Thursday 30 July 2020

The Smell of Pee

Back in April Calton wrote that Nicola Sturgeon reeked of exceptionalism. Now she stinks of urine - the pee some care home residents had to lie in due to the Scottish Government's mismanagement of the Covid crisis and care homes. Whenever someone dares to raise this issue with the First Minister, she complains that they are trying to make out that she did it deliberately. She plaintively protests that she did her best at the time and that, if mistakes were made, (note the 'if'), they will be examined at some future inquiry. She deeply regrets every death and, really, it's her we should be feeling sorry for because those nasty journalists and opposition politicians are trying to make her out to be a murderess.

No Nicola, the charge is not murder - it's manslaughter. Not intentional, pre-meditated killing but killing through incompetence. At the height of the pandemic you and your hopeless Health Secretary Jeanne Freeman shifted lots of vulnerable elderly patients from hospitals to care homes without testing them while at the same time lots of care home workers were having to stay at home for 14 days. You created a situation where an increase in residents coincided with a decrease in staff numbers and you did nothing to mitigate this. That is incompetence. The results of what you were doing were forseeable - you did not forsee them. The situation was exacerbated by a blanket directive (now deleted) that care home residents should not be moved to hospital if they got Covid.

Sturgeon's hands are not stained with blood - it's pee and no amount of washing will take away the smell.


Wednesday 15 July 2020

Nicola is no Boudicca

Calton has stopped listening to Nicola's lunchtime briefings. Her anxiety is palpable and it's infectious. Instead of leading the Scottish people our First Minister is pleading with the Scottish people. It's not a good look. No wonder some nationalists are casting about for another leader and their eye is falling on Sturgeon's predecessor and nemesis, Alex Salmond. The fact that there doesn't seem to be any other obvious candidate highlights the paucity of talent in the SNP. A leadership election in the aftermath of Salmond's resignation in 2014 might have highlighted what is now blindingly obvious even to some SNP members - Sturgeon's ultra-cautiousness and inability to be decisive is a huge drawback. She is a career politician, not a leader. She's the queen of spin in a sharp suit but she is no Boudicca and it is unlikely that she will ever lead the Scots to independence. She just doesn't have what it takes. If she did manage to take Scotland out of the UK we would be a nation of wee sleekit cow'rin tim'rous beasties just like her and we would indeed be too wee, too poor and too stupid to succeed as an independent country because that's what she will have made us.