Nicola Sturgeon is exploiting the pandemic to advance the SNP’s independence agenda. She is stoking fear of Coronavirus as a political tool to justify the excessive controls on individual life and freedom which continue to be imposed summarily and arbitrarily without common sense, without balance and without sufficient scientific explanation.

Totalitarian governments of the left and of the right have always used fear to control the people. They have also used unsettling wrong-footing tactics such as those we are witnessing daily. These follow from the exercise of appropriated absolute power amid the claimed national health emergency.

Nicola Sturgeon is disguising her intentions and her goals. We know she is doing this. She knows we know but her insouciance prevails. She is confident that we can do nothing about it. There is no credible opposition and the media are compliant.

Nicola Sturgeon has made herself the central player in this national drama. She is now preparing us for her own version of the Long March to achieve independence. Economic distress will be her ally because it will increase state dependence especially among the poorest who will suffer the most. For Marxist revolutionaries and fascist dictators, no price was too great to pay for absolute power. Nicola Sturgeon has said as much herself. Though it is always the people who pay. Wake up Scotland. Independence is always possible but surely not like this.