Frost appointment is height of hypocrisy

Frost appointment is height of hypocrisy

There is surely more than a little irony that Lord David Frost has been drafted into the Cabinet to take charge of forging a new relationship with the EU.

So, we have the man who negotiated our exit from the EU, ending rule by so-called “unelected bureaucrats”, is now not only an unelected bureaucrat himself but also a member of the Cabinet.

Not elected by anyone in the country, he won’t be accountable in the House of Commons to anyone. This government’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Alex Orr, Marchmont Road, Edinburgh.

Jury still out on care home outbreaks

Health and law and order are devolved, so Scotland could always have made different decisions from England; at no time has the FM suggested otherwise.

Scotland too was “shamefully late” (if that’s what you think caused the problem) in locking down.

As for discharges to care homes, the jury is out. Medical statistician James Urquhart said: "The study which it was claimed demonstrates that ‘hospital discharges were not found to have contributed to a significantly higher risk of an outbreak in care homes’ in truth shows no such thing.

"Even on the flawed assumptions in the study it is entirely possible that there was an appreciable number of excess deaths associated with the discharge of untested patients”.

As for Scotland’s overall performance, why did death rates rise so much from mid-September?

Scotland has had higher health spending per head than England for years (nothing to do with the SNP), with no obvious benefit in outcomes.

Andrew Anderson, Granton Road, Edinburgh.

Our Covid ground zero is fake news

Ian Murray (News, February 18) ignores the science in blaming an international Nike conference for introducing Covid-19 into Scotland in February 2020.

Not true: Covid was already here by then. Scrupulous follow-up by a team of Scottish genome scientists found that the Nike “strain” had disappeared a month later.

The first detected case in Scotland was in Tayside following a holiday in Northern Italy. The scientists found in the first four weeks of the epidemic the virus had arrived in Scotland from abroad at least 113 separate times.

Our local public health experts dealt with the Nike outbreak fantastically. What they couldn’t have known was that another 112+ outbreaks had started in Scotland or were about to.

The Nike conference was anything but a “ground zero” moment, however much Ian Murray would like to use it to blame the Scottish government. He would do better to highlight and praise the work of our public health teams.

Lyn Jones, Tollcross, Edinburgh.

Nicola’s powers of electoral divination

Nicola Sturgeon has made it very clear that she will regard a victory for the SNP at the election in May as an endorsement of her demand for a referendum.

Yet now she tells us that she wants us to make our voting choice based on whether we want her to continue to lead Scotland through the pandemic.

How will she know whether those voting SNP support another referendum or whether they simply want her to continue to lead the country through the pandemic, while remaining in the UK? Will there be some secret means of indicating our motive for our choice or will she instinctively divine it?

Jill Stephenson, Glenlockhart Valley, Edinburgh.

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