We should come together again to fight a common enemy
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My dear father was a great gadget man.
A small dairy farmer in Easter Ross, only he would buy an array of four feet diameter electric fans (from a scrapped aircraft carrier designed for Far East service) and build them into a large shed for drying freshly cut hay.
(Its banshee-like howl will stay with me forever. Its electricity bill must have been eye-watering.)
Ditto the printing machine he bought.
Anyone else would have got the labels for the cheese that he made from a local printer.
But not my old man.
In addition to cheese ones, he printed labels for all and sundry – and one of them was George Nicholson the SNP candidate for Ross and Cromarty in the 1970 general election.
For each design of label a beautiful brass printing block was made.
One of these days, providing I can still find it, I shall present the Nicholson one to the present day far north SNP party – and in doing so I know that my late mother would be pleased, because for much of the 1970s the SNP was her inclination.
“So romantic. And anyway, why shouldn’t Scotland be a separate country?!” I can hear her yet.
Anyway – this is all a preamble to saying that Scottish Independence is a perfectly legitimate proposal.
It’s not one for me, but I do recognise the validity of the argument.
And this in turn takes me to the Border between Scotland and England.
Since the establishment of Scottish law-making in the Scottish Parliament in 1999, the laws either side of the Border have become increasingly different.
For instance drink driving law in Scotland is tougher than in England. Woe betide you if you drink one and a half pints of lager in Berwick-upon-Tweed and then cross the Border to Duns and get stopped by the police.
Same with... I could continue, but that’s the nature of it.
Devolution. We do things our own way in Scotland. No worries. That’s what we voted for when we said that Scotland should have its own Parliament.
Except for one thing that has bothered me during these last days.
Coronavirus.
How far you can travel in Scotland, how far you can travel in England.
What you can do, what you can’t do.
That’s devolution.
But the trouble is this, the virus is no respecter of borders.
So I hope for three things.
Firstly that in God’s good time the virus is defeated.
Secondly that we are as prepared as we can possibly be for any second wave of coronavirus, or the eventual emergence of yet another deadly virus.
And thirdly – that the UK Government and the Scottish Government sing off the same sheet as far as humanly possible in preparedness and completely coordinated action.
Differences in approach don’t make huge sense in a UK-wide emergency.
If the mechanisms to ensure coordination are presently in place, then well and good.
If not, then they must be established immediately.
My father and mother came through the second war, she in the London Blitz, he in Burma fighting the Japanese.
Welsh, Northern Irish, Scottish and English, together successfully fought the enemy.
The same has to be true of this deadly virus today.
