Yahoo Sports The SNP's sinister paranoia now rules in Scotland
It’s hardly the kind of behaviour one would expect from bosses in charge of health provision in Scotland’s largest city: the health board for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) has admitted paying a private company to monitor the social media activities of a Scottish woman whose husband died at a scandal-hit hospital.
Louise Slorance’s husband Andrew died two years ago while being treated for Mantle Cell Lymphoma at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH). The father of five contracted Covid while in hospital but was also infected by Aspergillus, a fact Louise was not aware of until after her husband’s death. She has since been a fierce critic of the hospital and those who run it.
The hospital is now undergoing an inquiry into whether its construction led to the infection and deaths of multiple patients. It has now been revealed that Ms Slorance was targeted by the NHSGGC’s “social listening” programme monitoring social media posts, although the justification behind the targeting and the public cost of contracting out the activity to the private sector remain opaque.
First things first: many social media posts are public domain and there is no law against viewing public statements. But the very fact that a large public sector organisation – part of the NHS, no less – is employing a private company to keep an eye on the bereaved relative of a man who died in its care is a shocking revelation.
How was this information used by the health board? How much did it cost ordinary tax-payers? And what does it say about the political culture of modern Scotland that such activities can be exposed without so much as an apology or explanation for this intrusion?
Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister, was health secretary while the hospital was being built, but it was her successor, Humza Yousaf, who was more recently in charge of the health portfolio while this surreptitious monitoring of the hospital’s critics was being undertaken. Whether or not he was aware of such activities, it should not surprise us that the leadership of NHSGGC felt that the current political culture in Scotland gave them a green light to go ahead.
As Justice Secretary under Sturgeon, Yousaf masterminded the passage through parliament of the Hate Crime and Public Order Bill, which criminalises “hate speech”, including private conversations taking place in the privacy of one’s own home. Needless to say, Police Scotland are still wrestling with the practical implications of how such a law can be enforced.
Concerns over free speech and the right to protest were dismissed by Yousaf at the time. The term “Orwellian” is often overused, but it’s hard to deny its appropriateness when applied to this particular extension of state power. And if the leaders of Greater Glasgow and Clyde NHS took their lead from the former justice secretary’s obstinate championing of the state’s right to monitor our personal political opinions, they can hardly be blamed for that.
This is Scotland in 2023, where the bereaved are monitored for making unhelpful criticisms of those who govern us, and dinner table conversation risks landing citizens in court.
Which is odd, because in 1997, when Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP were campaigning for a Yes vote in the devolution referendum, those scenarios were never even mentioned.
