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Nicola Sturgeon made her irritation with the Boris Johnson government clear on Sunday, after other chaotic days of confused and poorly disciplined messages about reducing the Whitehall closure.
With UK ministers struggling to explain his new catchphrase “stay alert”, which Sturgeon said he had first seen in the newspapers, he insisted on the subject from the start of his daily briefing.
“Let me be very direct,” he said. Mixed messages meant that “people will die unnecessarily.” In an implicit rebuke to Johnson, he added: “The clarity of the message is paramount if we trust you to know exactly what we are asking of you, and as leaders we have a duty to provide that clarity to those who are responsible for not confusing you.”
Sturgeon revealed that he had asked the UK government to restrict the use of the message to England and to prevent it from appearing north of the border. She would lend her much stricter public health ad, the previous UK-wide catchphrase “stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”, to the UK government for any advertising site she has bought in Scotland.
While speaking in Edinburgh, the Scottish government tweeted a new message: “Please continue #StayAtHome. By staying home, you are saving lives.”
That became another topic for the day, with the delegated government of Wales and Northern Ireland issuing clearly different advice, in an effort to counter the sudden change in Downing Street messaging.
The Welsh government’s Twitter feed broadcast a 15-second clip with an unequivocal voiceover saying: “You must stay home.”
He also used the color green but in a darker shade, with an animation of the virus slowly rotating. “We know it is difficult, but please continue at home” The tweet reads.
Mark Drakeford, the Welsh Prime Minister, was clear. “You should listen to the government where you live,” he said on Sky Sophy Ridge Sunday. Communications with the UK government, he said, were on “attacks and starts.”
Arlene Foster, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, was less forthright, but confirmed that her power-sharing administration was also taking a different stance. He had fully reaffirmed the closing arrangements and would relax it only slowly, starting this week.
She told Sky News: “I think it is important that we listen to our medical director and scientific director, that we listen to modeling. [It] It is important that we do the right thing in our region of the UK in the future and that is why we are going to present our road plan early next week. “
While Foster’s tone was less forceful than Sturgeon’s, Stormont’s posts on social media were to the point. Northern Ireland Health Minister Robin Swan they tweeted theirs yellow, blue and red motif, that said, “Stay home; keep protecting the NHS; keep saving lives.”
On the surface, the three prime ministers indicated that their differences with Downing Street were message-based. All three insisted that the Prime Minister had the right to follow proper policies for England, and they too.
All three also said that in their jurisdictions, the R number, the rate at which the virus multiplies in the community, was still too close to 1 to risk making the block too easy. Foster said it was 0.8 to 0.9 in Northern Ireland, near Scotland.
All three said Johnson accepted, even embraced, the idea of governments moving at the right pace for their countries. However, they regretted the fact that Johnson and his ministers had not equaled that commitment with clear communication and collaborative policymaking.
But underlying that polite framework was a significant political message, which the Sturgeon statement hinted at. She is determined to exude competence and discipline. Critics have accused Downing Street of lacking both.
Delegated governments have advantages that Johnson does not. They are smaller and have fewer duties and pressures than yours. They also benefit from the UK government’s ranking and investment in scientific expertise.
Sturgeon’s government messages have had their flaws and flaws: Opposition MSPs have been recording the times their national clinical director, Jason Leitch, gave advice that was reversed in a matter of days. In addition, on Sunday, his health secretary, Jeane Freeman, admitted that flawed official advice on transferring untested elderly hospital patients to nursing homes had been posted on the Scottish government website.
But at the center of the disagreement this weekend are contrasts in leadership. In his daily briefings, Sturgeon has consciously displayed authority and clarity in the messages.
The Drakeford administration has been aware of Wales’ closing position. Sturgeon said he needed one thing from Johnson: a clear commitment that regardless of what he said about the shutdown, he was only talking about one nation: England. Drakeford and Foster will agree.
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