Thread by @SNPPeterhead

No nation was ever going to be immune to the Covid-19 Pandemic... from Communist to Capitalist… From Large Nations to Small…. From Rich Nations to Poor… because Viruses are indiscriminate.

But many nations had the opportunity to reduce the impact of the Virus, as it swept across the globe at a terrifying pace, passing through borders, ravaging populations and overloading health services.

The UK was ideally placed to protect her citizens from Covid-19. As an island nation we had a geographic advantage, and as a nation with a well-developed, publicly owned and freely available health service we should have felt relatively safe as the virus swept towards us.

But to get maximum utility from those advantages we needed a UK Government that was focused on International Co-operation and Protecting their citizens.

Sadly that’s not what we had, we had one led by Boris Johnson….

Don’t let the nice slick and admittedly successful vaccine rollout fool you all, the rest of the UK Governments response has been shockingly incompetent.

Here’s a wee reminder of their greatest hits…

rUK Test and Trace was a shambles, run by a person with a record of incompetence and failure in Private Industry who’s only qualifications were that she was a Baroness, she was married to an MP and that she was chums with David Cameron and Matt Hancock.

The results were all too predictable with privately outsourced contact tracing running as low as 60% at times, when simultaneously a separate test and trace operation set up by a local council using existing staff hit 98%.

The rUK “Bespoke and World Beating” Test and Trace App was only world beating in its cost, which was £14m and guess what? it didn’t even work.

It was abandoned and replaced with the bargain £700,000 and fully functional Google/Apple App that Scotgov already subscribed to.

18,000,000 people entered the UK without as much as a temperature check or health questionnaire in the first 93 days of the Pandemic.

Whilst the Gov’t tried to distract us into believing the “Kent Variant” was being brought ashore by asylum seekers after crossing the channel.

The UK Response to Covid could and should have been a larger and even better resourced version of New Zealand’s response.

One where we initially pulled up the drawbridge, before putting in place quarantine processes for returning citizens, then expanding that to health checked international travelers from safe countries.

But we all know that not what we got.

Because instead of a UK Government that was focused on International Co-operation and Protecting their citizens, we had one led by a populist, who’s prime focus is to remain popular.

And collectively we had a cabinet more focused on funneling public money into private pockets.

The similarities between Scotland and New Zealand are striking, similar in size, terrain, with similarly left leaning governance.

If we had been independent then our response could have been less like the UK’s and more like New Zealand’s.

Whatever your take on Politics it can't be denied that any response that is more like Jacinda Ardern's, and less like Boris Johnson's could only be a good thing.

Thanks to Led By Donkeys and the Good Law Project for the video….

@threadreaderapp unroll please