Herald letter: Where The Covid The Buck Stops.

GH Weir (Letters, June 12) needs to produce evidence if he wishes to lay the blame for Scotland’s Covid-19 infections and death rates on Westminster. In particular, he needs to show how and when the Scottish Government was overruled on the issues of lockdown and quarantine.

In the first case, he would do well to review all of the press conferences held by the First Minister in the first half of March. If he does so, he will see repeated arguments from the Scottish Government and its advisors that lockdown was not necessary. As late as March 18, we were told very clearly that “we are definitely not at the stage of needing lockdown measures in Scotland”. Not by Boris Johnson, not by Dominic Cummings, but by the Chief Medical Officer for Scotland under the admiring eye of Nicola Sturgeon.

In the case of quarantine, we need to see footage of the First Minister or the Health Secretary advocating such a move at any stage. Or perhaps correspondence to the Home Secretary or Health Secretary to show how much more prescient the Scottish Government was. In the absence of quarantine, it was all the time within the devolved public health powers of the Scottish Government to test international arrivals at Scotland’s airports and advise them to go into quarantine if they tested positive. Or to set up a strict Scotland-only protocol for everyone entering the country by whatever means. These steps were not taken, and again, the people deciding not to do so were not bogeymen in London but the Scottish Government.

The buck stops in Edinburgh and no-one should forget it.

Peter A Russell, Glasgow G13.

Herald letter: The Nationalist Parlour Game.

RUTH Marr (Letters, June 9) and others are indulging in a fallacy in their assertions that “if Scotland was independent…” with regard to the current Covid-19 pandemic. There is no comparison to be made between Scotland and New Zealand, not least because the latter is an archipelago so biologically remote from the rest of the world and anomalous that it had no terrestrial mammals at all until the Polynesians arrived in the 13th century.

What is more, Scotland voted to stay in the UK in 2014. The choice of two million Scots was the preference for the risks and responsibilities of being part of bigger and more diverse country and economy over those of being part of a smaller and narrower one. If we want to play Ms Marr’s parlour game and pretend that something else happened, we can also imagine the penury that Scotland would have faced following the greatest economic shock in its history, and wonder how on earth we would have managed with public services stripped of over £10 billion every year.

Such speculation is all very entertaining, and makes useful material for the attempts of nationalists to distract us from the failings of the SNP Scottish Government. But Scotland is not New Zealand. Nor Norway nor Denmark nor the Republic of Ireland. Nor in terms of responsibility for public health and the NHS and care homes, is it even England.

In the real world, we can only judge Nicola Sturgeon and Jeane Freeman and co by the actions and decisions they have taken, and have failed to take, and above all by the Covid-19 infection rate and death toll in Scotland. No wonder that their supporters want us to be distracted by their pointless fantasies.

Peter A Russell, Glasgow G13.