn’t the one who should be issuing apologies.
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