What motivated the Scottish government to take a more cautious approach to lockdown? Deviations from the UK government’s approach meant that those living north of the border often had to live with harsher restrictions compared to those in England, decisions that were widely assumed to be made on the basis of scientific advice. But now the Covid Inquiry has disclosed conversations that took place at the heart of government — and revealed how top academics were left confused by the SNP’s strategy.
Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh University, told the inquiry on Wednesday that he ‘did not understand’ the Scottish government’s ‘very, very cautious’ pandemic strategy during the summer months of 2020. Hinting that the Scottish government may have been more interested in politics than public health, Woolhouse remarked that the government didn’t quite manage to convey the health benefits of their tentative approach to easing restrictions, adding: ‘It seemed to be important to the politicians that it was more cautious than the one in England, so they were emphasising that.’
More specifically, there have been questions raised about whether the Scottish government was pursuing a ‘zero Covid’ strategy during the summer of 2020 and certainly that was Woolhouse’s impression. The Edinburgh professor could hardly contain his disdain when he spoke on Wednesday. He described how Scottish government figures appeared to believe that despite warnings of a second wave of the virus, Covid cases in Scotland would continue to fall to a ‘zero Covid’ level. ‘That to me was,’ he concluded, ‘not consistent with the evidence that had been available since February 2020.’
Ultimately it appears that Scotland’s more cautious approach did not better contain the spread of the virus. In fact, the evidence suggests the opposite. Scotland’s Covid deaths peaked at higher levels than those in England during both the Delta and Omicron waves of the disease — although the government’s wariness led to changes in public behaviour by, for example, encouraging mask-wearing.
So if the strategy didn’t work and independent advisers hadn’t recommended it, why did the Scottish government pursue a different Covid plan to that of the UK government? Thursday’s Covid hearings have shed a little more light on the SNP’s rationale. Liz Lloyd, former aide to Sturgeon and self-confessed close confidant of the former first minister, gave evidence in the morning. Her (retained) WhatsApp messages unveiled some choice language used by Sturgeon — and provided interesting insight into the thought processes of those in government. In one message exchange about a proposal from the UK government during November 2020, Sturgeon tells Lloyd: ‘On this I (reluctantly) think there’s merit in UK-wide position.’ In a conversation a few weeks earlier, Lloyd admitted: ‘My reason for setting a timeline for them to answer us on furlough is purely political.’
Was the Scottish government’s approach a politically motivated one that put politicking before public health?
Was the Scottish government’s approach a politically motivated one that put politicking before public health? This mindset certainly appeared to persist throughout the pandemic. When Boris Johnson heralded the long-awaited ‘freedom day’ in England on 19 July 2021 (when the legal requirement to wear masks in England were scrapped), face masks remained widely worn north of the border and the Scottish government warned against attending social gatherings. Nicola Sturgeon defended her decision to take a more cautious approach and was backed up by other advisers to the government, including global public health professor Devi Sridhar (who appeared at the inquiry yesterday). And not only did Scotland see a greater number of deaths from Covid during the Delta and Omicron waves than England, the tougher restrictions also affected mental health: the more severe the restrictions, the worse the mental health of the population became. Suicide numbers in Scotland were up on the average from previous years. Even now, Scotland’s NHS is nowhere near recovery: only 68 per cent of patients presenting to A&E were seen within four hours (nothing close to the service’s 95 per cent target) and hospitals are filling up. There was an uptick of bed-blocking patients awaiting discharge from Scotland’s hospitals in October 2023 as social care services remained overwhelmed. Meanwhile there has been a post-pandemic nosedive in how quickly cancer patients in Scotland are receiving care, with over a quarter of oncology patients waiting longer than 62 days from referral to treatment.
Sridhar sums up the defence the Scottish government would use to excuse its alternative approach: ‘If we have learned anything through this pandemic it is that it is better to be cautious.’ But the UK government felt there was more to it than that. When the Covid Inquiry was held in London before Christmas, both Michael Gove and Matt Hancock expressed their frustrations about cooperating with the Scottish government. Gove accused Sturgeon of trying to exploit grievances against the Westminster government while Hancock complained that ‘we found it much more difficult when decisions went up to first minister level, particularly with Nicola Sturgeon. Because we would find that sometimes some kind of spin was put on what was essentially substantively the same decision.’
Further criticism has been levelled at the Scottish government's pandemic strategy after a paragraph from social psychology professor Stephen Reicher's witness statement was pulled up on Wednesday. It admits that ‘the Scottish context offered different challenges and opportunities’ in terms of pandemic planning, revealing that there was thinking in government that drew on ‘Scottishness’ as a means of pulling communities together during Covid. ‘In the Scottish context it is possible to draw on the idea “We are Scotland” because Scottishness is more likely to be understood in “civic” terms,’ Reicher wrote, saying that an equivalent ‘We are England’ approach would be ‘more problematic and more likely to be understood in ethnic terms’. Tweeting his reaction, Sam Taylor, director of the These Islands think tank, wrote: ‘The civic inclusivity of “We are Scotland” might have resonated with SNP voters, but it didn’t feel very inclusive to those outside the nationalist tent.'
Was the SNP more concerned with playing politics during the pandemic than working on an effective public health response? The WhatsApp messages that have emerged so far don't reflect well on the Scottish government. Sturgeon can expect to face tough questions when she appears at the Inquiry next week.
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