Educational standards have been dropping for quite some time under the SNP government. The poverty gap is still widening in Scotland. In 2019/2020, 25,000 children lived in relative poverty, a 3% rise from
the previous year.
Pass rates in higher educational subjects have fallen. All this was before the
lockdown decimated our children’s future. One doctor recently told me that there had been a ten-fold increase in children seeking psychiatric help
since the beginning of lockdown. Children of all ages struggle to cope with learning remotely, but children at critical exam times are under immense stress as they worry about their grades and qualification for university.
According to a survey carried out by Barnardo’s, 58% of all parents struggle to cope with the impact of lockdown on children’s behaviour. Experts agree that the lockdown has seen an unprecedented detrimental effect on our children’s mental health.
This policy of locking down children seems particularly strange to me. Over the past hundred years, as a nation, we have become ever more aware of our children’s needs, almost to the point where we as parents will sacrifice anything to improve our children’s lives. Grandparents have been known to cry when a child succumbed to cancer and lamented that God should have taken them, who had already enjoyed a full life.
Suddenly, we have decided to turn all of this on its head. The children must be locked down to protect the elderly who are at death’s door. The vast majority of those dying with Covid were ill already, and only by manipulating the figures can governments make it look so grim.
Total deaths figures in Moray for 2020 were lower than the previous two years, so why are we preventing our children from going to school?
Even in Scotland’s entirety, deaths per thousand are only slightly higher than the 25-year average, and four years had higher figures. There has been an increase in suicide and fatalities at home due to untreated disease, so I suspect that Covid-19 has had little or no effect on overall figures.
Why are we continuing to lockdown our children?
The SNP were already failing our children even before lockdown, but the brutal, totalitarian restrictions will take a toll on our children, which may take years to show up. Lockdown must be immediately ended and must never be put in place again.
Never again should a government restrict us by these Stalinist
procedures and lock our children up.
Jim Whitelaw
