UNLESS a majority of MSPs are prepared to defend freedom – don’t laugh – Scotland will soon become the first part of the UK to impose vaccine passports.
Subject to the formality of a vote next week at Holyrood, from later this month Scots who wish to enter nightclubs, attend music festivals and large-scale concerts or be part of a five-figure football crowd, must be double-jabbed – and, crucially, be willing to prove it.
The foregoing are just some of the social activities in Scotland which First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has decreed off-limits to healthy people.
Addressing the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday, Sturgeon justified her malevolent measure because ‘case levels are 80 per cent higher now than they were last week and they are five times higher than four weeks ago’. Yet that five-fold rise over the past month continues to have negligible impact on the more important statistics: of 1,099 deaths in Scotland during week ending August 29, only 48 were ‘involving Covid’ – a weekly total and proportion (under 5 per cent) which has been consistent since mid-July.
The spiralling number of so-called cases is largely irrelevant and says only that Covid is circulating in Scotland amongst an adult population which already is overwhelmingly double-jabbed. This seems entirely consistent with recent findings that the fully vaccinated are just as likely to transmit the virus – a fact which, alone, renders redundant Sturgeon’s case for vaccine passports.
Spuriously presented as the benevolent alternative to another lockdown, the principal purpose of the policy is of course what health secretary Humza Yousaf euphemistically terms ‘incentivising vaccination’ – code for coercion of the reticent. Indeed, this week Nicola Sturgeon reiterated her amoral aim of unnecessary universal vaccination and restated her dastardly desire to stick needles into schoolchildren for whom the Covid vaccine is all risk and no personal benefit: ‘We still await advice from the JCVI [Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation] on vaccinating all 12- to 15-year-olds and I very much hope the evidence will allow the JCVI to give a positive recommendation very soon, and we stand ready to implement that if it is the case.’
Shameful. We are also expected to welcome Sturgeon’s assurance that her forthcoming medical apartheid will apply only ‘in very limited settings and never for public services such as transport, hospitals and education’.
Never? Believe that at your peril.
She expects us to be pathetically grateful that ‘certification rules in several other countries cover a far wider range of venues than the ones we are currently considering for Scotland’, and take comfort from her tartan tyranny being less draconian than elsewhere – at least for the moment.
Far from defending freedom, the spineless Scottish Conservatives are contemptible collaborators. Murdo Fraser, the shadow spokesman for Covid Recovery, was already a proponent of vaccine passports: when the SNP had earlier expressed scepticism, fatuous Fraser advocated the abomination as a ‘reasonable proposition’ and a ‘reasonable trade-off for people’.
His leader’s response to the First Minister’s statement was even more lamentable. Instead of speaking up for liberty and personal autonomy, the complaint from Douglas Ross was that ‘the SNP Government is now introducing vaccine passports at the last minute’; depressingly, he bemoaned the Nats ‘wasting months that could have been spent making proper preparations’. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9947533/Nicola-Sturgeon-wants-Scots-use-vaccine-passports-enter-clubs-attend-Premiership-games.html
Pathetic. The only party at Holyrood seemingly prepared to oppose these biometric badges is the Scottish Liberal Democrats.
For once, the lack of LibDem representation in parliament – the party currently has only four MSPs – is a matter of regret. New leader Alex Cole-Hamilton has at least been refreshingly forthright: ‘I will state this clearly where others have not: I and my party are fundamentally opposed to vaccine passports as a matter of principle.’
This is the correct stance. Unfortunately, operators who will be most affected, such as the hospitality and entertainment sectors, are already falling into the trap of questioning the inconsistencies and impracticalities of implementation. Instead of conceding ground by quibbling over detail, it is the principle of vaccine passports which must vehemently be resisted.
During his recent stint as interim leader of the Scottish LibDems, Alistair Carmichael damned the use of medical ID as ‘probably one of the most pointless and divisive exercises you can imagine’.
Divisive? Definitely. But pointless? Not to a domineering Nationalist determined to limit liberty and control the behaviour of the public.
The front page headline in Thursday’s Scottish Daily Express was ‘SNP in U-turn on vaccine passports’. The only surprise is that it took so long for an authoritarian Nationalist government, which revels in showing who is boss, to take the sinister step and adopt this prejudicial policy.
