Showing posts with label polirtics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label polirtics. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

The BBC's criticism of Scotland's slowness to react to the crisis is *partly* justified - but the BBC itself has questions to answer about its own failings in March

Quite a few SNP and independence supporters have reacted angrily to a BBC Scotland programme earlier this evening that suggested 80% of the deaths in Scotland could have been prevented if we had locked down two weeks earlier.  But in a sense that was just a statement of the obvious - we already know from the example of other countries (Denmark, New Zealand, Greece, etc) that locking down earlier and harder could have averted the worst of the catastrophe.  The bigger question is whether the BBC is apportioning blame in the wrong place, because Scotland didn't really have the legal power to fully lock down in early March.  (There's even an ongoing debate over whether the newly-won power to unilaterally maintain lockdown is meaningful, given London's control of the purse-strings.  But luckily we should only need to diverge for a matter of weeks rather than months, as long as we get to grips with testing and contact tracing quickly.)

It was the collective 4 Nations approach that failed, and Scotland's role in that was quite complex - it would have been realistic for us to go our own way in some respects but not in others.  There are four mistakes for which I think the Scottish Government can be legitimately criticised -

1) Not stopping large public gatherings earlier.  They eventually took that step a few days earlier than England, so there's no question that they could and should have done it even earlier.  The Lewis Capaldi concert should not have gone ahead, and neither should the Rangers v Leverkusen match or the Scotland v France Six Nations fixture.

2) Not closing schools earlier.  Again, this is undoubtedly a devolved power and there was no good reason for remaining in lockstep with England for so long.

3) Abandoning testing and contact tracing at the same time as the UK government.  Whatever the capacity issues, it should have been continued to the maximum extent possible.

4) Not issuing strong social distancing advice earlier.  You don't need to have or use draconian powers to get people to listen to your advice when you suggest that they should stay away from each other as much as possible.  That could really have made a telling difference, but instead, in those crucial days of mid-March, the leading Scottish Government spokesman was ludicrously advising people to increase their contact with vulnerable relatives, to go to mass gatherings, and boasting that he would do so himself.





And make no mistake - Leitch didn't issue that irresponsible advice because he was unaware of how bad the situation was. He was quite open in a number of interviews that his objective was for the vast majority of the population to be infected (albeit in a managed way) to achieve population-wide immunity. That was unforgivably reckless, given how little was known about the virus at the time - not least how deadly it is and how long any immunity actually lasts after infection.



So, yes, the BBC had a point tonight - albeit only partly. But the BBC itself should be answering questions about one of its biggest-ever failures as a public service broadcaster. During the herd immunity episode, it wasn't probing the UK government about the plans to expose the bulk of the population to a deadly pathogen, it wasn't asking the obvious question: "you're going to do WHAT?" Instead, it merely acted as a dutiful relayer of the state's messaging, "explaining" to viewers what was going to happen to them - exactly as a state broadcaster would do in an authoritarian country.
Posted by James Kelly at 12:11 AM 26 comments
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