The SNP’s media war conceals their Covid failures

Sarah Smith is the Scotland editor of BBC News. On Monday night’s Ten O’Clock News, she was in the middle of a ‘live’ from Glasgow on Scotland’s divergent lockdown arrangements when she said this:

Nicola Sturgeon has enjoyed the opportunity to set her own lockdown rules and not have to follow what’s happening in England or other parts of the UK.

If you don’t see it, that’s probably because you’re in the pay of MI5 too. Smith’s choice of words made her meaning unclear. Did she mean Sturgeon was taking the chance to make her own decisions? Or that she was fortunate or glad to be doing so? Was she suggesting Sturgeon was seizing an opportunity to differentiate Scotland from England? Each of those meanings may be right or wrong in its analysis of the situation but none is an illegitimate observation for a BBC correspondent to make. Smith’s ‘live’ provided viewers with a political context for a story with major political implications.