One Set of Rules for Us, Another for Them

Seems the lockdown rules don’t apply to Dr Calderwood, Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer. This is incredibly serious and there is only one credible way in which Nicola Sturgeon can handle the situation and that is to sack the CMO.

The excuse that the CMO has been working hard and took the opportunity for a break will not wash. There are scores of others working as hard, if not harder, than any government bureaucrat — the nurses, the doctors, the cleaners, the administrators desperately trying to keep the NHS afloat, the supermarket workers, the delivery drivers. Majority of them get paid fraction of what the CMO earns and can but dream of second homes. And all of them are expected to follow the rules or else.

The lock down is the lynchpin of the Government’s strategy, there really is only one thing Nicola can do here. To do otherwise is to signal that the lockdown is an unnecessary overreach.

Since I wrote this earlier today, Dr Calderwood has apologised for an ‘error of judgement’, while Nicola Sturgeon has said we all make ‘mistakes’. Neither is an appropriate description of what has happened.

It comes down to this: either Dr Calderwood doesn’t believe the current policy is necessary to fight the pandemic, in which case she should say so, and the Government should put in place a better policy for all of us. Or she does believe this is the necessary and correct policy, in which case this seems to me like serious professional misconduct.

It has further emerged that she visited the family dacha last weekend as well, and that she was merely issued with a police warning. Sorry Nicola, this really does look like different rules for different people.