Ex-Tory MSP suggests Wales shouldn’t have been allowed to set its own Covid rules
A former Tory MSP has suggested that Wales should not have been allowed to set its own rules to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic.
Brian Monteith who represented the Mid Scotland and Fife region in the Scottish Parliament has argued that there should have been a “UK-wide approach”, which would have put Boris Johnson’s government in charge of Wales’ Covid regulations.
He claimed that it was a “big error” for powers over Covid rules to be “devolved down to different administrations”.
According to the Welsh Election Study conducted by Cardiff University’s Wales Governance Centre, the Welsh public overwhelmingly prefers the Welsh Government’s handing of the pandemic to the UK Government’s.
It put the percentage of respondents who though the approach of the Welsh Government to handling the lockdown was good at 49.72%, while only 28.41% thought the approach of the UK Government was good.
When it came to communicating its decisions, 56.01% of respondents thought the approach of the Welsh Government was good, compared to 37.32% for the UK Government.
Monteith told GB News: “Well it certainly looks like Boris Johnson has got it right, but the big error is that right from the start this should have been a UK-wide national emergency, not devolved down to different administrations.
“So we have all of these confusing and self-defeating competitions between politicians as to who is going to get it right. That could have been avoided by having a UK approach, and now we’re seeing the ridiculous nature of people traveling from different parts of the country to beat the different bans. It’s just ridiculous.”
‘Omicron variant’
England has the highest seven-day positivity rate any country in the UK, as cases of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 surge in the country.
The governments of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland have put tighter restrictions in place in a bid to bring down the number of cases, while Boris Johnson’s UK government has refused to do the same in England.
This has led Professor Andrew Watterson, of the faculty of health sciences at the University of Stirling, to suggest that England is “out of step”, adding that “one would have expected a more precautionary and preventative approach” from the UK Government.
Support our Nation today
For the price of a cup of coffee a month you can help us create an independent, not-for-profit, national news service for the people of Wales, by the people of Wales.
By “travelling from different parts of the country” I presume he means “from one country to another”, but he can’t bring himself to say it. Absolute dinosaur.
Brian Monteith‘s arrogance is merely the lower benchmark of all tories, who see Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as nothing more than English possessions.
The Tories/Unionists feel very threatened…
You sound a bit threatened lol
Failed Jock Tory goes on GB News to spout garbage. Big deal. He flopped on his own turf and now thinks he’s got the credibility to pontificate further afield. Very sad delusion that.
“Well it certainly looks like Boris Johnson has got it right,”
There’s undoubtedly things that each nation got right and wrong but insufficient nuance in this analysis if covering the whole pandemic and it being such an early analysis if covering the Omicron wave makes rest of his words pointless.
Statements like this show how worried Tories in England and Celtic Nations are regarding judgement of their own performance. Something that applies to Drakeford in a small way too, If they were fully confident in what they’ve done they wouldn’t be pointing the finger at others.
Really? Not according to ‘Our World in Data’ and ‘JHU CSSE’ covid figures, which show Wales as having a death rate of 1.09% per covid cases, and England of 1.2%, (figures updated 28/12/21).
Aren’t they sweeties? Always thinking of us! But why do they all look so similar?
Given the amount of abuse that right wing Tories are throwing at Wales I suspect that this part of an organised campaign from Downing Street to shift attention away from the disaster that Omicron is about to create in England. Personally I would have wished Mr Drakeford had stressed Covid Distancing as that is surely one of the best ways of mitigating the spread of this particular variant. From my observations of perople’s behaviour here in West Wales too few folk (of all ages) are trying to avoid close contact.
The toraidhs in Wales are totally toxic and need to be utterly extirpated
Or to put it another way, we need to win the arguments across the country and make Wales a tory free zone
.
This Scottish Tory quisling attitude towards Wales typifies Unionism. Imposition and an English size fits all. If Wales followed England’s would have had deaths in the high thousands not low. Wales , Scotland & NI have tailored their own response to Covid. Thank heaven for devolution. We’d be in a far worse situation if Whitehall coordinated our fight against the pandemic. The mistakes made by Boris Johnson’s Tory Government caused the deaths of tens of thousands in England . The Tories wasted billions on a failed Covid testing system. Lost hundreds of millions purchasing tons of unusable PPE supplies .… Read more »
It is nothing to do with him
“Not allowed!?” I thought, getting ready with the righteous fire, and then I saw it was a quote from the Comedy Channel.