Scotland's Worst-ever Crime?

One of the many ways in which Scotland is different from the rest of the United Kingdom is our distinct legal system. One of the differences in that is the way that we define the crime of murder.

In England, a person may only be convicted of murder if they are found to have committed a premeditated act against a known person, resulting in death. In Scotland, this definition is sensibly expanded to also include any act of wicked recklessness that results in the death of any person, whether or not known to the perpetrator.

Currently in Scotland and all across the UK, our daily lives have been impinged upon by the actions of our various governments, reacting to an apparently natural phenomenon. These actions have been severe and have often imposed restrictions on our behaviour at short notice and without any adequately explained rationale. It must be assumed that the governments’ shared strategy remains to “squash the sombrero” as no further explanation has been offered.

These restrictions have not simply appeared spontaneously: we imagine that they must be the result of the careful weighing of many factors by responsible and thoughtful people, and represent their considered view of the necessary immediate tactics in support of an over-arching strategy. However, given the lack of parliamentary scrutiny of the governments’ actions, the actual decisions will probably have rested with a single person or a small group of people.

Someone has taken the deliberate decision to close down the majority of the healthcare provision in this country, including the private facilities, which will inevitably lead to the possibly otherwise avoidable deaths of patients with existing and/or new but undetected lethal conditions.

Someone has taken the deliberate decision to place serious restrictions on trade and commerce that will lead to a massive increase in unemployment of employed persons and the failures of many owner-managed businesses. This will inevitably lead to suicides as business owners see their life’s work destroyed without recompense and others meet intolerable financial pressures.

Someone has taken the deliberate decision to conduct the public coronavirus communications as a concerted programme of fear-mongering (the recent Vallance/Whitty presentation is a notably egregious example). This will lead to deaths not only by suicide due to plain despair and despondency, but also later through stress-induced heart disease and cancers.

Political decisions have been taken that will lead inexorably to the otherwise avoidable deaths of Scottish citizens. That much is incontrovertible. It appears to be acceptable to Someone that some people are to be sacrificed in an attempt to save the lives of others. This would only be vaguely acceptable to some Scots if the consequences of the remedial measures were less bad over a period of some years than were the effects of the virus. This could only be judged if a large number of widely divergent, high confidence scenarios were carefully modelled and their results compared with great care. If this is indeed the case, that fact has not been publicised.

Whether or not these decisions were indeed “wickedly reckless” can only be judged if the grounds on which they were taken can properly be assessed. Governments nearly everywhere have been reluctant, sometimes extremely reluctant, to explain their decision-making processes, preferring to merely rule by diktat.

We, the citizens of Scotland, have a right to expect that these decisions have been thoughtfully made on the basis of accurate and timely data with due consideration given to all consequences, short-term and long-term, anticipated or not. We expect that multiple strategies will have been modelled multiple times as information improves, and that full cost/benefit analyses of each competing strategy have been and still are continually compared.

Our political class must be prepared for a charge of murder to be laid against them and we, the citizens, must trust that they are able to defend themselves against it robustly.