The nationalists’ vaccine fallacy

The trouble with nationalism of any and every sort is that, in the end, it eats your brain. As evidence of this we may simply note Nicola Sturgeon’s assertions this week that the success of Britain’s vaccination programme should in no way encourage the thought an independent Scotland might have struggled to match this happy development.

According to Sturgeon, there is ‘absolutely no evidential basis to say Scotland would not have vaccinated as many people as we’ve vaccinated right now’ if it were an independent state. This is, to use the technical term, bollocks on a tartan pogo-stick. It would be vastly closer to the truth to argue the contrary, noting there is precisely zero evidential basis for thinking an independent Scotland would have vaccinated anything like so many of its citizens as has been made possible by the United Kingdom’s startlingly successful vaccine procurement programme.

But because it is axiomatic in the SNP’s world that Great Britain is a failing state lacking even the self-awareness to recognise its true and miserably diminished reality there can be no possible advantages to being a part of it.